And it’s locked two of the world’s wealthiest billionaires into a bitter rivalry.

They’re both fighting over a rare resource that’s become the most sought after — and fought over — commodity on the planet.

The Daily Mail calls this material “a wonder… that… may save the planet.”

It’s absolutely essential to Elon Musk’s growing empire. It’s no exaggeration to say Musk and his company’s livelihood depend on it.

But Warren Buffett is also after his own stockpile of this highly coveted raw material.

This puts them in direct head-to-head competition with each other because there just simply isn’t enough of this essential resource to go around.

Things are about to get ugly as these billionaires battle to control the most and best reserves.

But for savvy investors who act now, this situation is about to get very profitable.

It’s one where you could see every $1,000 that you invest turn into as much as $47,740.

After all, the biggest winners in this battle will be those who control the most and best reserves.

So, let me give you the full story right now…

It’s About to Turn Into an All-Out WAR!

Goldman Sachs calls it “the new gasoline.”

The Economist says it’s “the world’s hottest commodity.”

And Bloomberg goes so far as to say we should “get ready for life without oil.”

In fact, it’s already on track to replace up to 148 billion barrels of oil or more.

This little-known substance is already powering so much of our daily lives.

From smartphones, laptops, and tablets to cars, power tools, and even grid energy.

In fact, it’s already used in over 2 million cars, and it will be used in 24 million vehicles by 2030.

Supplies of this resource are already strained.

But now, thanks to a series of power moves by Elon Musk and Warren Buffett, this situation is really heating up.

Musk needs it to feed his new generation of electric vehicles (EVs).

Tesla requires the world’s entire supply of this substance in order to meet Musk’s annual production mandate of 500,000 vehicles. And he’ll need it year after year.

“In order to produce half a million cars a year… we would basically need to absorb the world’s entire production of [this resource],” says Musk.

In fact, with 400,000 preorders for the Tesla Model 3, worth about $14 billion, this single production run could swallow up 80% of the world’s supply.

But the Oracle from Omaha has a $2.3 billion investment in Tesla’s biggest rival — BYD (Build Your Dreams), a major electric car company that has the potential to leave Tesla in the dust.

BYD is already the world’s largest electric vehicle-maker, thanks to its market-leading position in China.

China buys more cars than any other country. And it’s also the largest electric car market. In fact, 40% of electric cars are sold in China — that’s double of what’s sold in the U.S.

The country’s “Made in China 2025” plan calls for hybrid vehicles and electric cars to account for at least 70% of sales by 2025.

And this Buffett-backed company has also set its sights on dominating another market — the good ol’ US of A.

It recently built a brand-new production facility in California. In fact, it’s the largest electric bus-manufacturing facility in North America, with an annual production capacity of 1,000 buses.

And orders are already pouring in from Facebook, the University of California, and Stanford University.

BYD is going to need the world’s entire supply of this rare substance just to meet the initial demand for its new electric vehicles. And like Musk and Tesla, it will need that same supply every single year.

That’s why these two billionaires are locked in a head-to-head battle for gaining control of as much of this resource as humanly possible.

Buffett is already pissed that Musk is developing long-haul electric semitrucks because it could steal business from Berkshire-owned railroad Burlington Northern.

So, you can bet that he won’t let Musk dominate the world’s supply of this precious resource.

And he’ll pay whatever price to make sure of it.

It’s a situation that could make you a retirement fortune if you act quickly.

The tiny little-known companies that I’ll tell you about control some of the world’s best reserves, making them highly sought-after targets for billionaires like Musk and Buffett.

And remember: Cars are just one of the industries that this metal is used in. It’s also being used in dozens of other industries from smartphones to smart homes and medicine to the smart grid.

So, what exactly is this mysterious substance that’s become the most targeted commodity on the planet?

I’m talking about lithium.

The recent surge in worldwide demand for electric vehicles has helped in triggering a historic bull market for lithium — with prices more than tripling since 2015.

It’s risen to $13,000 per tonne — its highest price ever.

In some countries, like China, it sells for as much as $20,000 per tonne!

Warren Buffett realized lithium’s potential long before most people understood just how valuable this metal would become.

That’s why Buffett’s firm, Berkshire Hathaway, bought battery-maker Duracell for $4.7 billion back in 2014.

Duracell also makes lithium-ion batteries, which are used to power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.

But before that, in 2008, Buffett bought a stake in BYD — the world’s largest electric vehicle-maker.

BYD’s CEO Wang Chuanfu started the world’s biggest mobile phone battery manufacturer. He made the lightest, most powerful battery on the planet.

It simply blew away any other power source of its kind. If you had a cell phone or a laptop in the ’90s, you’ll recall the short life, constant charging, and the heaviness that the device’s battery required.

