About BYD

BYD Co. Ltd. (Build Your Dreams) is a Chinese multinational company that primarily operates in the automotive and renewable energy industries. Founded in 1995, BYD is headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, and has become one of the world’s leading electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers and battery producers. Here are some key aspects of BYD:

1. Electric Vehicles (EVs): BYD is renowned for its electric vehicles, including electric cars, buses, and trucks. The company produces a wide range of EVs, from small passenger cars to electric buses and commercial vehicles. They have made significant strides in the EV market and have expanded their global presence in this sector.
2. Batteries: BYD is a major player in the production of lithium-ion batteries. They manufacture batteries not only for their own vehicles but also for other automakers and various applications, such as energy storage systems (ESS) and mobile devices.
   
3. Warren Buffett Investment: In 2008, the American investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. invested $232 million in BYD, acquiring a significant stake in the company. This investment garnered international attention and boosted BYD’s profile in the global business community.
   
4. Renewable Energy: Beyond electric vehicles and batteries, BYD is involved in various renewable energy projects, including solar power generation and energy storage solutions. They provide solar panels and energy storage systems to help meet the growing demand for sustainable energy sources.
   
5. Global Presence: BYD has expanded its operations internationally and has established a presence in many countries and regions worldwide. They have manufacturing facilities and subsidiaries in countries such as the United States, Brazil, India, and Europe, enabling them to tap into global markets.
   
6. Innovation: The company places a strong emphasis on research and development, continuously working on innovations in electric vehicle technology, battery technology, and other areas related to sustainable transportation and energy solutions.
   
7. Sustainability: BYD is committed to sustainability and reducing its carbon footprint. They aim to promote green transportation and environmentally friendly technologies to combat air pollution and climate change.
   
8. Challenges: Like other automotive companies, BYD faces challenges related to competition, technological advancements, and regulatory changes in the electric vehicle industry. However, they have shown resilience and adaptability in response to these challenges.

BYD’s combination of electric vehicle manufacturing, battery production, and renewable energy solutions has positioned it as a significant player in the global push for cleaner and more sustainable transportation and energy systems.

What are the key differences between Tesla and BYD vehicles?

Tesla and BYD are both prominent manufacturers of electric vehicles (EVs), but there are several key differences between their vehicles in terms of design, technology, markets, and overall brand identity. Here are some of the key differences between Tesla and BYD vehicles:

• Geographic Origin and Market Focus:
  
  • Tesla is an American company founded in California, with a strong presence in the United States and a focus on the global luxury and performance EV market.
  • BYD is a Chinese company with a significant presence in China and a broader focus on the global mass-market and commercial EV segments.
    
• Vehicle Models:
  
  • Tesla primarily produces premium electric cars, such as the Model S, Model 3, Model X, and Model Y, along with electric sports cars and upcoming products like the Tesla Cybertruck and Tesla Semi.
    
  • BYD manufactures a range of electric vehicles, including electric cars (e.g., the BYD e6, Qin, and Tang), electric buses, and commercial electric vehicles (e.g., electric trucks and vans).
    
• Price Range:
  
  • Tesla vehicles are generally positioned in the premium to luxury price range, making them relatively expensive compared to many other EVs.
  • BYD vehicles tend to cover a broader price spectrum, including more affordable options for mass-market consumers.
    
• Battery Technology:
  
  • Tesla is known for its advanced battery technology, which includes the use of cylindrical lithium-ion cells and its own custom-designed batteries produced at the Gigafactories.
  • BYD also produces lithium-ion batteries but focuses on different chemistries and cell formats for various applications, including iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries known for their safety and durability.
    
• Autonomous Driving and Software:
  
  • Tesla has developed a reputation for its advanced driver-assistance features and autonomous driving capabilities, with its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology being key selling points.
  • BYD also offers various levels of driver-assistance technology but may not be as advanced as Tesla in terms of autonomous driving capabilities.
    
• Charging Infrastructure:
  
  • Tesla has developed a proprietary Supercharger network, providing fast-charging stations primarily for Tesla vehicles. They have also opened up access to some third-party EVs in certain regions.
  • BYD relies on more standard charging infrastructure, often using industry-standard connectors and adapters.
    
• Global Reach:
  
  • Tesla has a substantial presence in North America, Europe, and other parts of the world, with a strong network of stores, service centers, and charging infrastructure.
  • BYD has a significant presence in China and has expanded into various international markets but may not have as extensive a global network as Tesla.
    
