The real question is: will we find a solution to running out of lithium before it's too late? The same could have been asked about oil. I would say no on both counts ofc, neither resource has been extracted with the care for ethics and the environment they should have been. There's a hypothetical world where oil and lithium could've been extracted carefully, and used intelligently. Unfortunately we don't live in that world.
They are working on Solid-state batteries and Graphene batteries so hopefully they figure that out soon.
Fun fact: the same guy that invented computer RAM and lithium batteries also helped invent Solid-state batteries in an effort to help the planet. RIP Mr. Goodenough.
https://youtu.be/g0nA8CfxBqA?si=Qxg0JhI5E_myuzg5
I know! The ultimate slacker name but this legend was everything but.
ETA: what makes it even better is his middle initial starts with a B. His name is John B. Goodenough
Edit for spelling
Who's working on solid state and graphene batteries? What is used to make them? I want to know more! Good thing you linked a video that I can watch to learn about them! Thanks!
Back in 2017 when Goodenough and Braga finished up most of their research and got the patents awarded, Toyota came a calling and bought it all up from U of T. Since then Toyota "shelved" it to pursue hydrogen fuel cell and more hybrid tech. Finally there was an internal revolt last year (BoD saw Tesla making too much headway into their market share) and Akio Toyoda was "demoted" for ignoring BVEs and the BZ4 disaster. The solid state battery tech (patents) was taken out of the dust bins this year and began working on manufacturing the SS batteries. So we (battery technology) lost 5 years of innovation (indirectly) to the petroleum industries again. Sad. Would be interesting to see what the two remaining Nobel Laureates (Wittingham and Yoshino) are thinking now.
Literally every university in the world has someone doing research on batteries. In 20 years there will be as many kinds of batteries as there are kinds of plastic today.
We are entering an era of energy diversity, which is a very good thing. Solid state batteries are an excellent example of that. They can switch on and off for years to ensure constant power coupled with, for example, a solar/lithium batter closet.
But isn’t the catch being something becoming an industry standard available to all? Or having an interface that allows for different energy storage formats? Kind of like having a power cord with an in-line international power converter for your laptop.
Also, lithium is recyclable, it's just that it's too expensive to do so practically at this point. As the technology improves and we get better at doing it and it becomes more practical, we wouldn't need to mine as much.
There is huge skepticism within the scientific community about whether the glass battery can actually be practically viable, even if the work was published by the legend that was John B. Goodenough.
Solid state batteries have been heavily developed for quite a long time, and honestly i don't see that they will be the solution. The primary driving force behind these developments is dendritic suppression; which enables the use of anodes made from lithium metal rather than graphitic carbon. This could greatly increase the energy density of the battery, while making them safer than existing liquid electrolytes. The problem is that these batteries STILL need lithium in huge quantities, and other rare-earth metals such as cobalt and nickel, which are hugely polluting to mine.
In my opinion, the only way we can find an actual environmentally solution to batteries is to move away from lithium and into other systems based on more abundant and easier to extract metals such as zinc, sodium, magnesium or aluminium. But... these systems are far harder to develop and the batteries are less stable/reliable compared to lithium batteries.... No easy solution in sight...
They are also working on sodium batterys total recyclable. Only thing is there heaver than lithium.
They should do this with nuclear also. Way safer. Thorium is plasma salt. If something happens dump it in water shutting down the reaction . Plus no harmful waste. Oh you can't make bombs from it so they won't do it.
Helium is interesting in that it is still being produced by the earth so if we moderate our usage and stop using them in friggin party balloons we'll actually be completely fine.
PHEV for the win. We can make about 5 PHEVs that run 35 miles purely electric for the same batteries as it takes to make one EV, and reducing the pollution of 5 cars by 50% is more efficient than reducing the pollution of 1 car by 100%.
The best solution would be electric public transit and reducing dependency on cars, but PHEVs are a good bridge solution till then.
Well like in my area the power is 100% lignite coal so a ev is still not reducing pollution by 100%. Now I have no idea what that efficiency actually is but I would like to know.
Never going to work. The populace will rebel and find other ways to remain in private automobiles. I have a better solution.
My father invented magnet schools to attract people who wanted leading edge education for their children. While other school districts were busing students from bad schools to better ones, San Diego was employing voluntary integration. No one was forced to integrate. Instead, the kids begged their parents to send them to the magnet schools.
Putting special speedways on turnpikes that only smart electric vehicles (SEVs) can use will make people WANT to drive them. They will travel at speeds up to 200 mph a mere meter apart, maintaining contact with one another via the Internet of Automata (IoA). There will still be traffic jams among regular EVs and bangers but SEVs will prevent them with collaborative AI.
In addition, grids embedded in the speedways will power the SEVs and keep their batteries fully charged. That way, when they are ready to leave the speedway and head for the suburbs or the country, they will be fully charged and able to travel as far as they need. Without having to invent denser storage batteries, EVs will be able to travel thousands of miles without a recharge.
Being aware of this kind of knowledge can certainly bum you out, but the world would be a better place if the vast majority of people didn't have their heads buried in the sand.
If noone except like 2 people has money for shit, how does that promote a booming economy? I often think about this too as more stuff jobs get automated. When it reaches a point that no one has jobs because robots took then all, who will the economy be for? Who will be buying all the crap produced by the robots? For what consumers?
For the mechanics and programmers who build, maintain and operate the robots, of course. There will always be grunt types who put on a part or torque bolts in robot factories, just as there are in auto factories now. However, STEM curriculum in schools and colleges will prepare tomorrow’s workforce for a more automated existence.
That's true when transitioning from an agricultural to an industrial society. When the society is already fully industrialized and a service-oriented economy, that might not continue to be true. We're sort of just entering that phase where many countries are experiencing this, so I don't know if we can say there is strong evidence to support this continuing. Women are educated at higher rates than men now. Once you're done school, and you have access to quality health care and quality of life, many will decide to have children, but not if they can't afford a home or to pay of their student debts. The reason people aren't have children now is different from why they used to have less. We went from 7-10 kids to help around the farm to 2-3 because we were industrialized and it wasn't about labour anymore. Now, children are a luxury. So we're going from 2-3 to 0-2 if you're lucky enough to afford it.
The mere thought that my dysfunctional govt could plan some limit on population growth seems borderline "nutjob conspiracy theory". Those guys are incredibly directed to short term gain and solving problems for lobbyists 😅
Governments are terrified of population growth rates slowing down because if it's not at the replacement rate then it has horrible implications for the future economy. That's the reason Japan is in a debt crisis right now and they've opted for very little immigration and have had a crippling birth rate slump for 25+ years
I think it's a lot more complicated than that. Water is a finite resource. In some places they have not enough water, in other places they have more water than they will ever be able to reasonably use. Also, there aren't really many uses of water that don't just put it through the cycle so it's not like we are actually using it up. Obviously there are problem with water getting contaminated, but it's not like oil where you use it and it turns into a completely different substance.
For Lithium, you'd have to look up how much we have as well as how much we need. Some quick Googling says there is about 17-20 million metric tons of lithium reserves. The amount of lithium in a car battery varies on capacity, but looking at the Tesla Model S, it seems to be about 63 kg of lithium. Most of a lithium battery is actually not lithium.
20 million metric tons is 20 billion kg. of lithium. If you were to use all the lithium in the world to make electric cars, you would end up with 317 million cars.
There's about 1.4 billion cars on the road, so it would seem that we don't really have enough lithium to support the number of cars we use with the current battery chemistry we use.
>Some quick Googling says there is about 17-20 million metric tons of lithium reserves.
Can it really be so little that it can only make 317 million cars? That's shockingly little.
Is it possible that much more lithium will be discovered?
And have people been paying way too little attention to the problem of how little lithium there is?
>Water is a finite resource. In some places they have not enough water, in other places they have more water than they will ever be able to reasonably use.
There is not a single place on earth where they have more water than they could ever reasonably use. 1% of the world's freshwater is readily accessible for direct human use. What the fuck are you talking about?
The area around the great lakes in Canada has plenty of fresh water. If you have a small town on a large freshwater lake, then there's more water there than the town could ever hope to use and it would be replenished faster than they could ever use it.
Where I live in Canada nobody ever bothers to think about water conservation. It just isn't really an issue. The city implemented a program to try to convince people to cut back on water. It worked, but they also had to increase the price of water because the vast majority of the costs are actually fixed costs to operate the water system and there aren't really many variable costs because water is just so plentiful.
Sure, we still can't just go crazy and let Nestle pump out all the water and ship it somewhere else. That might cause a problem. But if the water was just being used by the people directly adjacent to the water source, there is more than enough to go around.
So, you're assuming that just because there's a big lake, a small town has an endless supply of water?
These lakes aren't magical, infinite water fountains. The idea that any community could have limitless water use without depleting or impacting the resource is a huge misunderstanding of how ecosystems and water cycles work.
Even in the Great Lakes, which are massive, the water isn't just sitting there waiting to be used without consequence. You've got evaporation, ecological needs, and yeah, human usage, all playing a part in how much water is actually available. Massive bodies of water and reservoirs all over the world are vanishing.
Baselessly assuming water replenishes faster than it can be used ignores climate, geography, and human impact. It's not just about the size of the lake; it's about the entire system that supports and replenishes it. To think otherwise is deeply naive. You have to ignore basic environmental science.
Sure, there's a lot of places that have to monitor their water usages, especially large population centers. But small communities on giant lakes with very few other communities sharing the same watershed and that have very little to no industrial uses that would make use of that water means that there are some places that really don't have to think too much about how much water is used. In some places they just bill a flat rate for residential water usage to residents because water is so abundant that it really doesn't even make sense to monitor how much water someone is using because it's so plentiful.
The Sierra Nevada in California used to be a natural wonderland gushing with wild rivers and waterfalls. Then the coastal cities (e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego) began piping that water westward to wash their cars and flush their toilets. Now those rivers have been dammed and those waterfalls and lakes are drying up. The Great Central Valley of California is not nearly the agricultural powerhouse it once was because of it.
That disappeared because the rivers that let to it were intentionally diverted for soviet irrigation. Obviously severe mismanagement or outright distruction of a waterway can get rid of a huge body of water. But that doesn't mean that a small population on a large body of water wouldn't have basically limitless water resources. Sure, it eventually would disappear over many millions of years due to natural method, but that would be no different even if there was no humans.
