this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Is-There-Enough-Lithium-to-Maintain-the-Growth-of-the-Lithium-Ion-Battery-M
"The U.S. Geological Survey produced a reserves estimate of lithium in early 2015, concluding that the world has enough known reserves for about 365 years of current global production of about 37,000 tons per year"
"With known lithium “resources” at 39.5 million tons, we get about 50 years of supply with 100 Gigafactories"
There is a lot more lithium in the world, particularly in solution in the ocean, that is not currently listed in resource estimates. As lithium demands increase, more of these sources will be utilised.
that's from 2015 and relies on some assumptions that im sure were reasonable back then but would raise eyebrows now.
we don't need to extrapolate the amount of lithium in a tesla battery anymore, it's 60 or so kilograms, not the 10 the article uses for its calculation.
i like reserves a heck of a lot better than resources for this calculation, but even using resources i come up with a disconcerting 4.4kg lithium available for each persons ev battery. not nearly enough.
my own source here says typical EV batteries have only 8kg lithium in them (see the spoiler for the flaw in their use of a particular nature article that definitely wasn't making its calculation to represent an ideal universal median ev), but even then there's not enough to give everyone an ev.
but wait, it gets worse! we use lithium in a bunch of other stuff, and even if everyone on earth could get by with half a battery and didn't need to haul a load, go offroad or anything that would require a bigger battery, they'd still want lithium batteries in their phones, tablets, computers, power tools, flashlights, vapes, game controllers, standard size rechargeables of all kinds and you know, all the stuff we use lithium for that isn't storing charge (and there's a lot!).
it's not all the way worse yet! resources is great if we're trying to maximize for evs, but awful if we're trying to save the planet in any way. who out here is trying to frack (in terms of extracting a "tight" resource, not the process itself) more?
if we use the more conservative reserves figure it gets positively grim: just one and a half kilos of lithium for each person on earth! so if we don't wanna tear up every scrap of the planet to make batteries only a little over the current number of cars on earth (1.474B) could be accommodated and even then that's using the "typical" mass of lithium in each vehicle!
hold on, i can make it grimmer: producing enough evs for everyone on earth would need 6.6 billion more rolling chassis to put all those batteries in. so four times the productive capacity for cars that we have now. that's not gonna be easy on the environment!
so id say we can't put every person on earth in an ev. if we're getting out of this its gonna be with reduced consumption, not an increase!
the math!
39.5Mt/1.474B = a little under 53lbs per existing car. so we can't even replace all the worlds existing cars with tesla batteries, let alone produce enough cars for all the people on earth. but what if all the cars were using what was categorized in Nature as a more typical EV battery?
39.5Mt/8.1B = 9.75lb lithium per person on earth. so we can't give everyone a more typical EV battery (and we better have 100% perfect recycling!), but a lot of those are too young to drive, so what about just adults?
39.5Mt/5.1B = 15.4lb lithium per adult age 20 or up on earth. so we can't even give the earths adults a "more typical" EV battery!
i'm just gonna show work for the reserves calculations without editorializing:
13.5Mt/1.474 = 18.3lb
13.5Mt/8.1B = 3.33lb
13.5Mt/5.1B = 5.3lb
It's worth diving into the nature article that my source bases their claims of 8kg on. they look at the existing evs and calculate the amount from that. existing evs are almost universally small and light whereas replacing all the cars on earth with evs would require a decent portion of evs that can go off road and carry loads and have awful coefficients of friction that would use bigger and more lithium intensive batteries.
You might be right on this one. I'm not able to find a source to dispute that.
In other news, some Chinese car manufacturers are releasing cars with sodium ion batteries late this year / early next year. Lithium might not be a bottleneck for EV production.
I still agree with your initial point. More public transport is needed.
Didn’t meant to make it seem like an internet nerd debunking post. Sorry about that if the tone is off.
But yeah that’s what I meant by our choice of public transit (I don’t wanna say degrowth because of the goose chasing meme “who are we degrowing, who are we degrowing, motherfucker!”) or ecofascism.
Unfortunately no one wants to have public transit and no one’s making billions in profits off public transit so we’re gonna get ecofascism one way or another.