• Brand Image:
  
  • Tesla is often associated with cutting-edge technology, innovation, and a premium brand image.
  • BYD is recognized for its focus on practical and affordable electric transportation solutions, especially in the mass-market and commercial sectors.

These differences reflect the distinct strategies and target markets of Tesla and BYD. While Tesla emphasizes premium electric cars and advanced autonomous driving technology, BYD focuses on a wider range of electric vehicles, including more affordable options and commercial applications, and places a strong emphasis on battery technology and sustainable transportation.

BYD is China’s largest EV manufacturer, producing 1.5 million vehicles in 2022, and just reported a record quarterly profit in spite of Warren Buffet dumping $25.8 million dollars worth of BYD stock.

BYD Stock Surges Since 2020 (OTC Markets: BYDDY) 

Monthly Chart of BYDDY: TradingView

For roughly 10 years after going public in 2009, BYD traveled in a range between $3 and $20. In 2020, the stock took off, reaching a high of $80.75 in June 2022. BYD is currently trading at $60.92.

The post Tesla Faces Serious Competition from this EV Manufacturer appeared first on Global Investment Daily.

No earthly metal is more of a security concern right now than lithium. This ‘white gold’ underpins the entire clean energy transition, which has now become even more urgent as a Russian war on Ukraine exposes the severe vulnerability of fossil fuels to supply risks.

There is no energy transition without lithium, the battery metal that serves as the backbone of the trillion-dollar EV industry–an industry on track to top $1.3 trillion in just a few years.

As long as it has enough lithium …

Battery makers are sounding the alarm bells as they face shortages and call on governments worldwide to challenge China’s dominance of the raw material supply chain.

North America is playing catch-up here, but the urgency has now become palpable. Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to encourage mining for battery metals. Lithium is also on Canada’s critical minerals list.

That’s the perfect setup for new lithium explorers.

But exploration and development takes time, and investors will be looking for the earliest entrants who promise the fastest and biggest impact on new lithium supply.

Canadian EMP Metals Corp (CSE:EMPS) (OTC:EMPPF) is one early entrant that seems to be on track to become a leading lithium producer in Canada’s prolific Saskatchewan region. This is one of the clearest new beneficiaries of the aggressive push to get new lithium supplies to the market.

EMP is focused on large-scale, direct lithium extraction (DLE) assets, boasting over 200,000 acres in prime southeast Saskatchewan, the hotspot for lithium exploration in Canada, with  21 lithium-brine permits in four main distinct geological locations.

The company has already successfully completed one well re-entry, and lithium test results were excellent, confirming high flow rates and strong lithium brine concentrations .

What comes next?

This is the defining year for EMP, with 3-5 new wells or re-entries planned in an aggressive drill campaign that intends to harness North America’s massive push for new lithium resources.

Billions of dollars are being poured into new battery factories across North America, and even Elon Musk is ready to mine his own lithium to ensure supply security …

There has never been a more aggressive push for a critical metal than this, and the earlier entrants with the drill bit already in the ground will be at the forefront of the next wave of lithium millionaires and billionaires.

One of North America’s Most Important New Lithium Hubs

Canada’s Saskatchewan region has jumped on the lithium bandwagon with plans not just to mine new lithium supplies and help challenge China’s dominance, but to become one of the most important lithium hubs in North America, if not the world.

The provincial government is targeting the development of both lithium exploration and extraction technologies, and it is funding programs for miners to take advantage.

Lithium would add to the province’s already impressive lineup of critical minerals, including uranium, potash and helium.

It’s a region known to be rich in lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, aluminum and manganese.

That makes it the perfect hub for battery metals, at the perfect time.

For prospective lithium miners in Saskatchewan, the main geological layer of interest is the lithium-bearing Duperow formation.

The Duperow formation, which extends from Montana and North Dakota to Saskatchewan, has already seen wild success for petroleum explorers. This is exactly where EMP has acquired over 200,000 acres, with private land acquisitions still moving forward.

While the formation is laterally equivalent to the lithium-bearing Leduc formation of the Alberta basin, the Duperow has some distinct advantages, not the least of which is the fact that there are significantly higher grades of lithium being discovered in the Duperow.

The Duperow is a regionally extensive reservoir with aquifer support and the potential for less injection dilution, higher recoveries and longer project life. This formation also tends towards lower sour gas concentrations and shallower drilling depth than the Leduc.

That means potentially very attractive margins for EMP once it delineates a resource.