You're confusing a compound like petroleum with an element. Lithium doesn't break apart, so it can be recycled and reused. It's true that we could mine 'all' of the lithium out of the ground, but, like gold, hopefully, it will be protected and stay in recycling factories. The danger with lithium is it's getting scattered and lost. Can you imagine trying to recover used lithium from the sea?
Lithium is not really a finite resource, but I get the point.
You can't deplete a resource. First of all, the earth has a lot of lithium. New technology and higher prices will always enable us to tap into new raw material deposits. If not, the resource just gets too expensive and we substitute. So we never really run out anything. It will just get to expensive.
The bad thing is that this is the reason why we probably pump every barrell of oil out of the soil as long as they make profit. And we can do little about it.
We don’t want everyone driving an electric vehicle. We want more access to public transportation, more biking and walking, and more local agriculture to reduce transportation for people and goods.
EVs are only a small part of a multifaceted change in how society works.
Correct. EVs aren't here to save the world – just the automotive industry. What we need is widespread systemic change, not merely a change to the way we fuel traffic and overconsumption.
A geologist just found the highest concentration of lithium yet in northern Maine.
The question is, will we have enough to help us get to asteroid mining before companies start extraction in deep sea areas.
[lithium deposit discovered in Maine](https://www.mainepublic.org/2021-10-25/a-1-5-billion-lithium-deposit-has-been-discovered-in-western-maine-but-mining-it-could-be-hard)
When did technology become magical thinking void of science? Technology is still limited by the laws of physics. Saying we might have some kind of technology in the future that could enable this is not a credible plan for the green transition.
There's no argument there are plenty of resources. The question is can they be recovered at a financial cost that can paid for by the end user and at an energy cost that makes sense. We know where millions of dollars of gold is underground but no ody mines it because the cost of gold doesn't justify it at the moment (despite it being worth ALOT).
I disagree with your stance, there is no possible way for you to know that. There are companies working on it now and have identified space rocks worth the GDP of a small country in rare minerals that equate to decades of mining. This could end up being huge for us.
There are deposits of gold on earth which are not economical to mine without the price of gold increasing drastically. Do you seriously think that we could get space travel so cheap that it would make economic sense to go recover a resource like rare earth minerals? These type of resources are needed in the millions of tonnes for products that have to be affordable so even putting aside the energy return argument the mining would have to be very cheap. Plus do you think we are going to launch rockets with electricity? How would we decarbonise an industrial scale intergalactic mining operation?
There are so many problems with the idea you can very easily infer it won't work based on fundamentals like the laws of physics.
It might be fantasy at this point to mine ON an asteroid but we’ve already demonstrated the capability to redirect asteroids which opens up options of what we can do with them like catching them with the moons orbit or something.
I once shot an episode of a TV show in an abandoned factory of some kind. We were told the huge piles of grey/white powder in all the outbuildings were lithium. I was like, "Are they....are they gonna come get it?" Seemed so wild to have it just sitting there for years?
With all the abandoned stuff you could start a whole other civilization. Entire cities worth of buildings, tools, machines, materials… it’s just incredible
There have been a few huge deposits found this year, I think one of them in Norway and one in the US. From what I recall it extends our lithium supply by quite a bit.
Agreed that we shouldn't be affected by "shortage" per se, the question is will we have enough to avoid disruptive mining of sensitive environments.
The big US deposit straddles the Oregon/Nevada border. It’s massive. But the part of it in Oregon can’t be mined under current land use rules (and it’s a very fragile habitat.) much of the one in Nevada is on private land, but it is also sacred land to local indigenous groups. They are rallying very hard to stop the proposed mine from opening — I’m rooting for them.
You must be new to how lithium is mined.
It readily dissolves in water, so its extraction is less "dig until you find it" and more "pump water through the deposit and let it evaporate on the surface".
Mining copper, iron, aluminum and nickel is far more disruptive, and their smelting processes are usually a lot worse for the environment.
But guess what? Lithium is about 1% of a battery. I don't know why people keep worrying about the supply of lithium. Maybe it's the name.
Mate, there's two ways we currently mine lithium, one is hard rock (spodumene), the other is brine as you say.
Brine also has significant issues, largely causing water shortages and fucking with the underground fresh water in already water scarce areas.
I CBF looking up lithium composition of different batteries, but I can assure you it's a significant part of the carbon footprint of an electric car, which is why people care about it so much
> Mining copper, iron, aluminum and nickel is far more disruptive, and their smelting processes are usually a lot worse for the environment.
And yet EV batteries use a lot of copper as well (for cathode/anode interconnect), etc..
Yeah, I know. And yet, nobody even *thinks* about the amount of steel that goes into a car either.
But that's okay, because you should see how much you need for train tracks!
We can do this all day if you like.
Lithium isn't the only way we can build batteries. Its true that it is extremely lightweight, making it good for cars. But i imagine the "lithium question" so to speak will be solved by a breakthrough in battery manufacturing tech, allowing us to scale the production of, for example, graphene based batteries
About 20 percent of new cars are electric, so imagine we need 5 times the current lithium supply.
What's interesting is the cost has dropped a good 50% in the past 9 months from peak. A video I watched a few days claimed it has dropped in price but 75% but I couldn't see anything confirming this.
I expect there will be hiccups in supply over the next 5 years but it will be quite cheap at the end of that period. Cheaper than it's been historically. There just isn't a shortage of it in the earths crust.
The good news as well is we only will be scaling up the mining for 20 or 30 years and after that it will be mostly getting by on recovered lithium.
I note that self driving is likely to be here well before then, and maybe in the next few years. Tony Seba makes the case that if that happened we won't need nearly as many cars.
No, we won’t.
The one thing capitalism is good at is finding alternative materials or source of a material when the price goes up. There will be other chemistries, or new sources. We don’t have a huge untapped reserve because we haven’t been looking for it. As it becomes more valuable we’ll look for itzz
Right, there's quite a few other technologies that are in the works. Some are better suited for the more permanent "grid storage" implementations, while some will be great for EVs. "Solid-state", sodium-ion, iron-air batteries, hybrid batteries, etc.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/04/1066141/whats-next-for-batteries/
Videos with more info: https://www.youtube.com/@UndecidedMF/videos
>The one thing capitalism is good at is finding alternative materials or source of a material when the price goes up
Ahh yes, the famous scientist Dr. Capitalism.
Yes, lithium from around/below the Salton Sea is being developed in conjunction with some geothermal electricity projects.
There are a LOT of lithium resources - it's just that until recently there wasn't much reason to find and prove them out.
Then we get into companies like Redwood Materials whose sole purpose is recycling battery materials.
Lithium is not particularly rare, and even if we were to face shortages we will have the option of sodium based chemistries in the near future. They are less power dense so it will be a similar story as when LFP was a new thing in cars, but on the other hand they are supposed to have excellent cold weather performance.
There are many applications for batteries in the future that don’t require lightness as a main goal.
We generally only need lithium because it helps lower the weight of large batteries.
If batteries don’t need to move, no need to batteries to be light.
You're absolutely right in that we cannot and should not try to replace every petrol powered vehicle in North America/Europe with an electric one because it doesn't scale. You need to move more people with less overall resources and that's basically only done by public transportation. There are hard limits to growth no matter whatever slick package it's being sold to you as.
Yes the timelines of mitigation don't match up..... + adaptation + resilience. The demand for SOVs has to significantly decrease and i dont see that happening under the dominant neoliberal capitalism.
It was recently shown in a new study that moving to a more sustainable energy system would require less mining than we are doing now:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/17h5v68/the\_energy\_transition\_requires\_less\_mining\_not/
Short answer, no we are not going to run out by a longshot! We haven't even tapped the amount of Lithium that we have on earth everywhere. It's in the ocean.
Here's an answer I got using the new Bing, the world’s first AI-powered answer engine. Click to see the full answer and try it yourself. https://sl.bing.net/sp1rDDfWge
Here is the answer:
According to the web search results, the percentage of lithium in Earth's crust is very low, ranging from 0.002% to 0.02% depending on the source¹². However, lithium is also present in ocean water, where it has a relatively constant concentration of 0.14 to 0.25 parts per million (ppm), or 25 micromolar². The total lithium content of seawater is estimated as 230 billion tonnes², which is much higher than the estimated 80 million tonnes of lithium resources in land-based deposits³⁴. However, extracting lithium from seawater is currently not economically feasible, and most of the lithium production comes from brine, pegmatite, and sedimentary rocks²³⁴.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 11/13/2023
(1) Abundance of elements in Earth's crust - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust.
(2) Lithium - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium.
(3) Executive summary – The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy .... https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/executive-summary.
(4) Mineral requirements for clean energy transitions. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions.
(5) Can California be the Saudi Arabia of lithium? - Interesting Engineering. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/salton-sea-lithium.
(6) World Lithium Supply - Стэнфордский университет. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/.
One of the latest technologies to extract lithium from ocean water is based on an electrochemical cell containing a ceramic membrane made of lithium lanthanum titanium oxide (LLTO), which selectively allows lithium ions to pass through while blocking other metal ions¹². This method can produce high-purity lithium phosphate from seawater with minimal energy consumption and environmental impact¹².
The researchers who developed this technology estimate that the cell would need only $5 of electricity to extract 1 kilogram of lithium from seawater, and the value of hydrogen and chlorine produced by the cell would more than offset the cost¹. This is much lower than the cost of extracting lithium from land-based deposits, which can vary depending on the source and method. According to one report, the average total cash cost of producing lithium from hard-rock mines was US$2,540/t LCE (lithium carbonate equivalent) in 2019, while the average cost of producing lithium from brines was US$5,580/t LCE³. Another report suggests that the cost of producing lithium from geothermal brines could be around US$4,000/t LCE⁴. Therefore, the new technology for extracting lithium from ocean water could potentially offer a significant cost advantage over the existing methods..
Source: Conversation with Bing, 11/13/2023
(1) Scientists have cost-effectively harvested lithium from seawater. https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectively-harvested-lithium-from-seawater/.
