In order to make a really large number of model 3s, model ys, trucks, roadsters, and pickup trucks, elon and tesla will need large amounts of certain metals and minerals.

aluminum, steel, probably as an alloy with oher metals such as titanium, manganese, magnesium, etc.
some carbon for fiber, some silica for glass. lithium nickel and cobalt for the batteries.

recently there were news reports of tesla looking to partner with a large south american lithium mining concern.

i don't know much about how that company does things now.
What I want to write about is how they could be doing things.

Currently lithium comes from two main processes: one involves brines, pools of water with the mineral dissolved in it. the other involves mining a mineral ore, which costs more, and is more of an environmental problem, so i will focus on brines.

Brines, as discussed here, are typically salty brackish water pumped from underground lakes beneath salt flats. they are pumped into holding pools, where slowly, over a year or so, sunlight and wind reduce the water content. Once the solution becomes supersaturated, salt, sodium chloride, precipitates out. As the solution becomes more concentrate, other minerals reach their precipitation points and can be removed and concentrated. The valuable lithium is only a small fraction of the total at first, but increases each time other substances are removed.  Eventually the lithium is concentrated enough the solution can be chemically treaded to make lithium cloride, and removed, at which point it might be reconstituted back into metal for efficient shipping, or kept as the chloride for use in batteries. Depending on the site, the other minerals might include sodas, carbonates, sulphates, manganese, calcium, potassium, and then other trace minerals in smaller amounts.

The plus side of this method is that it is cheap, if slow.

Here's what I could see happening with an application of teslanomics.

build a solar tower using heliostats, basically big reflectors that focuses sunlight on a centrral tower.
arsenic sulfie solar cells turn some of that sunlight to electricity, while some stays as heat and turns the brine to steam.

have an area of solar pv panels. pipe water through the panels to heat up the water while cooling the panels. take this warm water, run it through a tube with a trough-spaced solar collector, so now it's nealy boiling, as it gets pumped up the tower, where it turns to steam, driving a turbine, producing electricty. steam can be piped back into the mine, helping to leach out more lithium? this works for oil wells but i ont know if works in brine mines.

so we are getting electric frrom pv, from the arsenic sulfide panels, and from the steam engine.

we -could- use some of the electricity produced to split the NaCL into sodium and chloride. this would give two or more products while storing energy in chemistry. but to me the risks lead me to table this idea for now. similarly extra electricty could be stored as hydrogen, by splitting water via electrolysis, and then the hydrogen can fuel inustrial processes. but the anodes and cathodes were expensive and fragile - has that changed?

this next bit of engineering is a black box to me: apparently when dissolved or suspended in the hot steam, the minerals can be sorted cheaply/efficiently. that may or may not turn out to be true.

let's assume that's not true and all we've done is remove 90% of the water and precipitate out the salt, sodium cloride.

Now we have a product, water, which can be bottled and sold. add food coloring, vitamins, minerals, and carbonation, and you've got soda, a second product, and table salt, a third. salt can be used with a 3d printer to make solid objects. e.g. 10-kilo lego bricks, with a plastic coating, which can be snapped together by robots to make gigafactories. or a mockup tesla roaster, spaceship, or supercharger, made from salt.
so that's water, soda, table salt, and bricks, each items that can be branded and sold to the average consumer for enhanced brand identification. no ads needed, the products sell themselves, so price point can be lower than competitors, to enhance market share. involve virgin/branson in a marketing partnership.

add 10% fruit juice to the soda, and you get a range of sodas to market.

 next, the water, drinking quality, can be piped to some nearby city.
[possibly lower quality] water can be used for agriculture or industry.

think of this as a water factory with a byproduct of lithium. in the 21st century, water matters.

anyway, now you have a more concentrated brine, so the lithium content is 10 times what it was.

maybe or maybe not, bacteria can be grown that act to biologically concentrate the lithium.
grow a bacteria that incorporates some lithium, filter it out, reduce to ash, chemically remove whatever is left that isn't lithium.

there's been a little work done with lithium-harvesting bacteria, but i dont even know which species to start with.

what i do know is that bacteria can be used to concentrate out many of the other components of the brine, such as manganese, potassium, and calcium.

i haven't worked it all out, but as this process continues, the lithium is more concentrated, as the other factors are remove. sulfates might remain an issue - i dont know if bacteria can remove sulphates.

Think of this as a manganese mine that happens to produce lithium as a byprouct.

Then, calcium and potassium are two of the three main ingredients in fertilizer. The other is nitrogen.

Think of this as a fertilizer mine that happens to produce lithium.

One thing i have not looked into is whether fungus can be used with or instead of the bacteria to concentrate certaain minerals. It's a question for Paul Stamets and his fungi com. Similarly, how about seaweeds?

With water, electricity, knowhow, and fertilizer, the factory could support a gigafarm as well, to produce crops such as soy and alfalfa that fix nitrogen and produce organic material as a component of the fertilizer. Meanwhile, other trace minerals can be added to the fertilizer on a custom basis  base on a soil analysis for each customer. It doesn't seem like there would be much left at the end, a sort of sandy powder, which could be stored for future use, or made into lego bricks.

So we have a process intended to mine lithium, which it does, but also we get
water
salt
bricks and 3 printed objects of salt,
fertilizer,
manganese,
more bricks.
The remainder is going to have some trace minerals like chromium or gold that it will probaby remain uneconomical  to try to harvest.

This article needs a footnote about sea monkeys. Brine shrimp can be raised in the initial concentrating pools. This is done in traitional argentina brine ponds. At least one patent holer hinks that organic material helps precipitate out the minerals faster.


Anyway, that's the general idea:

We can electrify and speed up the process, while also producing electricity,
bottled water, sodas, sea monkeys, fertiliser, salt, sculptures, bricks, and manganese.
ideally, the plant pays for itself, with the lithium as a free bonus.

of course you'd probabbly also do stuff like a health clinic, local internet, and a school.


 in a next section, i'll talk about desalination.
finally, does brine processing have possible applications for mars or the asteroids?