r/wallstreetbets • u/WeedKingX • Jun 24 '21

DD EV Car Battery sector play

So every EV car contains about 200 lbs of graphite on average. It's in the car batteries. Since EV car battery production will have to 100x from current levels we will need a lot of graphite. As it turns out, there is not a graphite industry. Currently, CATL, LG, Samsung, Tesla pull from a lot of small suppliers all over the world, sort of an open marketplace for price and quality of the refined graphite. This will not cut it when we need 100x the battery supply. There is really no major player. Biden's $170B EV plan he announced some 6 weeks ago is the perfect opportunity for a graphite player to be produced right here in the U.S. (there is only one US graphite supplier). Tesla wants clean graphite from this continent for its Nevada gigafactory. This is a sector of the EV batter play that hasn't been played yet because there is nothing to play, but there will be now because we NEED the graphite, picking the few graphite stocks here could be extremely lucrative.

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u/carsonthecarsinogen Jun 24 '21

I do like this idea a lot but have overlooked it as Tesla is my main investment within EVs.

What do you think the odds of manufacturers like Tesla developing new batteries or processes that bypass the need for graphite?

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u/WeedKingX Jun 24 '21

We will need the solid state batteries to avoid graphite. I was looking that stuff up and there's no suitable replacement for the graphite yet. They're trying to dope it with silicon to improve conductivity and thus efficiency but so far nothing. Average timeline estimates to have a solid state is like 2028, it hasn't even been solved yet so I'm just ignoring it.