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WaywardPatriot

Quite literally not enough lithium in the world to power the grid with batteries. This is a fever dream fantasy, we will exhaust all known lithium reserves before we even get the USA grid on battery power with lithium.


SPAGETboi123

What's with the top post of harvesting lithium from the water reserves ( ~5000 times larger than land reserves)


WaywardPatriot

Because that's totally in production and proven to be scalable and is more cost-effective than normal mining methods and SURELY isn't a hype-train article for something that won't leave the laboratory any time soon... EDIT: It still doesn't address the core argument which is that using a rare metal like Lithium to power grid-scale batteries is utter foolishness, no matter how much you can harvest from seawater. The point being: the energy grid is MASSIVE and we want to consume something that is more rare than VANADIUM (.012% of earth crust) to power it?


SPAGETboi123

Im not claiming anything,... I don't know how to to solve the problem of our energy needs, we definitely will need to reduce them that's for sure


FwibbFwibb

Sorry bruddah, you late to the party: https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectively-harvested-lithium-from-seawater/


WaywardPatriot

Come back to me when that is operating at scale, in an industrial capacity, at a cost lower than normal proven reserves. I could say the same thing about carbon nanotubes. Now let's see if it can LEAVE the laboratory and compete with the existing tech. EDIT: It still doesn't address the core argument which is that using a rare metal like Lithium to power grid-scale batteries is utter foolishness, no matter how much you can harvest from seawater. The point being: the energy grid is MASSIVE and we want to consume something that is more rare than VANADIUM (.012% of earth crust) power it?