White Gold News Links

To celebrate A123 (AONE) better than expected IPO today
which officially starts the race towards White Gold (Lithium)
I'm providing you with some of the better news stories recently:

Orocobre Plans to Start Lithium Output in Argentina (Update1)

The Daily Start-Up: A123 Systems Strikes While Lithium Is Hot

New Material Aims to Make Lithium-ion Batteries Safer

'Saudi Arabia of Lithium' To Produce Batteries By 2016

Western Lithium Looks to Expand Carbonate Production in Nevada

Why Warren Buffet is investing in lithium

Ghosn (CEO of Nissan), Immelt (CEO of GE owner of A123 Lithium battery leader) see future for electric cars as WHEN not IF

Will China Beat the US in the Electric Car Race?

Digital's Analogue Bottleneck

Although I preach and cheer for faster digital development
of automotive technologies, I must admit that the car of
the future cannot become completely run by computers...

Many argue that Lithium is the analogue bottleneck,
or in this case, the big supply & demand question mark?

Some writers think there will never be enough
and others think there's plenty of it worldwide.

What's known for sure, is that the Lithium reserves
on planet Earth are distributed differently than oil.

According to Enough lithium for hybrid boom? Most say yes,
the USA is the most serious about leveraging
Lithium reserves and is getting the most to
market proportionally while Bolivia with the
most reserves in the world.... sits tight...

Locating lithium

Shares of global lithium supply by country
Production Reserves
Chile 39.30% 22.10%
China 13.30 16.20
Australia 11.00 2.40
Russia 10.80 n/a
Argentina 9.80 14.70
United States 8.40 0.60
Bolivia 0.00 39.70

Source: Meridian International Research, 2005 levels
adapted from http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10357588-48.html

PS Lithium has tripled in price during The Hybrid Phenomenon!!!

Shockgun Weddings

Here's a digital ten billion dollar list of
shotgun weddings that will change the
world's largest business forever!!!

Compact Power, Inc. (LG Chem, Ltd.) received $151,400,000 of your tax dollars to produce the lithium-ion polymer battery cells for the Chevy's Volt for GM who will invest $240,000,000 of your tax dollars into batteries
Bosch (BOM) and BMW
Ener1 (HEV) got $118,500,000 of your tax dollars to build batteries for Nissan (NSANY)
Daimler and Tesla Motors
Johnson Controls (JCL) and Ford (F) got $100,000,000 for batteries
GE and A123 who landed $249,100,000 for battery packs and systems preferred by many EV race car drivers
Buffet and BYD
Valence and Segway
Panasonic EV Energy and Toyota (TM)
Sanyo and Ford
Saft and Mercedes

Affordable Simple Sexy Digital

Everyone is coming to the digital party including suppliers who are creating vehicles to showcase Intellectual Property that has been marinating in back office garages for decades! It's about time someone sees that automaking will follow the same path as consumer electronics and computers. A few companies make the chassis and a few more design the package sold by a few more brands. Would you rather make the guts, motors or shell? Magna is offering to let your digital automaker focus on design and branding. Just like opening a Dell, Gateway, HP or Sony laptop and finding only one of two engines and almost identical chassis in several brands. Where did Acer and Asus come from? Maybe the same place Magna is proposing...

Nissan's Old School Analogue New School Digital Marraige

Nissan shows one way to get to digital! WOW! Marry old school analogue diesel explosions to the next generation of smooth motors for a ride that can go forever... Diesels don't break and electric motors have two moving parts so expect this Infiniti to live up to it's name when a derivative shows up at your dealership next decade...

California Digital Geneva Debut

Headquartered in California Fisker Shows it's Digital Flagship The Karma

The Global Digital Race Accelerates

Who will win the Lithium race?

Automakers spend more on R&D than any other industry. For example, Toyota spends 10 times more dollars than Apple. Getting to the Prius cost $1 billion and getting to the next digital transportation breakthrough is costing more.

The race to marry Lithium with automobiles is attracting top talent, global money powering new technologies with promising futures.

Just as entrepreneurs and corporate American filled the analogue to digital wake that Napster left in the music industry, venture capitalist and the largest organizations in the world are racing to R&D the iPod for the auto industry.

I wonder who will sell me the automobile that can drive across the digital divide and set the standard to accelerate away from the competition...


Start your Lithium teams and then engines (ranked in random order)!!!