Impressive Results on Maiden Drill

EMP has already completed one re-entry well showing high-grade levels of lithium.

In one zone, initial showings were for 85mg/L, and in two additional zones indications were of up to 96.3mg/L.

Against the backdrop of a growing sense of urgency on a national security level, EMP plans to attack exploration over the coming months very aggressively, with plans to drill up to 5 new wells or re-entries in targeted areas this year.

And they’re doing it with a focus on DLE (direct lithium extraction), a lithium extraction process that reduces the environmental footprint by 90% compared to traditional methods. DLE is a process that employs a highly selective absorbent to extract lithium from brine water using geothermal or renewable energy sources.

Not only is most of North America’s lithium imported and sourced from South America and China …

But that lithium is processed from open-pit mines or saltwater flats from which it is pumped into huge basins to evaporate by the sun. Both open-pit mining and brine mining leave troubling environmental footprints, either by destroying the land, contaminating water or contributing to drought.

EMP is an ESG company, all the way.

It plans on using DLE methods that will provide for a more sustainable lithium supply. What makes it so much more sustainable is that it seeks to extract the lithium before the brine is pumped back underground.

With ESG a clear focus and up to 5 new wells or re-entries planned for this year, we expect the news flow to be fast-paced in line with today’s constant barrage of appeals from giant automakers and battery gigafactories.

Billions Being Poured into Batteries

North America is fast becoming a mega-center for EV and energy storage batteries–the lynchpin of our clean energy future.

In the United States, 13 gigafactories are in the works, almost all of them slated to be operational by 2025.

Source: Electrek.co

They will require an enormous amount of raw materials, and everything depends on new lithium discovery and development.

Canada, too, is seeing an aggressive push into this domain.

Just recently, LG Energy Solutions announced a $5-billion EV battery plant in Ontario in partnership with Stellantis, and giant GM agreed to build a $500-million factory in Quebec to manufacture integral components of EV batteries.

At its current pace, supply simply cannot meet soaring demand.

By 2025, that demand will be out of this world.

Everyone Wants Lithium and Relationships Are Key

Car-makers and battery makers around the world are scouring the planet for more lithium supply and scrambling to secure off-take deals.

EMP is a team of veterans who already have key relationships with developers up and down the EV and battery supply chain–all of them will require major lithium resources.

EMP’s President, CEO and Director, Rob Gamley, is a finance and capital markets veteran, supported by an exploration and development team that has experience with the biggest names in the business, including American Lithium Corp.

The operational team has been running large oilfield brine lifting operations in southeast Saskatchewan since 2001.  Cam Taylor, Bryden Wright and Jared Lukomski are all former senior management from Villanova 4 Oil Corp. and collectively have decades of experience in Saskatchewan’s Williston Basin building large scale brine lifting and disposal infrastructure as well as drilling wells to all depths within the basin.  

Peter Polland, Ph.D., is EMP’s chief geologist and director with over 30 years mineral exploration experience, while Advisor Mike Kobler is the former present and current general manager of U.S. operations for American Lithium Corp. He’s responsible for advancing the company’s TLC lithium project in Nevada–the only place in the United States where lithium is produced.

Advisor Brian Balazs also has more than three decades of experience in oil and gas exploration and development in western Canada and around the world, as does Director Greg Bronson.

This is a team that has the necessary experience and industry relationships to move fast on its Saskatchewan drilling and bring this to the finish line at the height of a lithium supply frenzy.

Everyone Wants Lithium

The land rush for North American lithium started a few years back when the first alarm bells started sounding with respect to a future supply shortage. For investors, that earlier rush was premature. The timing wasn’t quite right. It left new lithium entrants without enough funding to see their projects through because the “shortage” was still a few years off.

Several years have passed since that initial false start. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic and now Russia’s war on Ukraine have sped up the clean energy transition exponentially, and market conditions are now fully on board with new lithium exploration and development.

While it’s still a crowded space, with all kinds of junior miners trying to get in on the coming largesse, investors are looking for earlier entrants with the right management teams–that’s what makes or breaks a new lithium project.

EMP ticks all of those boxes, with a lineup of world-class geologists with specific lithium experience in North America, and capital markets experts who have closed all the right deals.

This is all going down in Canada’s new “lithium hub” in Saskatchewan, where EMP has been busy scooping up acreage that is surrounded by infrastructure in a basin that is already showing high grades high-grade lithium.

The drill bit is already in the ground on this one and first results are already in. Up to five more wells or re-entires are planned this year, making this a fast-moving lithium play that is more likely to start pinging investor radar than some of its peers.

