As I mentioned before, I have been keeping an eye on EV trends since I've been into the next generation vehicle for the last few years. I found an online article that said the demand of lithium ion batteries for EVs is expected to increase drastically in the future. Lithium is a main ingredient(material) for the battery and it faces a huge issue in that it's hard to maintain a stable supply of lithium. There are some methods which extract lithium by mining from ores and refining it from salt lakes and salt wafer in the stratum. However, those methods have problems in that it takes long time to produce and so on. "Direct Lithium Extraction(DLE)" is one of the alternatives for a stable supply and many companies have recently conducted research and development for this solution. The method is a technology which extracts lithium directly from salt wafer pumped from salt lakes and the layer (I'm not sure about this part). The conventional refinement method stores salt water in a distillation pond and requires a few years to evaporate it. On the other hand, DLE can produce lithium in a few hours since it extracts it by passing salt water through a filter and absorption film. That's why the method doesn't need a large space like required for distillation ponds and this method can reduce cost to produce lithium (costs for lithium production). I hope this technology will give us affordable lithium batteries in the future.