How can the world meet Elon Musk’s 300 TWh battery capacity target?

The world will need to increase battery production thirty-fold from today’s levels by midcentury to reach Elon Musk’s forecast of 300 terawatt-hours of needed global battery capacity, according to Benchmark’s chief executive Simon Moores.

Production of lithium ion batteries will need to increase from 0.6 TWh a year to 20 TWh by 2050 to transition the global transportation and energy systems away from fossil fuels, Moores told the Benchmark Week conference in Los Angeles.

“We need to double the pace of everything – investment, capacity,” Moores said.

The cost of building the world’s battery capacity would only be 5% of the almost $100 trillion estimated by the International Energy Agency and others needed to reach net zero emissions by 2050, Moores said, at a cost of $3 to $5 trillion.

“For something that is so critical … it’s an incredible value for investors,” he said.

In a TED interview last year Tesla’s chief executive Musk said the world would need 300 TWh of battery capacity to be fully sustainable.

That would require annual battery production rising to 6.7 TWh by 2030 and 11.8 Twh in 2040, Moores said.

“That’s twice the pace of where we are today,” he said.

At 20 TWh of annual production would require around 50 million to 60 million tonnes a year of raw materials, Moores said. Recycling could make up 40% of that amount and mining 50%, he said.

That would require a twenty-fold increase in lithium supply to 12 million tonnes of lithium LCE and a similar increase in nickel sulphate to 8 million tonnes. Cobalt supply would have to increase by five times to 1 million tonnes of cobalt sulphate, and manganese by over twenty-fold to 2.5 million tonnes of manganese sulphate, according to Moores.

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