And now, his innovation in lithium-ion batteries is what enables those devices to last for days on a single charge. This breakthrough has led to his batteries capturing 50% of the mobile phone market!

But then Wang Chuanfu had another brilliant idea: to use the same technology to capitalize on the future of transportation.

You see, the secret to making billions from the electric car industry isn’t the car — it’s the battery.

So, he took BYD from being the world’s most successful battery company to being the world’s top-selling electric car company with sales having clocked in last year at $14.5 billion.

In comparison, Tesla Motors only pulled in sales of $7 billion.

Over the past five years, BYD’s stock has risen 162% — a trend that is likely to continue thanks to BYD’s aggressive expansion plans into the U.S. BYD plans to double its production capacity at its new California plant by the end of the year.

That kind of growth will require a lot more lithium.

So, you have Buffett and BYD consuming 20% of the world’s lithium supply and, at the same time, Musk wanting to absorb all of the lithium produced in the world to fuel his growing empire.

That alone is enough to send lithium prices soaring.

But it’s not only these two billionaires who are fighting over this critical resource…

Bill Gates and His Billion-Dollar Buddies Are “In”

Elon Musk and Warren Buffett are about to face even stiffer competition from other members of the billionaire’s club.

Many of these rich and famous businessmen are getting in for a different reason: to get filthy rich.

Like Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal…

His investment firm injected $15 million into a battery startup with plans to invest $600 million more.

And then there’s Bill Gates — the world’s second-richest man.

He’s assembled an all-star group of billionaires to invest in lithium-related ventures. This group includes:

• Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.
• Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.
• Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group.
• Hasso Plattner, cofounder of SAP.
• Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.
• And more…

They’re putting up $1 billion, just for starters.

Then there’s Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting, the founder of LeEco, which has been called the “Netflix of China.”

He’s getting into the electric car game, too.

According to Forbes: “Jia wants to build China’s Tesla — and much more.”

And Richard Branson also says his Virgin Group “has teams of people working on electric cars.”

Branson has even made the bold prediction that in 15 years, “every car on the road will be electric.”

With multibillionaire entrepreneurs of this caliber entering the game, it’s time to sit up and pay very close attention.

They see the writing on the wall: The world is now in the early stages of a historic shift to electric vehicles.

And now is the time to get on board with the investments that could help you turn every $1,000 you invest into $47,040 or more…

India has set an even more aggressive target: Its government stated that every vehicle sold in the country should be powered by electricity by 2030.

China’s “Made in China 2025” plan calls for hybrid and electric cars to account for at least 70% of sales by 2025, forcing every automaker that sells cars to go electric.

It all adds up to hundreds of millions of electric cars being produced over the years ahead.

Even OPEC is suggesting that by 2040, the global vehicle fleet will include 266 million electric vehicles.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance says that by 2040, there could be 530 million electric vehicles — or one-third of all cars!

This is not some wild-eyed prediction for the future: This is unstoppable and is happening right now.

Toyota, General Motors, Nissan, and just about every other big automaker have joined the race.

• General Motors said it plans to phase out gas-powered vehicles for an “all-electric future.” It plans to have 20 all-electric vehicle models by 2023.

• Volvo announced that beginning in 2019, all new models it introduces are going to be either hybrids or electric vehicles.
• Ford CEO Mark Fields wants to convert almost half of his fleet to electric vehicles. The automaker has 13 new all-electric and hybrid vehicle models slated for release by 2023.
• The Renault, Nissan, and Mitsubishi alliance is working together to develop new systems to use across their vehicle lines — with a focus on “purely electric” EVs like the Nissan Leaf. The automakers plan to release 12 all-electric models by 2022.
• VW Group — the parent company of European automakers like Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche — will invest $84 billion in EV development. Roughly $60 billion of the total will be dedicated to battery production, but the company also plans to offer electric and hybrid versions of 300 vehicles by 2030.
• Mercedes-Benz outlined a plan to electrify its “entire portfolio” by 2022, offering 50 electric and hybrid models.
• Jaguar Land Rover plans to electrify its entire vehicle lineup by 2020.

And remember: Every single one of these electric vehicles produced will need a lithium battery…

“Goldman Sachs expects lithium demand to surge 1,000% in the next few years.”

So, just where will all of these batteries supplying these new electric vehicles come from?

New factories, of course…

As you may know, Elon Musk built his $5 billion Gigafactory 1 in the desert outside of Reno, Nevada.

It’s scheduled to churn out 500,000 electric car batteries per year by 2020. And that will require a lot of new lithium.

And Tesla is just one automaker on a very long list of folks building these battery factories…

Billionaire mining mogul Robert Friedland recently told Musk: “The Germans are building a gigafactory twice as big as yours, the Chinese are building four of them bigger than yours, the Japanese are building two and the Koreans are building one.”