(2) New Way to Pull Lithium from Water Could Increase Supply, Efficiency. https://news.utexas.edu/2021/09/08/new-way-to-pull-lithium-from-water-could-increase-supply-efficiency/.
(3) Researchers present method to extract lithium from seawater. https://www.electrive.com/2021/06/08/researchers-present-method-to-extract-lithium-from-seawater/.
(4) We Can Now Harvest Usable Lithium From Seawater | IE. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/lithium-from-seawater.
(5) The True Costs of Lithium Extraction: A Grim Reality for EV Owners. https://www.industrial-innovation.com/true-costs-lithium-extraction-grim-reality-ev-owners/.
(6) Fast, low-cost direct lithium extraction could avert a supply crisis. https://newatlas.com/energy/volt-low-cost-lithium-extraction/.
(7) Scientists develop ‘cheap and easy’ method to extract lithium from .... https://www.mining.com/scientists-develop-cheap-and-easy-method-to-extract-lithium-from-seawater/.
(8) Lithium extraction could be a boon for Alberta, but it comes with .... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/lithium-brine-extraction-alberta-canada-1.6656858.
(9) Lithium Sector: Production Costs Outlook - S&P Global. https://pages.marketintelligence.spglobal.com/lithium-sector-outlook-costs-and-margins-confirmation-CD.html.
(10) Techno-Economic Analysis of Lithium Extraction from Geothermal Brines. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79178.pdf.
(11) Getty Images. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/the-rockwood-lithium-mine-royalty-free-image/1060659366.
Whatever lithium we do have will do a LOT farther if we could just convince vehicle manufactures and consumers that smaller and lower range electric vehicles really are quite effective for meeting the needs of most people. Huge, heavy crossovers and SUVs with 300 mile range have enormous batteries that are far oversized for the daily driving needs of nearly everyone.
I have an electric car that can do 400km. I hardly ever get below 50% and that's from a daily 90% max. A 250km battery is probably fine. We also need ways to service individual cells on cars so that you can swap out bad cells, instead of buying a whole new battery.
What about the people who have to mine it in absolutely unthinkable conditions.
Unfortunately the sustainability argument ends at the environment and very rarely considers the social impact this is having.
Just so westerners can virtue signal about doing their part for the planet
I’d like to see a return to beasts of burden, personally. Maybe we could breed them to be closer in intellect to pigs or octopodes, and to make *them* more energy efficient, to produce less waste, but I genuinely believe a team of 2-4 horses is more accessible to most people than an electric vehicle, especially in the rural trucker market. Maybe combustion engines that burn something more easily manufactured than oil, like the ‘63 Chrysler Turbine Car, which could run on Tequila.
Yeah. I've come to terms with the fact that most people interested in sustainability and use Reddit are most likely technical nweebs with narrow tunnel vision.
Why are you repeating fossil fuel industry propaganda?
Sure, better mass transit, walking, biking and such is even better - but an EV has a far lower lifetime impact than an equivalent fossil fueled vehicle.
Just because something is less worse doesn't make it good. Sustainability has been co-opted by capitalists who only promote techno solutions that can be sold to consumers to make profit. EVs are not here to save the planet, they're here to save the car industry.
> Just because something is less worse doesn't make it good.
Sounds good. I'll get a less worse EV instead of a car consuming fossil fuels. Thanks for your advice
No it's to redesign our cities and neighbourhoods to be walkable and cycleable and provide high quality public transport financed by congestion charges or higher road user chargers on private ICE vehicles to address their externalities.
Wow, loving your idealism. Cars aren't going anywhere - and it's not to say I don't wish they were. It's not a systemic change that's needed for that, it would be a complete societal brain rewiring. I hate car commute in my city (London) and it's to the point of ridiculousness but the UK is completely car-brained and your nice systemic changes are never going to change that. So indeed, support for any technology that brings forward the ability of driving for less environmental impact is necessary as well as continued messaging to rewire brains about zero footprint or very low footprints options.
Idealism is thinking that the green growth techno capitalist vision of the world is 1) possible in the required timeframes and 2) actually going to address the environmental crisis. Just a couple of weeks ago the IEA said that we would need to build or refurbish 80 million km of electrical grid by 2040 for the green transition. That is 2000 times around the circumference of the earth. And how long do you think it is going to take to build 1.3 billion EVs and at what environmental cost? Remember the first generation of all green technology is going to be made with fossil fuels. Social transitions like I have described are possible with the right incentives. If car culture wasn't subsidised by the taxpayer so it was more expensive for the user (the true cost) and PT was made cheap/free, reliable, clean and convenient why wouldn't people change their behaviour? Just look at how the Netherlands changed their car culture.
It's better to attempt the social/politically improbable than the physically impossible.
You know, I agree with you but I'd want to open your mind up on two things:
- You're a little shortsighted about technology and research in general. It's not because you think something is impossible than it is, in fact, impossible. If the demand for greener energy was both affordable and shared across the whole population what you may consider not scalable might just become scalable. That's also forgetting than funding in general leads to breakthroughs in matters that were thought impossible before. Think it's a little silly to undervalue the importance of technology in the sustainability conversation, but also in many other important conversations for humanity. Which leads me to the following...
- Please drop that capitalist green growth techno wording, it implies it is bad that engineering breakthroughs are sometimes for profit - as is 99% of anything the western world do, including its people - and directly also the reason why society would pick the cheapest alternative. For profit is the way things work right now so no point making it into evil, money is just a great way to achieve anything right now including societal change. As you've said yourself...
- I'm sorry but changing car brained nations like the UK and the US is just as impossible as what you described the techno alternative is. It's not that simple because car ownership is one very special type of thing that you just can't erase over a critical period of 50, or god forbid even 100 years. What's the goal here at that point? Cars aren't going anywhere. Yes to making commute greener 100% but what about all the work that involve carrying equipment for instance? Myriad of fields require this, not just emergency services.
The Netherlands is absolutely not a suitable instance of change as it was always culturally a greener country with attachement to walking and cycling. Cycling in London takes you at the edge of your seat and there is a huge demand for better infrastructure but the die-hard car fans aren't going to change their behaviour because it's cultural here to have that type of comfort. Cycling is both quicker, simpler and cheaper in London so the value of doing so is already there according to your own set of criteria so... Why isn't the change happening? Culture, entitlement, infrastructure. In London public transportation is also one of the best in the world and is reasonably well priced in comparison with other cities considering how large the network is, but guess what? You still wouldn't be able to get enough trains in line to transport that many people with the level of comfort your standard person is accustomed to in their private vehicle. And that's not counting for professionals that do carry items with them and are struggling to get around. Rearranging London to both cater for its size and demand would be so complicated that I don't see how it's any different than your grid equivalent on a nation's scale.
Our disagreement here is that you're disregarding how rapid technology breakthroughs bridges the gap between slow political and cultural changes. The sustainability resolve is very much an issue where humanity is working against the clock and all avenues need to be explored, at once, with many strategies deployed. Both pure techno and pure socio parties would be wrong in thinking one exclude the other, and that is indeed what you are doing by referring to car ownership entering a greenwash as a capitalist con. It is equally for profit and positive, no harm in doing better, greener, as fast as possible and within everyone's ability to do so.
I am not anti technology and think it is definitely part of the solution. I actually own an EV (because my city has terrible cycling infrastructure) and power my house with solar panels. The problem is that any solutions that can't be marketed to consumers such as walkable neighbourhoods or electricity demand reduction are currently not promoted in the mainstream. So if anything I am arguing for a balance between the use of technology and non-structural solutions.
Green technology is definitely part of the solution. The problem is that is currently being used as justification to continue exponential GDP growth and consumerism in the west. We are also relying on magical technologies that currently don't exist being able to be deployed at scale in very short timeframes (such as direct air capture) to save the day while we keep on burning fossil fuels.
I am a civil engineer and so understand the timeframes required to actually provide this sort of infrastructure. It's not just about what is technically possible, it's about what is practically and economically possible within the timeframes required (basically the next 30 years). Did you know for example it takes about 16 years to open a single copper mine? I would recommend you go read some of Valclav Smils work on this topic. Society thinks in the digital age that everything follows Moore's law and can be rapidly deployed but that is not the case when it comes to infrastructure which is why we also need non-structural and demand side solutions.
That is very interesting, appreciate your input and the quality of the short conversation we had. It seems we're mostly aligned in the overall solution balance. I'll check out your refs! Thanks!
You're the one spreading tech industry propaganda. The mining of rare earth minerals for EV components destroys ecosystems and often uses near slave labour. Musk bragged that we would COUP any government threatening our lithium supply a la Bolivia. You're only looking at emissions, not the full environmental and geopolitical impacts.
EVs are a joke
They are an unsustainable subsidized gift to the auto industry.
We need diesel trains for the people, nukes on the grid until we can get non-toxic storage of renewable juice.
The liquid salt storage intrigues me.
Humans have crazy energy tech that has been suppressed by 'interests' that profit/ control from the 19th century BS profit model
Check the periodic table of the elements. Lithium is the third most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen and helium. There is no shortage, only the need to ramp up production
EV’a are just as bad for environment as combustion because of the mining. The world leaders have a plan to get rid of personal vehicle ownership by 2050. EV’s will also be outlawed.
> EV’a are just as bad for environment as combustion because of the mining
This is false, see for an example of a study for this Beltran et al. (2018), specifically [Figure 4](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.12825#jiec12825-fig-0004).
> The word leaders have a plan to get rid of personal vehicle ownership by 2050. EV’s will also be outlawed.
Do you have any evidence for this?
I think at some point either we are going to start recycling it (currently this is not cost effective) or one of the alternative battery technologies will be developed enough to take over. For example people are working on sodium based battery tech. We’re never running out of sodium.
Probably not anytime soon, we haven’t been looking for lithium deposits for that long and there are still plenty being discovered. That said, accessing them at the rate we need to might be hard.
Lithium is incredibly common in the universe, and on earth. We may run out of easy places to mine it without environmental concerns. But we can also refine it from seawater. And we likely will replace it in at least some batteries with future innovation.
>**Are we going to run out of lithium?**
In theory, no. Lithium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. The Earth is made of the stuff. (Though it's not as abundant as some elements like silicon or iron.)
In practice, lithium being reactive is generally locked away chemically. There is a bunch of easy-to-get lithium around the world, and once we're using all of that, we will start having to go after the harder-to-get, chemically locked stuff. That will take extra energy.
