Will the EV supply chain hold?

The stakes come first, because they set up why a hedged answer is still an alarming one. Electric vehicles are pivotal, he argues, precisely because there is no good substitute. Hydrogen was once the rival and remains the best fallback, but running electrolysis through a fuel cell wastes most of the energy compared with charging a battery directly, so a hydrogen-fuelled vehicle fleet would need roughly three times as much zero-carbon generation behind it. Hydrogen is also far behind on supply chain investment and infrastructure, and the major vehicle manufacturers are, in his phrase, pot-committed to batteries. A supply chain failure therefore does not reroute the transition; it stalls it, and the alternative is both worse and more than a decade away.

The optimistic half of the essay is a story about scale, and about substitution inside the battery. Lithium-ion has improved steadily even while the industry expanded by orders of magnitude, and cell costs collapsed as gigafactories arrived; his summary of that decade is never to bet against economies of scale. The same logic softens the mineral problem, because the frightening inputs turn out to be replaceable. Cathodes made from lithium, iron and phosphate are cheaper and easier to source than the nickel-manganese-cobalt blends, already standard in stationary storage and making headway in vehicles despite lower energy density, and he is increasingly convinced they can displace the older chemistry in many applications. That matters mostly because of cobalt, which he treats as the one genuinely existential input: the most geographically concentrated of the transition minerals, concentrated in a country with severe governance problems, and probably not abundant enough for mass-market global adoption even so. Sodium-ion, which could substitute for lithium itself, he flags as a watch item rather than a solution, noting that consensus puts its energy density too low for most vehicles.

Then the turn. None of this is where the risk actually lives. Reserve estimates suggest there is enough of everything in the crust except possibly cobalt, so the constraint is the speed at which material can be got out and processed. New mines often take a decade or more and, for nickel and copper, which he calls the extreme cases, have averaged considerably longer; recycling and reuse will help but cannot cover more than a modest share of inputs within the decade; and the obstacles that make new projects uneconomic are often environmental and procedural. That is also his explanation for China’s dominance, which he is careful to state as a capability rather than a conspiracy: China can build big things fast, including things that carry environmental risk, and the United States currently cannot. He is sympathetic to why, asking who would want to live beside a rare earth mine or a lithium evaporation pond, and he points to the Lithium Triangle as the pattern in miniature: very dilute brines, an extraction method that recovers less than half the lithium and provokes real conflict over land and water, siting stalled as a result, and new supply arriving instead from Australian hard rock, which he considers a less robust long-term option.

So the essay ends where it cannot resolve. Direct lithium extraction would remove the evaporation ponds and is being pursued from several directions; he calls that problem solvable but far from solved, which is roughly his verdict on the whole chain. The question he actually leaves the reader with is not about minerals at all but about whether US-China relations hold, and his answer to that is to describe what his firm is funding while everyone waits.