And the Chinese firm that Warren Buffett is backing, BYD, has plans for building a gigafactory of its own…

“Imagine 1,000 gigafactories — that’s what we’ll be seeing in the coming decade,” says The Australian Business Review.

Tesla’s competitors will make this one of the biggest battles of the century — one that entirely depends on lithium supply.

Consider this…

By 2020, lithium demand will exceed supply by 125%, and that’s just for starters…

Demand is expected to continue rising by as much as 16% every year — for the next 10 years — which is faster than any other commodity over the past 100 years!

Remember: It’s not just the automotive industry scrambling to get its hands on it.

After all, lithium is essential to the batteries that power those electric vehicles in addition to the batteries that power many of our most sought-after consumer electronics, including smartphones.

This isn’t even considering grid energy storage (set to outstrip electric vehicle demand) and the rising use of consumer electronics.

Lithium battery demand for grid energy storage is set to grow fivefold by 2020!

For instance, Tesla’s energy-storage battery, the Powerpack, weighs 3,575 pounds.

That’s three times the weight of a Model S battery — the equivalent of 12,000 iPhone batteries.

In January, Tesla deployed 198 of these Powerpacks in California — the battery-weight equivalent of 2.3 million iPhones.

GTM Research estimates that by 2022, America’s power grid will host 30 times the amount of what Tesla just installed.

If all of that energy demand were met with Tesla’s Powerpacks, it would be the equivalent of the batteries of 60 BILLION iPhones — almost 8.5 iPhones for every person on Earth.

And now, some of the world’s biggest and wealthiest firms — like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Walmart — are planning to run their entire operations almost exclusively with lithium-enhanced systems.

For example, Google and Apple are building batteries to power their giant warehouses of servers.

Demand for lithium-powered storage batteries like these is expected to grow more than 500% by 2020, soaring from about $400 million to about $2 billion within just two years!

As you can see, this story is a lot bigger than just Musk and Buffett.

The battle for lithium supply has gone GLOBAL, which is estimated to be roughly 14 million tons.

With how quickly consumption is increasing, that amount might not even get us through the next decade…

“I think we will see shortages.”

Of the world’s available lithium supply, 98.6% is located in just four countries: Australia, Chile, Argentina, and China.

According to the Wall Street Journal: “Most deposits are in remote locations that pose technological and logistical challenges.”

Lithium is a poorly concentrated mineral that’s not easy to dig up.

It has to be painstakingly extracted, then meticulously dried and processed with harsh chemicals like sulfuric acid, before it can be refined into the fine powder that’s used in batteries.

All of this takes a lot of time and a lot of money.

In fact, the extraction process can take between eight months to three years!

So, it’s no wonder that global lithium production last year clocked in at just 35,000 tons.

To put that into perspective, that’s about as heavy as the Statue of Liberty, about 2.5 times as heavy as the Brooklyn Bridge, and about three times as heavy as the Eiffel Tower.

And it’s a drop in the bucket compared to annual worldwide demand, which is now 535,000 tons and growing…

It’s a mismatch that could make you very wealthy in the days and weeks ahead.

As Simon Moores, head of the minerals and mining consultancy Benchmark Intelligence, says: “I think we will see shortages. New supply is needed now, and it will be in the future, even if a fraction of the planned expansions in battery production happens.”

Shares of companies in this space have already handed investors huge gains.

I’m talking about companies like…

Galaxy Resources, an Australian lithium miner that soared 1,163%:

Lithium Corporation shot up 445%:

Millennial Lithium Corp jumped 2,666%:

And another little company that Tesla Motors signed a lithium supply deal with soared 400% within the span of three months.

Had you owned these stocks from the get-go, you would have banked a life-changing 4,674% windfall.

If you’d put $1,000 into each of these four companies, you would have made $47,740.

And if you’d put a $10,000 stake into each of these four companies, you would have made an incredible $477,400.

Incredible, right?

Just think about everything you could do with those profits: buy a fancy car, pay off your house, take that trip around the world, put your kids or grandkids through college…

You could retire in style.

This is how real money is made — by owning the little players capitalizing on the trend.

And I’ve identified three little players for you that are set to surge on the coming lithium-supply battle:

• This first little lithium player controls one of the largest lithium fields in the world. We’re talking enough lithium to fill up the entire Houston Astrodome! This isn’t some risky exploration project — the company is already producing lithium from this field and raking in revenues of $120 million.

• The second lithium player is practically sitting right in the backyard of Elon Musk’s $5 billion Gigafactory 1. It could provide Musk and company with enough lithium to meet his ambitious production target of 500,000 electric vehicles. And this property is in addition to a world-class lithium asset that it has a 50% stake in Argentina — one of the world’s lithium hot spots.