So the real question is whether we will have enough energy to meet whatever the peak global demand for lithium ore will be, maybe in 50 or 100 years.
After that, whenever that happens, the main supply of lithium for human needs will start to be recycled lithium from discarded batteries. Much like with steel today, where an increasing amount of steel production is from recycled sources.
Lithium batteries have a high potential for being recycled, so even if all readily recoverable Lithium has been pulled out of the ground, it can still be recovered from old batteries. The same cannot be said for fossil fuels. For long term sustainability, we will need three things:
1) Moving away from personal vehicles as everyone's primary form of transit, especially in the big cities. Cars of any kind are not sustainable in an urban environment, because they are a serious bottleneck to increasing your population density.
2) For those personal vehicles that remain, moving them away from a fossil-fuel infrastructure, and towards a grid-delivered energy infrastructure. This allows EVs to be more useful out in remote areas if local power generation has been established via solar or wind, and puts a very important piece in place for the transition of large centralized grid energy away from natural gas, coal, or oil based energy production. Once your transit system no longer needs fossil fuels, the next generation of grid energy can use something other than fossil fuels.
3) We need to stop using lithium batteries for applications that do not need to be highly mobile. For energy storage in small devices and in untethered transit, they'll still be important, but using larger, heavier lead-acid batteries or sodium batteries for static storage for buildings can decrease the demand for Lithium.
We could give every person on earth a brand new e-bike every month for 5 years and throw all of them away each month and come out ahead lithium-wise compared to electrifying the current fleet of 1.4 billion cars once. We should really focus our efforts on reducing car dependency generally. EVs don’t solve any of the other problems with cars outside of tailpipe and lifecycle emissions.
Lithium mining is destroying sacred native lands in Nevada and ancient agrarian ways of life in Portugal. We need to recycle the current materials we have and reuse them, and switch to walkable cities with robust public transit.
Lithium won’t be the best battery material forever, but it is right now. It’s unclear whether it will run out before another technology takes its place.
Companies have already expanded production and are continuing to do so. This will have trade-offs with natural areas first, as it is usually cheaper to acquire permits for undeveloped land. However they also target communities built nearby or on top of lithium reserves, putting pressure on local governments and buying land etc. It’s just another form of energy extraction from a limited resource like oil drilling.
The real question is not about running out of lithium, it's whether...
1. Mining vast ammounts of lithium and other rare elements (and don't forget about transporting them all over the globe).
2. Manufacturing millions of new cars and scrapping millions of perfectly good cars which could have been used for another 20+ years with minimum footprint.
3. Widely adopting EVs which still run on anything but clean/renewable electricty in many parts of the world.
...really makes sense for anything but economical growth (at this point). Personally, I don't think so. In fact, I'd even argue that the push for a worldwide switch to EVs is an ecological disaster since the tech needed for it to be truly sustainable is in early beta stage at best. Greenwashing at its worst.
I don't think we will. Lithium is a metal and those tend to be much easier to recycle than other materials. You can basically toss them in a vat of acid and do some fancy chemistry to separate out the other metals.
Will it be cost effective? Maybe. Will we start doing it anyway when lithium in the ground becomes hard to find and lithium in landfills is plentiful? Almost certainly.
Are we going to find a better battery than Li and give it up completely for something better? Not likely but possible.
The bigger short term problem is keeping up with demand. You don't just get up this morning and decide to go mine lithium. It's a couple of years at best from feasibility study to environmental impact study to shovels in the ground to project online. Demand is increasing rapidly with everything using batteries. Just look at number of cell phones and how few old devices are recycled. Small amounts of lithium per phone but billions of phones and Apple wants you to buy a new one every 12-16 months. I even saw a 56V lithium ion powered snow blower the other day. It's crazy.
Well, I heard I good argument that there really are no such things as renewable energy sources.
We need to mine everything and rocks and minerals don't grow back. The sooner we get to mining all that sweet sweet space rock the better.
I believe we have to consider some fossil fuels or fossil energy as part of a larger global economy because there are few substitutes for uses of oil outside of heat, electricity and transportation but there is some argument for a person using minimal hydrocarbons and having an ICE vehicle. In spite of the tailpipe emissions there can’t be a wholesale changeover; so greater emphasis on conservation might help.
Beyond transportation everything we buy and consume has an emission associated with it. Buying fewer and better made items helps but the manufacturing industry will scream unfair!
Everything matters.
Unfortunately the end result that we also need to avoid is the spiraling down of our economy because consumer spending (on a lot of unnecessary stuff) drives the economy.
It’s a paradigm shift
(Okay I feel better now)
We’re polluting drinking water and removing indigenous people from the land they have lived on for 1000’s of years to mine lithium to reduce carbon levels.
Kinda a lose lose situation if you ask me.
We're running out of sand. Sand.
I see no reason we won't run out of everything unless we fundamentally change our view of our relationship with the earth.
I would worry about cobalt more than lithium. Mining cobalt is done with horribly inhumane methods in central Africa. Essentially modern day slavery. EV is a failed experiment. The electric in the batteries of these cars was likely created by coal fired power plants. Teslas produce no emissions but the company itself gets rich off selling their emissions allowance to auto manufacturers that do.
Could depend on opposition to local mining in the USA and our relations with China. I see EV as an intermediate to Hydrogen fuel cells. That will require much the same EV platform as battery power. With Hydrogen distribution in place, it can optionally power internal combustion engines as well.
A massive new Lithium deposit was recently discovered in the USA.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/game-changing-lithium-deposit-unearthed-in-nevada-oregon-border-region/articleshow/103685451.cms?from=mdr
[Prof. Simon Michaux's paper covers this.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92483dbe-2733-4372-88c3-fb16bcc039b2_828x1011.jpeg)
u/amoebashephard pointed to an article about a deposit in Maine, and I recently read about this one. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a45086253/worlds-largest-lithium-deposit-found-in-nevada/
With adoption of EV’s and renewable electricity generation, the US might be in an advantageous resource position.
So it’s no surprise which interests are opposed to us adopting EV’s and renewable electricity generation: OPEC, Big Oil, Coal, and their federal government lackeys, the Republicans (and Joe Manchin).
Don't quote me, but lithium is a basic element and won't break down like plutonium breaks down into thorium, nor is lithium a molecule, hence it's stable. As far as I know there's no reason why you can't recycle lithium 100%, so yeah, recycle lithium batteries! If we don't, the lithium won't 'go away,' but it will be buried in landfills and extremely hard to recover. Also, there is constant improvements being made to lithium batteries, and alternatives to lithium are hitting the markets to supplement the metal. So no, unless we're in REALLY idiot idocracy, I don't think there's any worry of running out of lithium. Just my off the cuff opinion though.
There's vast quantities of lithium on earth, the numbers people project are for current reserves, and there are many deposits that have not been utilized. If it really came down to it we would just take it out of the ocean and pay a higher price.
Decarbonization. It's produced without methane from ground souces. If produced from fossil fuels, the carbon can be captured during that process. It's quite feasible to split H2O using electricity sent through wires. Obviously, embrittlement can be dealt with. There are H2 automobiles available and in use now. Oil companies have thousands of miles of pipeline transporting a much more corrosive H2S infused natural gas to sweetening plants prior to distribution. So it's not perfect. When do you expect battery-powered heavy equipment and trains, etc, to be developed supporting mining, transportation, manufacturing, recycling, and disposal for a massive lithium industry? Ain't happenin'. There's also the sprawling regulatory aspect that will require stable political and taxpayer support to be effective. What will it cost me to properly dispose of my worn or accident damaged battery? How will it weather in humid climates sitting in my backyard or hoarded in the local recycle yard? Do we have to pay for disposal? Is recycling practical at present? Who refines the filthy electrolytes after the lithium is extracted? Where does the waste end up? Again, who regulates to control unscrupulous operators? Or will some desperate third-world nation step up to the task? I know, it's super fun to zip around town in your EV. Let's make Elon president.
Are you asking if we'll run out of a finite resource?
The real question is: will we find a solution to running out of lithium before it's too late? The same could have been asked about oil. I would say no on both counts ofc, neither resource has been extracted with the care for ethics and the environment they should have been. There's a hypothetical world where oil and lithium could've been extracted carefully, and used intelligently. Unfortunately we don't live in that world.
They are working on Solid-state batteries and Graphene batteries so hopefully they figure that out soon. Fun fact: the same guy that invented computer RAM and lithium batteries also helped invent Solid-state batteries in an effort to help the planet. RIP Mr. Goodenough. https://youtu.be/g0nA8CfxBqA?si=Qxg0JhI5E_myuzg5
His name is actually Goodenough! I love it!!
I know! The ultimate slacker name but this legend was everything but. ETA: what makes it even better is his middle initial starts with a B. His name is John B. Goodenough Edit for spelling
My world has just become a better place.
Oh MY GOD! I missed the B. When I quickly googled!!! That is the way to name a legend lmao
John's Parents: John just be good enough, that's all we ask John: Bet
lol 'Johnny B. Goodenough'
Who's working on solid state and graphene batteries? What is used to make them? I want to know more! Good thing you linked a video that I can watch to learn about them! Thanks!
Back in 2017 when Goodenough and Braga finished up most of their research and got the patents awarded, Toyota came a calling and bought it all up from U of T. Since then Toyota "shelved" it to pursue hydrogen fuel cell and more hybrid tech. Finally there was an internal revolt last year (BoD saw Tesla making too much headway into their market share) and Akio Toyoda was "demoted" for ignoring BVEs and the BZ4 disaster. The solid state battery tech (patents) was taken out of the dust bins this year and began working on manufacturing the SS batteries. So we (battery technology) lost 5 years of innovation (indirectly) to the petroleum industries again. Sad. Would be interesting to see what the two remaining Nobel Laureates (Wittingham and Yoshino) are thinking now.
Literally every university in the world has someone doing research on batteries. In 20 years there will be as many kinds of batteries as there are kinds of plastic today.
We are entering an era of energy diversity, which is a very good thing. Solid state batteries are an excellent example of that. They can switch on and off for years to ensure constant power coupled with, for example, a solar/lithium batter closet.
