EVs seem to not be a very well thought-out long term solution in general, unless radically different batteries with very high energy density can soon be developed. Earth has 88 million tons of lithium, of which only 1/4 is economically feasible to mine. Each Tesla battery uses about 50 kg of Li, which means only about 18 Tesla batteries can be produced per ton, or about 396 million total Tesla batteries. Current global automobile production is about 80 million per year. If society were to totally switch to EVs, we would run out within a decade or so even assuming most of these cars used far less lithium (and thus had much shorter range, limiting practicality). This back of the napkin analysis also ignores all the other competing uses of Li...
Lithium is one of the most common elements on the planet. Earths crust contains ~0.002-0.006% Li by weight, or 1,220,000,000 million tonnes if you use the low estimate.
You seem to have confused the concept of "known reserves" - the 88M number is deposits that we've paid to map out and know exactly where they are.
As current deposits empty out, companies will invest in mapping out others.
Maybe governments are helping to prop up EVs as a means of covertly hoarding lithium. Even if EVs don't work out, having an abundance of lithium could be of tremendous value. /conspiracy
> Earth has 88 million tons of lithium, of which only 1/4 is economically feasible to mine.
This is outrageously spun. That number is (I assume, you don't cite a source) a count of total known reserves. That's not the way research extraction works; as industries develop (and this one is in its infancy) they discover new sources. This is the logic that led people to warn about "peak oil" in the 90's. They were hilariously wrong (because guess what? we "discovered" fracking as prices rose!).
The "1/4 economically feasible" bit likewise assumes, again, current prices and production method. You don't think it's possible to reach a price equilibrium and technology balance that makes that worthwhile to extract? Why? It's happened for every other resource we use.
And the big mistake here is that you're assuming that we throw the batteries in the trash when a vehicle reaches end of life. In point of fact battery elements are among the most effectively recycled materials in the modern economy. A junk NMC battery is, in essence, a very highly concentrated cobalt/lithium ore just waiting for smelting. We don't "run out" like you posit. At steady state, we need enough to cover growth and loss only.
Basically: you're wrong. There's lots and lots of Li out there long term. In the nearer term, though, yeah: we can't mine remotely enough of the stuff and batteries will remain expensive as the industry grows.
> as industries develop (and this one is in its infancy) they discover new sources.
And what do you imagine they will do with those new sources? Leave them pristine while they elegantly and cleanly suck out only the required lithium? No, they will destroy those ecologies with massive mining operations which will generate tons of waste, toxic chemicals, and CO2.
In our quest to reduce carbon emissions it seems we are willing to do everything we can to destroy our habitable environment.
> To illustrate the ultimate scale of demand that EV mandates alone will place on mining, consider that a world with 500 million electric cars — which would still constitute under half of all vehicles — would require mining a quantity of energy minerals sufficient to build batteries for about 3 trillion smartphones. That’s equal to over 2,000 years of mining and production for the latter. For the record, that many EVs would eliminate only about 15% of world oil use.
> Set aside the environmental, economic and geopolitical implications of such a staggering expansion of global mining. The World Bank cautions about “a new suite of challenges for the sustainable development of minerals and resources.” Such an increase in mining has direct relevance for predictions about the future carbon intensity for minerals because acquiring raw materials already accounts for nearly one half of the life-cycle carbon dioxide emissions for EVs.
People are still living in the fantasy that EVs will solve the problem of ICEs, they haven't thought through what it would actually take to do that. Basically, they are imagining a completely blue-sky happy path where every single piece magically falls into place: abundant high-yield mineral deposits continue to be found and quickly extracted, battery technology improves exponentially, car makers are able to smoothly incorporate all of these new technology improvements and supply chain disruptions to switch to EVs, and cheaply decommission and recycle legacy ICE vehicles. So many things have to come together absolutely perfectly that it beggars belief.
Ironically the very oil and gas industries that funded this FUD via the Manhattan Institute are themselves a perfect example of how extractive industry can scale up far beyond the kind of naive extrapolations that gave us the "peak oil" idea.
I suppose that the Climate and Community Project and University of California, Davis are also being funded by the Manhattan Institute to spread FUD?
> The US’s transition to electric vehicles could require three times as much lithium as is currently produced for the entire global market, causing needless water shortages, Indigenous land grabs, and ecosystem destruction inside and outside its borders, new research finds.
That's the first paragraph of https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-... (that's 2023-01-24, btw). The entire article is worth reading to get a high-level overview of the actual real-world impact the lithium mining will have over the next couple of decades if we keep rushing headlong into a path where we believe electric cars will just magically solve everything.
I know in this cynical age no one wants to believe anything, but really–have we not seen enough ecologies destroyed by mining to understand that this is real?