• The third play I have for you is a secret battery supplier that’s quietly secured a major contract with the U.S. government. In fact, it supplies the battery needs for all the branches of the military! The military is the nation’s largest consumer of energy, spending roughly $17 billion on fuel every year. And in an effort to get rid of that title, it’s starting to make the move to electric vehicles.

I’ll tell you more about each of these exciting little companies in just a few moments…

With the world’s energy future literally at stake, this could be the bidding war to end all bidding wars.

And the companies that I’ve uncovered could already be sitting at the finish line as the clear winners — ready to scoop up billions and billions of dollars of eager money.

With lithium about to power every major energy source that we need, new energy dynasties will be created…

Just like the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, and the Hunts at the start of the oil boom at the turn of the 1900s.

Investors who get into position today will earn similar fortunes to those who invested in coal before the Industrial Revolution and nuclear in the 1980s.

And the time to act is now because the battle is heating up…

BYD, the company Buffett is backing, is in talks with several lithium producers about potential deals to secure long-term supplies.

And so is Musk…

And that adds up to billions in profits for companies that supply high-grade lithium for batteries.

Like the small companies that I’m about to introduce to you…

I’m Keith Kohl: the lead energy analyst at Angel Publishing.

My 300,000 daily readers get high-caliber profit-gushing energy investments that simply can’t be found anywhere else.

Take the U.S. shale boom for example. Since 2008, I’ve called practically every major shale play before the mainstream press gets wind of it.

I was the first to break news about Bakken oil plays to our readers back in 2007 when no one could imagine that North Dakota held more oil than any OPEC member nation.

I visited the wells, spoke with the experts involved, and racked up a string of triple-digit gains from the Bakken.

Including 574% gains on Brigham Exploration, 103% on Northern Oil & Gas, 170% on American Oil & Gas, and much more…

I was one of the first investors to move into the massive shale gas deposit in the Marcellus Formation.

I’ve even road-tripped to the oil sands in Alberta and met with millionaire energy executives.

And we pulled in gains of 103% on Petrobank Energy and 85% on Canadian Superior Energy.

In short, I do whatever it takes to find and truly vet the next potential energy windfall.

But those gains could look small compared to the profits coming from lithium ahead…

The lithium boom is about to trump every major North American energy boom in history!

I’ve already shown you why demand for lithium is continuing to soar…

As the Financial Times reports: “Concern is growing among analysts, and some other carmakers, that supply… will not be able to keep pace with demand.”

The simple truth is that the worldwide supply of this limited resource is nowhere enough to meet the growing demand, and it’s because of how difficult lithium production can be…

The Lithium Triangle: “Off-Limits!”

South America’s “lithium triangle” is home to more than half of the world’s identified lithium resources.

Some analysts are even calling it the “New Middle East.”

The lithium triangle — which straddles Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia — has explosive investment potential because of the soaring value of lithium in the ground.

But two-thirds of the triangle is off-limits to investors.

And it’s because Chile and Bolivia are not currently issuing mining licenses.

In anticipation of an impending lithium shortage, scientists in Japan are already experimenting with ways to extract lithium from seawater.

It’s no wonder that Musk erected his Gigafactory 1 near the salt lakes of Nevada right on top of the U.S.’ only lithium hub.

Bottom line: We’re at the end of the fossil fuel era.

Our cars will get plugged into walls instead of gas pumps. Our homes will be battery-powered. Our electronic devices and our mobile lifestyles all depend on batteries.

The world has gone rechargeable…

Lithium will literally be everywhere.

It’s no wonder that lithium is being called “the oil of the future.”

But despite the massive amount of money pouring in, I believe that the market is still in its infancy.

The entire industry accounts for only $31 billion. To put it another way: Currently, the worldwide lithium market is one-twelfth the size of just one oil company — Exxon.

But that’s about to change in a major way.

This $31 billion market is on the verge of exploding to $7.2 trillion!

That’s based on projections by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

So, we’re potentially looking at a stunning 24,728% growth rate.

Savvy investors know that the best way to get a slice of this market and bank quadruple gains is by owning the little companies that own lithium goldmines in remote fields.

These are the real market players to keep an eye on — the ones that Musk and Buffett will vie for.

And if history is any indication, we should see a small stake of $1,000 multiply into $47,740 in no time flat.

Remember the gains that I showed you earlier:

• Galaxy Resources, an Australian lithium miner, soared 1,163%.

• Lithium Corporation shot up 445%.

• Millennial Lithium Corp jumped 2,666%.

• And another little company Tesla Motors signed a lithium supply deal with that soared 400% within the span of three months.