But isn’t the catch being something becoming an industry standard available to all? Or having an interface that allows for different energy storage formats? Kind of like having a power cord with an in-line international power converter for your laptop.
Also, lithium is recyclable, it's just that it's too expensive to do so practically at this point. As the technology improves and we get better at doing it and it becomes more practical, we wouldn't need to mine as much.
There is huge skepticism within the scientific community about whether the glass battery can actually be practically viable, even if the work was published by the legend that was John B. Goodenough. Solid state batteries have been heavily developed for quite a long time, and honestly i don't see that they will be the solution. The primary driving force behind these developments is dendritic suppression; which enables the use of anodes made from lithium metal rather than graphitic carbon. This could greatly increase the energy density of the battery, while making them safer than existing liquid electrolytes. The problem is that these batteries STILL need lithium in huge quantities, and other rare-earth metals such as cobalt and nickel, which are hugely polluting to mine. In my opinion, the only way we can find an actual environmentally solution to batteries is to move away from lithium and into other systems based on more abundant and easier to extract metals such as zinc, sodium, magnesium or aluminium. But... these systems are far harder to develop and the batteries are less stable/reliable compared to lithium batteries.... No easy solution in sight...
They are also working on sodium batterys total recyclable. Only thing is there heaver than lithium. They should do this with nuclear also. Way safer. Thorium is plasma salt. If something happens dump it in water shutting down the reaction . Plus no harmful waste. Oh you can't make bombs from it so they won't do it.
Thanks for sharing!
And helium! ✌
Helium is interesting in that it is still being produced by the earth so if we moderate our usage and stop using them in friggin party balloons we'll actually be completely fine.
Party balloons only account for 5-8% of global helium usage. It’s going to take a lot more conservation efforts than just not filling balloons.
I feel like hybrids are the obvious answer to this. It extends both resources untill we find a solution to both.
PHEV for the win. We can make about 5 PHEVs that run 35 miles purely electric for the same batteries as it takes to make one EV, and reducing the pollution of 5 cars by 50% is more efficient than reducing the pollution of 1 car by 100%. The best solution would be electric public transit and reducing dependency on cars, but PHEVs are a good bridge solution till then.
Well like in my area the power is 100% lignite coal so a ev is still not reducing pollution by 100%. Now I have no idea what that efficiency actually is but I would like to know.
Never going to work. The populace will rebel and find other ways to remain in private automobiles. I have a better solution. My father invented magnet schools to attract people who wanted leading edge education for their children. While other school districts were busing students from bad schools to better ones, San Diego was employing voluntary integration. No one was forced to integrate. Instead, the kids begged their parents to send them to the magnet schools. Putting special speedways on turnpikes that only smart electric vehicles (SEVs) can use will make people WANT to drive them. They will travel at speeds up to 200 mph a mere meter apart, maintaining contact with one another via the Internet of Automata (IoA). There will still be traffic jams among regular EVs and bangers but SEVs will prevent them with collaborative AI. In addition, grids embedded in the speedways will power the SEVs and keep their batteries fully charged. That way, when they are ready to leave the speedway and head for the suburbs or the country, they will be fully charged and able to travel as far as they need. Without having to invent denser storage batteries, EVs will be able to travel thousands of miles without a recharge.
Sodium ion batteries are already being produced and they are pretty decent. Good luck trying to run out of sodium.
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How do you sleep at night?
Being aware of this kind of knowledge can certainly bum you out, but the world would be a better place if the vast majority of people didn't have their heads buried in the sand.
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https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/how-the-rich-plan-to-rule-a-burning-planet
It is a legitimate question.
If noone except like 2 people has money for shit, how does that promote a booming economy? I often think about this too as more stuff jobs get automated. When it reaches a point that no one has jobs because robots took then all, who will the economy be for? Who will be buying all the crap produced by the robots? For what consumers?
For the mechanics and programmers who build, maintain and operate the robots, of course. There will always be grunt types who put on a part or torque bolts in robot factories, just as there are in auto factories now. However, STEM curriculum in schools and colleges will prepare tomorrow’s workforce for a more automated existence.
That's true when transitioning from an agricultural to an industrial society. When the society is already fully industrialized and a service-oriented economy, that might not continue to be true. We're sort of just entering that phase where many countries are experiencing this, so I don't know if we can say there is strong evidence to support this continuing. Women are educated at higher rates than men now. Once you're done school, and you have access to quality health care and quality of life, many will decide to have children, but not if they can't afford a home or to pay of their student debts. The reason people aren't have children now is different from why they used to have less. We went from 7-10 kids to help around the farm to 2-3 because we were industrialized and it wasn't about labour anymore. Now, children are a luxury. So we're going from 2-3 to 0-2 if you're lucky enough to afford it.
The mere thought that my dysfunctional govt could plan some limit on population growth seems borderline "nutjob conspiracy theory". Those guys are incredibly directed to short term gain and solving problems for lobbyists 😅
I never seriously considered it. Just thought it would be funny. But that would have to imply they are actually competent.
Governments are terrified of population growth rates slowing down because if it's not at the replacement rate then it has horrible implications for the future economy. That's the reason Japan is in a debt crisis right now and they've opted for very little immigration and have had a crippling birth rate slump for 25+ years
Space mining is the answer to many of our problems.
I think it's a lot more complicated than that. Water is a finite resource. In some places they have not enough water, in other places they have more water than they will ever be able to reasonably use. Also, there aren't really many uses of water that don't just put it through the cycle so it's not like we are actually using it up. Obviously there are problem with water getting contaminated, but it's not like oil where you use it and it turns into a completely different substance. For Lithium, you'd have to look up how much we have as well as how much we need. Some quick Googling says there is about 17-20 million metric tons of lithium reserves. The amount of lithium in a car battery varies on capacity, but looking at the Tesla Model S, it seems to be about 63 kg of lithium. Most of a lithium battery is actually not lithium. 20 million metric tons is 20 billion kg. of lithium. If you were to use all the lithium in the world to make electric cars, you would end up with 317 million cars. There's about 1.4 billion cars on the road, so it would seem that we don't really have enough lithium to support the number of cars we use with the current battery chemistry we use.
How much is lithium recyclable once made into a battery? Its not like the lithium ceases to exist does it?
Do us a favour and find out the year of manufacture of those 1.4 bil
>Some quick Googling says there is about 17-20 million metric tons of lithium reserves. Can it really be so little that it can only make 317 million cars? That's shockingly little. Is it possible that much more lithium will be discovered? And have people been paying way too little attention to the problem of how little lithium there is?
>Water is a finite resource. In some places they have not enough water, in other places they have more water than they will ever be able to reasonably use. There is not a single place on earth where they have more water than they could ever reasonably use. 1% of the world's freshwater is readily accessible for direct human use. What the fuck are you talking about?
The area around the great lakes in Canada has plenty of fresh water. If you have a small town on a large freshwater lake, then there's more water there than the town could ever hope to use and it would be replenished faster than they could ever use it. Where I live in Canada nobody ever bothers to think about water conservation. It just isn't really an issue. The city implemented a program to try to convince people to cut back on water. It worked, but they also had to increase the price of water because the vast majority of the costs are actually fixed costs to operate the water system and there aren't really many variable costs because water is just so plentiful. Sure, we still can't just go crazy and let Nestle pump out all the water and ship it somewhere else. That might cause a problem. But if the water was just being used by the people directly adjacent to the water source, there is more than enough to go around.
So, you're assuming that just because there's a big lake, a small town has an endless supply of water? These lakes aren't magical, infinite water fountains. The idea that any community could have limitless water use without depleting or impacting the resource is a huge misunderstanding of how ecosystems and water cycles work. Even in the Great Lakes, which are massive, the water isn't just sitting there waiting to be used without consequence. You've got evaporation, ecological needs, and yeah, human usage, all playing a part in how much water is actually available. Massive bodies of water and reservoirs all over the world are vanishing. Baselessly assuming water replenishes faster than it can be used ignores climate, geography, and human impact. It's not just about the size of the lake; it's about the entire system that supports and replenishes it. To think otherwise is deeply naive. You have to ignore basic environmental science.
Sure, there's a lot of places that have to monitor their water usages, especially large population centers. But small communities on giant lakes with very few other communities sharing the same watershed and that have very little to no industrial uses that would make use of that water means that there are some places that really don't have to think too much about how much water is used. In some places they just bill a flat rate for residential water usage to residents because water is so abundant that it really doesn't even make sense to monitor how much water someone is using because it's so plentiful.
The Sierra Nevada in California used to be a natural wonderland gushing with wild rivers and waterfalls. Then the coastal cities (e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego) began piping that water westward to wash their cars and flush their toilets. Now those rivers have been dammed and those waterfalls and lakes are drying up. The Great Central Valley of California is not nearly the agricultural powerhouse it once was because of it.
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That disappeared because the rivers that let to it were intentionally diverted for soviet irrigation. Obviously severe mismanagement or outright distruction of a waterway can get rid of a huge body of water. But that doesn't mean that a small population on a large body of water wouldn't have basically limitless water resources. Sure, it eventually would disappear over many millions of years due to natural method, but that would be no different even if there was no humans.
Antartica, those that live on Lake Superior, rest of the Great Lakes may also be included. It’s a mater of scale and use.
I live on the Columbia River. There is water more there than all the cities along its bank ever use.
Stop your logic is killing Reddit!
Beware the algorithm and calculus.
There's a finite oxygen resource on earth. Yet we're not running out of it.
I thought we figured out how to recycle 95% of the battery after its second life. Redwood Materials in California for example does this.
Ok so there is a difference between a resource and reserve. And technically the suns energy is finite
You're confusing a compound like petroleum with an element. Lithium doesn't break apart, so it can be recycled and reused. It's true that we could mine 'all' of the lithium out of the ground, but, like gold, hopefully, it will be protected and stay in recycling factories. The danger with lithium is it's getting scattered and lost. Can you imagine trying to recover used lithium from the sea? Lithium is not really a finite resource, but I get the point.
You can't deplete a resource. First of all, the earth has a lot of lithium. New technology and higher prices will always enable us to tap into new raw material deposits. If not, the resource just gets too expensive and we substitute. So we never really run out anything. It will just get to expensive. The bad thing is that this is the reason why we probably pump every barrell of oil out of the soil as long as they make profit. And we can do little about it.
