Evaluating battery minerals future supply through production predicting in the context of the green energy transition

Abstract

A global transition from the current “brown economy” to a “green economy” has been perceived as an ineluctable carbon neutrality strategy to deal with climate change and its global devastating impacts. This global ambition of green economy necessitates large-scale electrification which imposes growing demand for lithium-ion batteries as state-of-the-art energy storage technologies. Thereupon, the developing market of batteries reinforces the concern over the resilient and consistent supply of battery raw materials. By the reason of the interdependencies of all the stages involved in a value chain of a battery, it is critical to identify the battery material supply-disruptive risks and uncertainties, and subsequently to analyze the impacts of the perpetuation of the supply issues on the future market of batteries. In this research study, to contribute to these processes necessary for overcoming the ongoing supply sustainability challenges, the focus is on lithium, nickel, graphite, and cobalt, which are among the battery raw materials with high supply risks. After analyzing and categorizing the driving forces behind the historical and current bottlenecks to their mining production, the regional and global mining production of those battery materials have been predicted for twenty years ahead using three time series forecasting techniques including Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average, Holt's linear trend, and Holt-Winters’ methods. Forecasting possible future production trends of those battery raw materials is indisputably imperative to resolve planning strategies while dealing with uncertainties and supply risks. Reliable supply forecasting results provide more uncertainty and risk management achievements since the stakeholders and policymakers can use the outcomes as a source of information in the decision-making process at any stage of a lithium-ion battery value chain.