The majority of the world's battery supply chain capacity for relevant lithium chemicals, nickel called wall chemicals, all flows through China. Rare earths are not used in batteries, but they are also used in defense applications and in permanent magnets in the car. If you look back far enough in the supply chain, you are going to see a bottleneck in the form of Chinese state-back control over these resources.
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Vivas Kumar, founder of Mitra Chem, to talk about batteries (4:00), starting out at Tesla (8:10), launching his company (9:50), the race for battery resources (12:40), iron and China (14:00), meeting Chamath Palihapitya (18:10), going from India to Singapore to Texas to California (21:40), the Tesla roller coaster (26:30), making cathode powder (34:15), and the million-mile battery (39:30).
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