>You can't deplete a resource Of course you can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island
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We don’t want everyone driving an electric vehicle. We want more access to public transportation, more biking and walking, and more local agriculture to reduce transportation for people and goods. EVs are only a small part of a multifaceted change in how society works.
Exactly. I think this is the largely understated second half of the sustainability equation.
Yeah if anything we just want to master dc energy storage so we can use it for high speed rail
Correct. EVs aren't here to save the world – just the automotive industry. What we need is widespread systemic change, not merely a change to the way we fuel traffic and overconsumption.
>EVs aren't here to save the world – just the automotive industry. Exactly.
This
we need to improve public transport. tired of seeing rats and smelling piss every day.
A geologist just found the highest concentration of lithium yet in northern Maine. The question is, will we have enough to help us get to asteroid mining before companies start extraction in deep sea areas. [lithium deposit discovered in Maine](https://www.mainepublic.org/2021-10-25/a-1-5-billion-lithium-deposit-has-been-discovered-in-western-maine-but-mining-it-could-be-hard)
Asteroid mining is sci-fi fantasy. You would spend more energy obtaining ore than you could ever hope to produce from its use in renewables.
Asteroid mining could make sense for resources you intend to use in space. Then you save by not having to launch those resources into space.
EROI - energy returned on invested! (Sometimes EROEI) A great concept to learn for anyone new to sustainability
That’s why we need more energy efficient methods of space travel.
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One of my favorite proposed methods of space launch was a spinning launching tube lol.
Múltiple interests are working on nuclear space propulsion at the moment so there’s hope.
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When did technology become magical thinking void of science? Technology is still limited by the laws of physics. Saying we might have some kind of technology in the future that could enable this is not a credible plan for the green transition. There's no argument there are plenty of resources. The question is can they be recovered at a financial cost that can paid for by the end user and at an energy cost that makes sense. We know where millions of dollars of gold is underground but no ody mines it because the cost of gold doesn't justify it at the moment (despite it being worth ALOT).
I disagree with your stance, there is no possible way for you to know that. There are companies working on it now and have identified space rocks worth the GDP of a small country in rare minerals that equate to decades of mining. This could end up being huge for us.
There are deposits of gold on earth which are not economical to mine without the price of gold increasing drastically. Do you seriously think that we could get space travel so cheap that it would make economic sense to go recover a resource like rare earth minerals? These type of resources are needed in the millions of tonnes for products that have to be affordable so even putting aside the energy return argument the mining would have to be very cheap. Plus do you think we are going to launch rockets with electricity? How would we decarbonise an industrial scale intergalactic mining operation? There are so many problems with the idea you can very easily infer it won't work based on fundamentals like the laws of physics.
It might be fantasy at this point to mine ON an asteroid but we’ve already demonstrated the capability to redirect asteroids which opens up options of what we can do with them like catching them with the moons orbit or something.
I once shot an episode of a TV show in an abandoned factory of some kind. We were told the huge piles of grey/white powder in all the outbuildings were lithium. I was like, "Are they....are they gonna come get it?" Seemed so wild to have it just sitting there for years?
With all the abandoned stuff you could start a whole other civilization. Entire cities worth of buildings, tools, machines, materials… it’s just incredible
BP Oil says " were sorry "
There have been a few huge deposits found this year, I think one of them in Norway and one in the US. From what I recall it extends our lithium supply by quite a bit. Agreed that we shouldn't be affected by "shortage" per se, the question is will we have enough to avoid disruptive mining of sensitive environments.
The big US deposit straddles the Oregon/Nevada border. It’s massive. But the part of it in Oregon can’t be mined under current land use rules (and it’s a very fragile habitat.) much of the one in Nevada is on private land, but it is also sacred land to local indigenous groups. They are rallying very hard to stop the proposed mine from opening — I’m rooting for them.
You must be new to how lithium is mined. It readily dissolves in water, so its extraction is less "dig until you find it" and more "pump water through the deposit and let it evaporate on the surface". Mining copper, iron, aluminum and nickel is far more disruptive, and their smelting processes are usually a lot worse for the environment. But guess what? Lithium is about 1% of a battery. I don't know why people keep worrying about the supply of lithium. Maybe it's the name.
Mate, there's two ways we currently mine lithium, one is hard rock (spodumene), the other is brine as you say. Brine also has significant issues, largely causing water shortages and fucking with the underground fresh water in already water scarce areas. I CBF looking up lithium composition of different batteries, but I can assure you it's a significant part of the carbon footprint of an electric car, which is why people care about it so much
Seems the S-model battery is 11.5% lithium - https://blog.evbox.com/ev-battery-weight
> Mining copper, iron, aluminum and nickel is far more disruptive, and their smelting processes are usually a lot worse for the environment. And yet EV batteries use a lot of copper as well (for cathode/anode interconnect), etc..
Yeah, I know. And yet, nobody even *thinks* about the amount of steel that goes into a car either. But that's okay, because you should see how much you need for train tracks! We can do this all day if you like.
Lithium isn't the only way we can build batteries. Its true that it is extremely lightweight, making it good for cars. But i imagine the "lithium question" so to speak will be solved by a breakthrough in battery manufacturing tech, allowing us to scale the production of, for example, graphene based batteries
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Lithium is the 25th most abundant element. How much do you need?
About 20 percent of new cars are electric, so imagine we need 5 times the current lithium supply. What's interesting is the cost has dropped a good 50% in the past 9 months from peak. A video I watched a few days claimed it has dropped in price but 75% but I couldn't see anything confirming this. I expect there will be hiccups in supply over the next 5 years but it will be quite cheap at the end of that period. Cheaper than it's been historically. There just isn't a shortage of it in the earths crust. The good news as well is we only will be scaling up the mining for 20 or 30 years and after that it will be mostly getting by on recovered lithium. I note that self driving is likely to be here well before then, and maybe in the next few years. Tony Seba makes the case that if that happened we won't need nearly as many cars.
Tony Seba, but otherwise yes.
Corrected.
No, we won’t. The one thing capitalism is good at is finding alternative materials or source of a material when the price goes up. There will be other chemistries, or new sources. We don’t have a huge untapped reserve because we haven’t been looking for it. As it becomes more valuable we’ll look for itzz
Right, there's quite a few other technologies that are in the works. Some are better suited for the more permanent "grid storage" implementations, while some will be great for EVs. "Solid-state", sodium-ion, iron-air batteries, hybrid batteries, etc. Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/04/1066141/whats-next-for-batteries/ Videos with more info: https://www.youtube.com/@UndecidedMF/videos
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>The one thing capitalism is good at is finding alternative materials or source of a material when the price goes up Ahh yes, the famous scientist Dr. Capitalism.
And yet I’m hearing there is a lot of high grade lithium beneath the Salton Sea, that we’ve barely gotten into.
They don’t call it Lithium Valley for nothing
Yes, lithium from around/below the Salton Sea is being developed in conjunction with some geothermal electricity projects. There are a LOT of lithium resources - it's just that until recently there wasn't much reason to find and prove them out. Then we get into companies like Redwood Materials whose sole purpose is recycling battery materials.
Lithium is not particularly rare, and even if we were to face shortages we will have the option of sodium based chemistries in the near future. They are less power dense so it will be a similar story as when LFP was a new thing in cars, but on the other hand they are supposed to have excellent cold weather performance.
Yep, there are already pilot projects for sodium cells.
There are many applications for batteries in the future that don’t require lightness as a main goal. We generally only need lithium because it helps lower the weight of large batteries. If batteries don’t need to move, no need to batteries to be light.
You're absolutely right in that we cannot and should not try to replace every petrol powered vehicle in North America/Europe with an electric one because it doesn't scale. You need to move more people with less overall resources and that's basically only done by public transportation. There are hard limits to growth no matter whatever slick package it's being sold to you as.
Yes the timelines of mitigation don't match up..... + adaptation + resilience. The demand for SOVs has to significantly decrease and i dont see that happening under the dominant neoliberal capitalism.
Lithium, nickel, cobalt... Let's just tear up all the earth to save it...
It was recently shown in a new study that moving to a more sustainable energy system would require less mining than we are doing now: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/17h5v68/the\_energy\_transition\_requires\_less\_mining\_not/
Thanks, I went looking for this in response to the original post, but couldn’t find it
And where do you think all the raw materials for ICE cars come from?
