Does China Control the World’s Lithium Battery Supply?

In this Article…

Vladimir Putin may have upward of 1,500 questionably maintained ICBMs pointed at us, but today, he’s not our most fearsome enemy. 

Not by a long shot. 

If we judge our enemy by its power to build and maintain control over us, then today, there is no greater threat to our way of life and livelihood than the People’s Republic of China. 

Without getting into politics, we can all agree that at this point in history China is a rival, not a friend or an ally. 

China’s goal, or more precisely, the goal of the Chinese Communist Party, is to increase Chinese influence on a global scale, which puts it on a direct collision course with us, but that shouldn’t be news to anybody. 

What is troubling are the steps it has taken to achieve this and how long it's been taking those steps. 

For more than two decades now, the Chinese have been buying up and developing lithium production assets across the world. 

As of 2021, China controlled 65% of the world’s lithium refining and processing capacity, making it by far the biggest contributor to, and beneficiary of, the rechargeable battery market. 

Now, making money was, of course, part of the reason behind a national campaign to achieve this status in the global arena, but an even bigger part of it goes back to that control and influence that I mentioned earlier.

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You see, Chinese strategists saw the West’s growing lithium addiction years before lithium-ion became a commonly used term. 

They saw the pattern first appear with portable audio devices, like the Walkman and Discman series from Sony. 

Then came the rise of the cellphone and the MP3 player. 

Then the smartphone.

And every step of the way, a handful of massive Chinese companies worked around the clock to build their ability to address this growing market.

Today, even Elon Musk buys his batteries from the Chinese, despite the fact that his much-discussed gigafactories were built specifically to give Tesla lithium independence from any external sources.

Right now this may all seem abstract to you because you have all the rechargeable batteries you need, but just imagine if we were to get into a conflict with China — as is very possible given the rapidly deteriorating situation in Taiwan.

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What if the Chinese decided to sanction us the same way that we sanctioned Russia?

Can you imagine the disruption to our way of life — which would happen virtually overnight?

Cutting off our battery supply could prove to be far worse than the OPEC oil embargoes of the 1970s because, unlike the Arab states back then, the Chinese control the bulk of global production today. 

The bottom line is that lithium is a strategic weakness for any nation that depends on it. 

And we depend on it more than most. 

Because lithium isn’t just what powers our phones and laptops. It’s also used to store energy on an industrial scale in a variety of applications. 

From trains; to massive ocean-going ships; to distributed energy storage for homes, businesses, and institutions; to overflow energy storage for our power plants, it all runs on lithium. 

The fact that lithium batteries are slow to charge, unreliable, and potentially deadly when old or damaged is secondary to the fact that their continued use makes us vulnerable to foreign influence. 

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How Many Lithium-Ion Powered Devices Do You Have?

The race for an alternative has been running for some time now, and today one potential front-runner is offering us a glimpse of a post-lithium world.

The batteries made from this 100% artificial, lab-created “supermaterial” are generations beyond anything lithium-ion battery designers have ever hoped to achieve. 

I’m talking about radically increased capacity, reliability, and life span, with charge speeds up to 70x faster.

Put these new batteries in your iPhone and it could go from dead to 100% in less than 40 seconds.

You could charge a car equipped with these batteries to capacity in less time than it takes to pump a tank full of gas.

And then you could proceed to drive for a month between charges and put more than a million miles on your car and still have the cells operating at less than a 5% capacity loss.

And you can forget about overheating and fires. That will become a memory the same way that crank-started engines did in the 1920s.

An Australian company operating out of Brisbane has spent years developing the tech behind these revolutionary energy storage systems, and it's currently preparing the first production run for client testing. 

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If everything goes as expected, you could see them on the market by next year. 

This company is small, so you’ve likely never heard of it, but its shareholders know they’re sitting on a future brand name. 

Within two–three years, this $150 million market cap company could be one of the world leaders in battery production — with patents not just on the batteries themselves, but also on the production process of the cathode material that replaces lithium. 

The Chinese have spent decades building their lithium empire… They never anticipated anything like this. 

Shares are already trading, and recent pullbacks in the market have made them as affordable as they’re likely to ever get.

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Fortune favors the bold,

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Alex Koyfman

Read more from Alex Koyfman at WealthDaily.com

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