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by simondotau 15 days ago
Yes, LFP is a better chemistry for various reasons including cost. Thankfully this means that nickel and cobalt are not needed for EVs adoption to continue scaling.

For now, NMC remains superior for some high performance applications, as well as for high-end laptops and phones. Yes, there are "myriad" problems with nickel and cobalt. These problems will diminish as scale makes recycling economically competitive to virgin material mining.

At some point the number of EV batteries being disposed will approach equilibrium to the number of new vehicle batteries manufactured. When this happens the amount of virgin nickel and cobalt needed will also approach zero.