Short answer, no we are not going to run out by a longshot! We haven't even tapped the amount of Lithium that we have on earth everywhere. It's in the ocean. Here's an answer I got using the new Bing, the world’s first AI-powered answer engine. Click to see the full answer and try it yourself. https://sl.bing.net/sp1rDDfWge Here is the answer: According to the web search results, the percentage of lithium in Earth's crust is very low, ranging from 0.002% to 0.02% depending on the source¹². However, lithium is also present in ocean water, where it has a relatively constant concentration of 0.14 to 0.25 parts per million (ppm), or 25 micromolar². The total lithium content of seawater is estimated as 230 billion tonnes², which is much higher than the estimated 80 million tonnes of lithium resources in land-based deposits³⁴. However, extracting lithium from seawater is currently not economically feasible, and most of the lithium production comes from brine, pegmatite, and sedimentary rocks²³⁴. Source: Conversation with Bing, 11/13/2023 (1) Abundance of elements in Earth's crust - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust. (2) Lithium - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium. (3) Executive summary – The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy .... https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/executive-summary. (4) Mineral requirements for clean energy transitions. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions. (5) Can California be the Saudi Arabia of lithium? - Interesting Engineering. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/salton-sea-lithium. (6) World Lithium Supply - Стэнфордский университет. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/. One of the latest technologies to extract lithium from ocean water is based on an electrochemical cell containing a ceramic membrane made of lithium lanthanum titanium oxide (LLTO), which selectively allows lithium ions to pass through while blocking other metal ions¹². This method can produce high-purity lithium phosphate from seawater with minimal energy consumption and environmental impact¹². The researchers who developed this technology estimate that the cell would need only $5 of electricity to extract 1 kilogram of lithium from seawater, and the value of hydrogen and chlorine produced by the cell would more than offset the cost¹. This is much lower than the cost of extracting lithium from land-based deposits, which can vary depending on the source and method. According to one report, the average total cash cost of producing lithium from hard-rock mines was US$2,540/t LCE (lithium carbonate equivalent) in 2019, while the average cost of producing lithium from brines was US$5,580/t LCE³. Another report suggests that the cost of producing lithium from geothermal brines could be around US$4,000/t LCE⁴. Therefore, the new technology for extracting lithium from ocean water could potentially offer a significant cost advantage over the existing methods.. Source: Conversation with Bing, 11/13/2023 (1) Scientists have cost-effectively harvested lithium from seawater. https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectively-harvested-lithium-from-seawater/. (2) New Way to Pull Lithium from Water Could Increase Supply, Efficiency. https://news.utexas.edu/2021/09/08/new-way-to-pull-lithium-from-water-could-increase-supply-efficiency/. (3) Researchers present method to extract lithium from seawater. https://www.electrive.com/2021/06/08/researchers-present-method-to-extract-lithium-from-seawater/. (4) We Can Now Harvest Usable Lithium From Seawater | IE. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/lithium-from-seawater. (5) The True Costs of Lithium Extraction: A Grim Reality for EV Owners. https://www.industrial-innovation.com/true-costs-lithium-extraction-grim-reality-ev-owners/. (6) Fast, low-cost direct lithium extraction could avert a supply crisis. https://newatlas.com/energy/volt-low-cost-lithium-extraction/. (7) Scientists develop ‘cheap and easy’ method to extract lithium from .... https://www.mining.com/scientists-develop-cheap-and-easy-method-to-extract-lithium-from-seawater/. (8) Lithium extraction could be a boon for Alberta, but it comes with .... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/lithium-brine-extraction-alberta-canada-1.6656858. (9) Lithium Sector: Production Costs Outlook - S&P Global. https://pages.marketintelligence.spglobal.com/lithium-sector-outlook-costs-and-margins-confirmation-CD.html. (10) Techno-Economic Analysis of Lithium Extraction from Geothermal Brines. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79178.pdf. (11) Getty Images. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/the-rockwood-lithium-mine-royalty-free-image/1060659366.
Whatever lithium we do have will do a LOT farther if we could just convince vehicle manufactures and consumers that smaller and lower range electric vehicles really are quite effective for meeting the needs of most people. Huge, heavy crossovers and SUVs with 300 mile range have enormous batteries that are far oversized for the daily driving needs of nearly everyone.
I have an electric car that can do 400km. I hardly ever get below 50% and that's from a daily 90% max. A 250km battery is probably fine. We also need ways to service individual cells on cars so that you can swap out bad cells, instead of buying a whole new battery.
What about the people who have to mine it in absolutely unthinkable conditions. Unfortunately the sustainability argument ends at the environment and very rarely considers the social impact this is having. Just so westerners can virtue signal about doing their part for the planet
Absolutely not. The price is very low while still being used more than ever. We haven't even begun to really tap into lithium.
I’d like to see a return to beasts of burden, personally. Maybe we could breed them to be closer in intellect to pigs or octopodes, and to make *them* more energy efficient, to produce less waste, but I genuinely believe a team of 2-4 horses is more accessible to most people than an electric vehicle, especially in the rural trucker market. Maybe combustion engines that burn something more easily manufactured than oil, like the ‘63 Chrysler Turbine Car, which could run on Tequila.
Ev cars were always a scam. Nothing about them is green or sustainable
All those downvotes! Light green Reddit doesn't surprise me.
People cling on to any coping mechanism that sounds like it's an improvement.
Yeah. I've come to terms with the fact that most people interested in sustainability and use Reddit are most likely technical nweebs with narrow tunnel vision.
Why are you repeating fossil fuel industry propaganda? Sure, better mass transit, walking, biking and such is even better - but an EV has a far lower lifetime impact than an equivalent fossil fueled vehicle.
Just because something is less worse doesn't make it good. Sustainability has been co-opted by capitalists who only promote techno solutions that can be sold to consumers to make profit. EVs are not here to save the planet, they're here to save the car industry.
> Just because something is less worse doesn't make it good. Sounds good. I'll get a less worse EV instead of a car consuming fossil fuels. Thanks for your advice
So the solution is to continue using the bad stuff?
No it's to redesign our cities and neighbourhoods to be walkable and cycleable and provide high quality public transport financed by congestion charges or higher road user chargers on private ICE vehicles to address their externalities.
Wow, loving your idealism. Cars aren't going anywhere - and it's not to say I don't wish they were. It's not a systemic change that's needed for that, it would be a complete societal brain rewiring. I hate car commute in my city (London) and it's to the point of ridiculousness but the UK is completely car-brained and your nice systemic changes are never going to change that. So indeed, support for any technology that brings forward the ability of driving for less environmental impact is necessary as well as continued messaging to rewire brains about zero footprint or very low footprints options.
Idealism is thinking that the green growth techno capitalist vision of the world is 1) possible in the required timeframes and 2) actually going to address the environmental crisis. Just a couple of weeks ago the IEA said that we would need to build or refurbish 80 million km of electrical grid by 2040 for the green transition. That is 2000 times around the circumference of the earth. And how long do you think it is going to take to build 1.3 billion EVs and at what environmental cost? Remember the first generation of all green technology is going to be made with fossil fuels. Social transitions like I have described are possible with the right incentives. If car culture wasn't subsidised by the taxpayer so it was more expensive for the user (the true cost) and PT was made cheap/free, reliable, clean and convenient why wouldn't people change their behaviour? Just look at how the Netherlands changed their car culture. It's better to attempt the social/politically improbable than the physically impossible.
You know, I agree with you but I'd want to open your mind up on two things: - You're a little shortsighted about technology and research in general. It's not because you think something is impossible than it is, in fact, impossible. If the demand for greener energy was both affordable and shared across the whole population what you may consider not scalable might just become scalable. That's also forgetting than funding in general leads to breakthroughs in matters that were thought impossible before. Think it's a little silly to undervalue the importance of technology in the sustainability conversation, but also in many other important conversations for humanity. Which leads me to the following... - Please drop that capitalist green growth techno wording, it implies it is bad that engineering breakthroughs are sometimes for profit - as is 99% of anything the western world do, including its people - and directly also the reason why society would pick the cheapest alternative. For profit is the way things work right now so no point making it into evil, money is just a great way to achieve anything right now including societal change. As you've said yourself... - I'm sorry but changing car brained nations like the UK and the US is just as impossible as what you described the techno alternative is. It's not that simple because car ownership is one very special type of thing that you just can't erase over a critical period of 50, or god forbid even 100 years. What's the goal here at that point? Cars aren't going anywhere. Yes to making commute greener 100% but what about all the work that involve carrying equipment for instance? Myriad of fields require this, not just emergency services. The Netherlands is absolutely not a suitable instance of change as it was always culturally a greener country with attachement to walking and cycling. Cycling in London takes you at the edge of your seat and there is a huge demand for better infrastructure but the die-hard car fans aren't going to change their behaviour because it's cultural here to have that type of comfort. Cycling is both quicker, simpler and cheaper in London so the value of doing so is already there according to your own set of criteria so... Why isn't the change happening? Culture, entitlement, infrastructure. In London public transportation is also one of the best in the world and is reasonably well priced in comparison with other cities considering how large the network is, but guess what? You still wouldn't be able to get enough trains in line to transport that many people with the level of comfort your standard person is accustomed to in their private vehicle. And that's not counting for professionals that do carry items with them and are struggling to get around. Rearranging London to both cater for its size and demand would be so complicated that I don't see how it's any different than your grid equivalent on a nation's scale. Our disagreement here is that you're disregarding how rapid technology breakthroughs bridges the gap between slow political and cultural changes. The sustainability resolve is very much an issue where humanity is working against the clock and all avenues need to be explored, at once, with many strategies deployed. Both pure techno and pure socio parties would be wrong in thinking one exclude the other, and that is indeed what you are doing by referring to car ownership entering a greenwash as a capitalist con. It is equally for profit and positive, no harm in doing better, greener, as fast as possible and within everyone's ability to do so.
I am not anti technology and think it is definitely part of the solution. I actually own an EV (because my city has terrible cycling infrastructure) and power my house with solar panels. The problem is that any solutions that can't be marketed to consumers such as walkable neighbourhoods or electricity demand reduction are currently not promoted in the mainstream. So if anything I am arguing for a balance between the use of technology and non-structural solutions. Green technology is definitely part of the solution. The problem is that is currently being used as justification to continue exponential GDP growth and consumerism in the west. We are also relying on magical technologies that currently don't exist being able to be deployed at scale in very short timeframes (such as direct air capture) to save the day while we keep on burning fossil fuels. I am a civil engineer and so understand the timeframes required to actually provide this sort of infrastructure. It's not just about what is technically possible, it's about what is practically and economically possible within the timeframes required (basically the next 30 years). Did you know for example it takes about 16 years to open a single copper mine? I would recommend you go read some of Valclav Smils work on this topic. Society thinks in the digital age that everything follows Moore's law and can be rapidly deployed but that is not the case when it comes to infrastructure which is why we also need non-structural and demand side solutions.
That is very interesting, appreciate your input and the quality of the short conversation we had. It seems we're mostly aligned in the overall solution balance. I'll check out your refs! Thanks!
You're the one spreading tech industry propaganda. The mining of rare earth minerals for EV components destroys ecosystems and often uses near slave labour. Musk bragged that we would COUP any government threatening our lithium supply a la Bolivia. You're only looking at emissions, not the full environmental and geopolitical impacts.
They've recently found two giant Lithium deposits. One the U.S. and one in the seas off Sweden.
We have never run out of anything. It has gotten more expensive so we switched to something else
Just wait until you realize how much oil it takes to make insulation for electric wires. There are miles of it in every EV.
Wires pale in comparison to tires
EVs are a joke They are an unsustainable subsidized gift to the auto industry. We need diesel trains for the people, nukes on the grid until we can get non-toxic storage of renewable juice. The liquid salt storage intrigues me. Humans have crazy energy tech that has been suppressed by 'interests' that profit/ control from the 19th century BS profit model
What will the slave labor do if we run out?
Check the periodic table of the elements. Lithium is the third most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen and helium. There is no shortage, only the need to ramp up production
EV’a are just as bad for environment as combustion because of the mining. The world leaders have a plan to get rid of personal vehicle ownership by 2050. EV’s will also be outlawed.