• Team Toyota: 2006 $7.7B Toyota R&D incl. 300 engineers studying Lithium chemistry vs $6.6B GM R&D's 0 in-house engineers

• Team Volt: Sequoia, GM, A123

• Team VW: 360 million euros to develop Li-ion batteries by Bosch, Evonic Degssa, Li-Tec, STEAG Saar Egnergie including 60 million euros from the German govt. (Automotive Engineer, Dec 2007, Vol. 32 Issue 11, p 47)

• Team Nissan: NEC Lamilion Energy, A123, SAP AG

• Venrock Associates, Granite Global Ventures and Gabriel Venture Partners led by Oak Investment Partners/$68MT-$40MR3 Boston-Power

• New Enterprise Associates, BlueRun Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DFJ

• Element/$7.5mR1-$15MR2 Deeya Energy

• Team Ford: GE, $30 million R1, $40 million R2 for A123, Sanyo

• Team Phoenix: Al Yousaf, Altair

• Team GM: Cobasts, Johnson

• Vincent Bollore/EDF/$52.8M BatScap/Continental AG/BMW/Pininfarina/BlueCar

• Team Mitsubishi: GS Yuasu, Lithium Energy Japan, MiEV

• Team Tesla: $37M Musk/VantagePoint Venture Partners, Technology Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson/$105M Tesla

• Team Fisker: $10M Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers/Quantum

• Team Zenn: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers/EEEstor/$25M Zenn/Lockheed
  

• Israel Corp., Morgan Stanley, VantagePoint Venture Partners/Renault Nissan/Israel's Ofer Shipping Holdings/$200 million R1 for Project Better Place

Who's making Lithium batteries?

This is probably the next biggest question out there. There are basically two tactics: research and develop in house or play suppliers against each other. Toyota has assembled hundreds of engineers to work on Lithium in house while GM has pit two battery-makers against each other to race the 2010 deadline.

This list will change often so feel free to suggest any additions or changes!!!

Li Batterymakers
A123
Advanced Battery Tech
Altair
Autotech
BASF
Bolloré
Bosch
Boston-Power
BYD
Concorde
Contental AG
Cobasys
Danionics (iPod)
Deeya Energy
EEStor ($2.5M Zenn + Kleiner etc.)
EnerDel
Johnson Controls
KW Energy
Li-Tec
Lithium Energy Japan
Lithium Technology Corp.
Maxwell Technologies
Odyne
Panasonic
Phostech Lithium
Nissan-NEC Lamilion Energy
Quantum
Sanyo Energy
Tesla Energy Group
Toshiba
Valence
ZAP

Who's making Lithium autos?

I've been putting together this list of automakers for quite awhile now. When possible I like to link directly to an automaker's Lithium technology that's on or closest to the road, but if not available, I provide a link to some news about the technology.

Also, there's a possibility of having to go to an overseas website, like Toyota for example, that has been selling small Lithium light hybrids in Tokyo for quite awhile now. Those are called Vitz aka Yaris hatchbacks with options called the Intelligent Package. These are marketed at urban women and Toyota has quietly been selling about 10 Lithium autos per month to be the first automaker on the road.

Li Automakers

AC Propulsion
Azure Dynamics
Aptera
BYD Auto
Chrylser
Commuter Cars
Daimler
Electrovaya
Falcon
Fisker
Ford
Fuji
GM
Honda
Hybrid Technolgies
JR East
Lightening Car
Loremo AG
Miles
Mitsubishi
Phoenix
Pininfarina
Nissan
Renault
Roth Motors
Saturn
Segway
Subaru
Think
Toyota
Universal
Velozzi
Venturi
Venture Vehicles
Visionary Vehicles
Volvo
VW
Wrightspeed
Zenn
ZAP

nano Lithium

http://www.hybridcars.com/technology-stories/lithium-ion-batteries.html

Raw blogged response to
Lithium Ion Batteries
at hybridcars.com

nano Lithium
By John Acheson on 2007-12-21 02:50:02The breakthrough that Stanford's Dr. Cui changes everything! This could be the breakthrough that everyone's been searching for. The main problem with Lithium batteries is that the small hairs or fibers that hold the electricity have to expand everytime they are charged and then contract everytime used. That's why you don't want to recharge you batteries often and rather let them go down all the way. The reason is that the small fibers start cracking after too many reps. This phenomenon works great in weight lifting because additional fibers grow after the muscle is torn and overall the unit gets stronger. For batteries it's just the opposite. The more charge cycle, them more cracks, and pretty soon you need a new cell phone, etc. Dr. Cui found a way to use nano fibers that I interpret as a much denser sponge with many more reps. So the result is a battery that can last 10 times longer. Why is that so important? Because automaking is capital intensive and automakers have to provide 100,000 mile warrranties these days. For them, that means making batteries that last 150,000 or 200,000 so there are no bad apples that pull a Pinto or Corvair black eye on the technology. So Dr. Cui's work will revolutionize the Lithium we have now, but cause another problem. The search and mining of new Lithium deposits to keep up the tremendous demand. Fortunately for the U.S., the Americas hold an estimated half of the world's Lithium.