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The post New Lithium for North America: Let’s See Who Gets There First appeared first on Global Investment Daily.

It’s a script that has played out with numerous commodities including potash, graphite, cobalt, rare earths, vanadium, and even marijuana (though not strictly a commodity).

And it’s now playing out with helium, the second-most abundant element in the Universe behind only hydrogen, yet also one of the rarest elements on our planet.

Helium’s scarcity and value stems from the fact that it’s an inert gas that does readily react with other elements or much of it generated by earth’s natural processes. It’s also 7x lighter than air and readily leaks into space and eventually gets torn away by solar winds.

Each year, our planet generates about 3,000 tons of helium through radioactive decay deep in the bowels of the earth. Unfortunately, the vast majority leaks off into space, and the little that  is trapped in the atmosphere comes nowhere close to meeting our global demand of 32,000 tons of helium per year (about 6.2 billion cubic feet measured at 70°F and under earth’s normal atmosphere). 

Indeed, the majority of our helium reserves are found in ancient shale formations. Helium is, therefore, regarded as a finite, non-renewable resource.

Yet, many investors have been sleeping on an unraveling helium boom, thanks to

explosive growth in the semiconductor and healthcare industries as well as space and quantum computing.

This rare gas is endowed with unique qualities that make it indispensable in many key applications including space exploration, rocketry, high-level scientific applications, in the medical industry for MRI scanners, fiber optics, electronics, telecommunications, superconductivity, underwater breathing, welding, cryogenic shielding, leak detection, and in lifting balloons. 

At a melting point of -261.1°C (-429°F), helium has the lowest melting point of any element, meaning there’s no substitute for the gas where ultra-low temperatures are required such as superconductors. For instance, the fastest train ever built, the SC MagLev, capable of speeds of more than 600 km per hour, uses liquid helium to cool the superconducting material, niobium‐titanium alloy, to 452 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

According to ResearchAndMarkets, the global helium market is projected to reach US$18.2B in 2025, growing at a CAGR of 11.2% during the period 2021 to 2025 mainly driven by robust medical and consumer electronics demand. About 30% of the world’s helium supply goes into MRI scanners while another 20% goes into the manufacture of hard disks and semiconductors.

Meanwhile, Big Tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix are heavy users of helium in their massive data centers.

With demand constantly outstripping supply and the federal government no longer freely selling helium, prices have skyrocketed, hitting $35 per liter in 2019, more than double an average of $14.60 per liter they commanded three years ago.

Helium Uses

Source: Helium One

No more helium from the Fed

The biggest chink in the helium supply chain is the fact that a large chunk of the supply is in the hands of the U.S. federal government.

Back in 1925 when helium-based airships seemed like they would become vital to national defense, the U.S. government created the Federal Helium Reserve (FHR) out of a giant, abandoned salt mine located 12 miles northwest of Amarillo, Texas. Over several decades, FHR collected as much helium as it could and essentially became the world’s strategic helium reserve supplying ~40% of the world’s needs.

Unfortunately, the FHR eventually ran into debt trouble to the tune of billions of dollars thanks to its habit of selling helium at well below market prices. In 1996, the U.S. government passed laws mandating FHR to sell off its reserves and close in 2021 in an effort to recoup its debts.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has outlined the process and timeline by which the FHR will dispose of its remaining helium and helium assets.  BLM, which now manages the reserve, managed to sell off most of the stored helium to all users, with the remaining 3 billion cubic feet (84 million cubic meters) by 2018 restricted for sale to only federal users, including universities that use helium for federally sponsored research. BLM held its last Crude Helium Auction in Amarillo, Texas, in 2019 with the price rising 135%, from $119/Mcf in 2018 to $280/Mcf in 2019. 

The sale of crude helium to private industry has been discontinued and the remaining stockpile is earmarked for Federal users only.

The sale deadline has since then been extended to 30 September 2022, but  privatization likely won’t be completed until at least 2023.

There are a ton of stocks to play in this space, including giant Exxon (NYSE:XOM), which produces about 25% of the world’s helium supply at its plant in LaBarge, Wyoming. Regeneron (NASDAQ:REGN) is also poised to become a major helium player, with South Africa’s first-ever liquid helium processing technology. And plenty of small-caps form some potentially juicy new entrants to this space. 

This is one to watch. It’s not about balloons anymore. 

The post Abundant Yet Rare: The Juicy Helium Paradox appeared first on Global Investment Daily.