"It" is the iron phosphate cathode material that drives the cost of LFP batteries; Kelty had just said more than 90% of LFP comes from China. He went on to say that anyone competing head to head in the US without tariffs or production tax credits is in for a tough battle.
So over 90% of the LFP today comes from China. While saying that, we are also producers of LFP. So at our Ultium factories, we're also making LFP there right now, selling it to LG for energy storage applications. So we just started that this year, and there's very small production of LFP in the States. It's almost insignificant today. If you look at monthly volume, we're probably the largest now of producing that. But that's for energy storage applications. Yeah.
And so even the kind of LFP and the bolt, those are just imported packs that are put in the vehicle, right? Yeah.
Yeah. And let me, and you raised up a really good point here on the components here. So the cathode material, the iron phosphate, is the main driver of cost here. And in China, it's a byproduct of titanium manufacturing. And so you get this product for almost free in China. And it's just very difficult for anywhere else in the world to compete against free. If you're going to compete head to head with China on LFP here in the States, I wish you good luck. It's going to be challenging. The only way to do that is with tariffs, with production tax credits. There's ways that you can compete. If you're going head to head without any protection from the government, it's going to be a tough battle.
It is funny whenever we talk about these dynamics of the US and China, and China gets all these inputs into its production, quote unquote, for free because it's getting them as byproducts of some other industrial process that it's doing. It's like this dynamic also exists in the U.S. It just exists like only for fossil fuels. Like we get all this free gas, quote unquote, because it comes out with the oil for heat map, which focuses on decarbonization, the energy transition, not necessarily the kind of free byproducts that we're looking for in the industrial process. Let's talk about the kind of next chemistry that you're working on.
Yeah. So LMR, lithium manganese rich chemistry, has got something we developed over the last 10 years. The advantage LMR has is it uses much less nickel. So instead of using that 85 to 90% nickel, we're in that 35 to 40 percent nickel. So it's come way down. And as a result, we have much lower cost. So in the end, what you end up with is a battery cell that can compete with LFP on cost. If you were to make LFP here in the States and you compared it with LMR, it's going to be similar costs on a dollar per watt hour basis. But the advantage is that the energy you'll get is 30 to 35% greater. So if you go back to that Silver Auto example, the 492 miles of NMC, the 350 miles with LFP, with LMR, you'll get about 420 miles, but it's at the same cost as the LFP. And so that's the real advantage of it: the performance versus cost. It's a huge advantage. It's not, we're off of that triangle where you have to do these trade-offs. It's a different triangle. So we're able to get good energy at a low cost.
How soon would I be able to buy a GM vehicle with LMR batteries in it?