CPM Group provides clients with detailed analyses of individual metals markets as well as overall work, mostly on a bespoke basis tailored to each client’s needs. It has researched, advised clients, and produced reports on the Evolution of Automotive Propulsion Technologies and Its Impact On Specific Metals Markets since the 1970s.

Energy Metals

It is not New Energy Vehicles or Alternate Energy Vehicles that matter. It is Energy Metals. When rhenium was added to petroleum refining catalysts in 1979, Codelco, the world’s largest rhenium miner, turned to CPM’s Jeffrey M. Christian for information and advice on the rhenium market. Large and small energy transformations in the past and in the future have and will continue to have large requirements for an array of metals for the supply, distribution, and use of new and alternate energy technologies. It is the totality of energy markets, present and future, that affect individual metals markets.

Meanwhile, there is and should be enormous uncertainty about which technologies will emerge as significant new industries, which metals they will require, and how much of each metal they will need. Broad abstract pictures based on marketing hype about the Green Energy Revolution or the “Commodities Supercycle” have no place in sober financial considerations of the wisdom of capital development programs and investments.

CPM is a realist about the potential for EVs. The true believers that technologies will come fast and furious paint us as skeptics or anti-EVs. We are not, as per below. We just have a deep-rooted understanding of both each metal’s supply and demand fundamentals and the macro-economic forces that will drive and divert the march toward a new energy future.

We warned clients away from lithium development company stocks during the hyped booms in lithium prices 2005 – 2008 and then 2014 – 2019. We warned clients about investing in cobalt development companies. Not because we are skeptics, but because we understood both the fundamentals of the lithium and cobalt markets as well as the prospective changes in battery technology that since then have radically reduced projected cobalt requirements and increased projected lithium supply. CPM was for many years the only company that included projected secondary recovery of lithium from the mountain of end-of-life batteries that would be created by any broad introduction of EVs. We knew the companies research lithium recycling, and the one company that already was reprocessing spent lithium to battery grade material.

Manganese

Manganese is a perfect example of CPM’s superior focus on energy metals. Our firm has researched, analyzed, and written about manganese since at least 1999, and has focused on the high purity manganese required for lithium ion batteries since 2009. Others have realized that manganese is critical to lithium ion batteries and is one of the two metals substituting for cobalt in 2020. Our expertise in high purity manganese, an extremely opaque sector of the market, simply surpasses that of other companies writing about battery materials, and often is used as the basis for their research.

While CPM has analyzed and projected manganese use in batteries for more than a decade, it has only been in 2021 that companies such as Volkswagen and Tesla have declared that manganese rich batteries will become the preferred chemistry for on-road vehicle batteries.

The Old Man and the EVs

Energy metals, let alone New Energy Vehicles, are nothing new to CPM Group. In just the past few years many companies have been trying to portray themselves as bastions of information on EVs and the vast metals requirements such a new technology will require. In some cases they are the same companies and people who touted the New Economic Paradigm and hawked internet stocks and funds in the late 1990s.

CPM Group’s founder, Jeffrey M. Christian, literally wrote the book on EVs, in 1979. He also wrote the newsletter on EVs, in 1978, and studied energy markets and alternative energy technologies, including EVs, solar and wind power, and next generation power equipment beginning in 1975. We have watched these industries develop and start to blossom, as well as the broader energy and electricity markets and the ancillary industries that will require hundreds of billions of dollars in capital to support any emerging new energy source for motive power.

CPM’s expertise in EVs, energy, alternative energy technologies, and energy metals goes far beyond its Founder’s 1970s work in these areas. CPM has a staff of analysts and advisors who each have decades of experience in these markets.

Let Us Work For You

To learn how CPM can help you navigate investments in exciting potential technologies that face an uncertain future, contact CPM Group.

CPM Group LLC

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212-785-8320