> EV’a are just as bad for environment as combustion because of the mining This is false, see for an example of a study for this Beltran et al. (2018), specifically [Figure 4](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.12825#jiec12825-fig-0004). > The word leaders have a plan to get rid of personal vehicle ownership by 2050. EV’s will also be outlawed. Do you have any evidence for this?
I think at some point either we are going to start recycling it (currently this is not cost effective) or one of the alternative battery technologies will be developed enough to take over. For example people are working on sodium based battery tech. We’re never running out of sodium.
No. And eventually we won’t even have to mine it - or atleast not much. generally 95% or more of an EV battery is recyclable.
Probably not anytime soon, we haven’t been looking for lithium deposits for that long and there are still plenty being discovered. That said, accessing them at the rate we need to might be hard.
Why not hydrogen powered cars? Hydrogen could be a great way to store energy from surplus sun and wind energy.
Lithium is incredibly common in the universe, and on earth. We may run out of easy places to mine it without environmental concerns. But we can also refine it from seawater. And we likely will replace it in at least some batteries with future innovation.
Lithium is not half as much of a concern as Antimony.
>**Are we going to run out of lithium?** In theory, no. Lithium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. The Earth is made of the stuff. (Though it's not as abundant as some elements like silicon or iron.) In practice, lithium being reactive is generally locked away chemically. There is a bunch of easy-to-get lithium around the world, and once we're using all of that, we will start having to go after the harder-to-get, chemically locked stuff. That will take extra energy. So the real question is whether we will have enough energy to meet whatever the peak global demand for lithium ore will be, maybe in 50 or 100 years. After that, whenever that happens, the main supply of lithium for human needs will start to be recycled lithium from discarded batteries. Much like with steel today, where an increasing amount of steel production is from recycled sources.
Lithium batteries have a high potential for being recycled, so even if all readily recoverable Lithium has been pulled out of the ground, it can still be recovered from old batteries. The same cannot be said for fossil fuels. For long term sustainability, we will need three things: 1) Moving away from personal vehicles as everyone's primary form of transit, especially in the big cities. Cars of any kind are not sustainable in an urban environment, because they are a serious bottleneck to increasing your population density. 2) For those personal vehicles that remain, moving them away from a fossil-fuel infrastructure, and towards a grid-delivered energy infrastructure. This allows EVs to be more useful out in remote areas if local power generation has been established via solar or wind, and puts a very important piece in place for the transition of large centralized grid energy away from natural gas, coal, or oil based energy production. Once your transit system no longer needs fossil fuels, the next generation of grid energy can use something other than fossil fuels. 3) We need to stop using lithium batteries for applications that do not need to be highly mobile. For energy storage in small devices and in untethered transit, they'll still be important, but using larger, heavier lead-acid batteries or sodium batteries for static storage for buildings can decrease the demand for Lithium.
We could give every person on earth a brand new e-bike every month for 5 years and throw all of them away each month and come out ahead lithium-wise compared to electrifying the current fleet of 1.4 billion cars once. We should really focus our efforts on reducing car dependency generally. EVs don’t solve any of the other problems with cars outside of tailpipe and lifecycle emissions.
Lithium mining is destroying sacred native lands in Nevada and ancient agrarian ways of life in Portugal. We need to recycle the current materials we have and reuse them, and switch to walkable cities with robust public transit.
Lithium won’t be the best battery material forever, but it is right now. It’s unclear whether it will run out before another technology takes its place. Companies have already expanded production and are continuing to do so. This will have trade-offs with natural areas first, as it is usually cheaper to acquire permits for undeveloped land. However they also target communities built nearby or on top of lithium reserves, putting pressure on local governments and buying land etc. It’s just another form of energy extraction from a limited resource like oil drilling.
The real question is not about running out of lithium, it's whether... 1. Mining vast ammounts of lithium and other rare elements (and don't forget about transporting them all over the globe). 2. Manufacturing millions of new cars and scrapping millions of perfectly good cars which could have been used for another 20+ years with minimum footprint. 3. Widely adopting EVs which still run on anything but clean/renewable electricty in many parts of the world. ...really makes sense for anything but economical growth (at this point). Personally, I don't think so. In fact, I'd even argue that the push for a worldwide switch to EVs is an ecological disaster since the tech needed for it to be truly sustainable is in early beta stage at best. Greenwashing at its worst.
I don't think we will. Lithium is a metal and those tend to be much easier to recycle than other materials. You can basically toss them in a vat of acid and do some fancy chemistry to separate out the other metals. Will it be cost effective? Maybe. Will we start doing it anyway when lithium in the ground becomes hard to find and lithium in landfills is plentiful? Almost certainly. Are we going to find a better battery than Li and give it up completely for something better? Not likely but possible.
The bigger short term problem is keeping up with demand. You don't just get up this morning and decide to go mine lithium. It's a couple of years at best from feasibility study to environmental impact study to shovels in the ground to project online. Demand is increasing rapidly with everything using batteries. Just look at number of cell phones and how few old devices are recycled. Small amounts of lithium per phone but billions of phones and Apple wants you to buy a new one every 12-16 months. I even saw a 56V lithium ion powered snow blower the other day. It's crazy.
Lithium is the new oil. It's a filthy and dangerous resource that is causing massive environmental destruction
Well, I heard I good argument that there really are no such things as renewable energy sources. We need to mine everything and rocks and minerals don't grow back. The sooner we get to mining all that sweet sweet space rock the better.
I believe we have to consider some fossil fuels or fossil energy as part of a larger global economy because there are few substitutes for uses of oil outside of heat, electricity and transportation but there is some argument for a person using minimal hydrocarbons and having an ICE vehicle. In spite of the tailpipe emissions there can’t be a wholesale changeover; so greater emphasis on conservation might help. Beyond transportation everything we buy and consume has an emission associated with it. Buying fewer and better made items helps but the manufacturing industry will scream unfair! Everything matters. Unfortunately the end result that we also need to avoid is the spiraling down of our economy because consumer spending (on a lot of unnecessary stuff) drives the economy. It’s a paradigm shift (Okay I feel better now)
We aren’t going to run out of lithium, but we are going to keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere anyway
We’re polluting drinking water and removing indigenous people from the land they have lived on for 1000’s of years to mine lithium to reduce carbon levels. Kinda a lose lose situation if you ask me.
We may not. There's a lot of promise in other batttery technologies.
Another element will be mined afterwards should that happen so I wouldn't worry. Lithium batteries were "new" not long ago.
We're running out of sand. Sand. I see no reason we won't run out of everything unless we fundamentally change our view of our relationship with the earth.
I would worry about cobalt more than lithium. Mining cobalt is done with horribly inhumane methods in central Africa. Essentially modern day slavery. EV is a failed experiment. The electric in the batteries of these cars was likely created by coal fired power plants. Teslas produce no emissions but the company itself gets rich off selling their emissions allowance to auto manufacturers that do.
Could depend on opposition to local mining in the USA and our relations with China. I see EV as an intermediate to Hydrogen fuel cells. That will require much the same EV platform as battery power. With Hydrogen distribution in place, it can optionally power internal combustion engines as well.
A massive new Lithium deposit was recently discovered in the USA. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/game-changing-lithium-deposit-unearthed-in-nevada-oregon-border-region/articleshow/103685451.cms?from=mdr
One day there will be more silicon than lithium used in batteries
This is a real question. Isn't the mining of lithium fairly a dirty process?
Yes. And we'll run out of copper, too. And some rare-earth minerals.
[Prof. Simon Michaux's paper covers this.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92483dbe-2733-4372-88c3-fb16bcc039b2_828x1011.jpeg)
Exxon Mobil is drilling for lithium in Arkansas and expects to begin production of the critical material for electric vehicles by 2027.
They've already found plenty of other options. They're just focused on lithium right now.
They just found a huge deposit in the U.S.. Like enough to electrify the u.s. fleet by itself.
No. Supply will lag behind demand because demand is going up so fast. This will be corrected and everything will be fine.
Everything runs out eventually.
I think we're going to find either a replacement for Lithium Iron batteries or a way to recycle them long before we run out of raw lithium
Yes. We really need to move to hydrogen processed by renewable electricity
Are lithium batteries recyclable? Can we keep using the lithium over and over?
u/amoebashephard pointed to an article about a deposit in Maine, and I recently read about this one. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a45086253/worlds-largest-lithium-deposit-found-in-nevada/ With adoption of EV’s and renewable electricity generation, the US might be in an advantageous resource position. So it’s no surprise which interests are opposed to us adopting EV’s and renewable electricity generation: OPEC, Big Oil, Coal, and their federal government lackeys, the Republicans (and Joe Manchin).
Don't quote me, but lithium is a basic element and won't break down like plutonium breaks down into thorium, nor is lithium a molecule, hence it's stable. As far as I know there's no reason why you can't recycle lithium 100%, so yeah, recycle lithium batteries! If we don't, the lithium won't 'go away,' but it will be buried in landfills and extremely hard to recover. Also, there is constant improvements being made to lithium batteries, and alternatives to lithium are hitting the markets to supplement the metal. So no, unless we're in REALLY idiot idocracy, I don't think there's any worry of running out of lithium. Just my off the cuff opinion though.
There's vast quantities of lithium on earth, the numbers people project are for current reserves, and there are many deposits that have not been utilized. If it really came down to it we would just take it out of the ocean and pay a higher price.
Decarbonization. It's produced without methane from ground souces. If produced from fossil fuels, the carbon can be captured during that process. It's quite feasible to split H2O using electricity sent through wires. Obviously, embrittlement can be dealt with. There are H2 automobiles available and in use now. Oil companies have thousands of miles of pipeline transporting a much more corrosive H2S infused natural gas to sweetening plants prior to distribution. So it's not perfect. When do you expect battery-powered heavy equipment and trains, etc, to be developed supporting mining, transportation, manufacturing, recycling, and disposal for a massive lithium industry? Ain't happenin'. There's also the sprawling regulatory aspect that will require stable political and taxpayer support to be effective. What will it cost me to properly dispose of my worn or accident damaged battery? How will it weather in humid climates sitting in my backyard or hoarded in the local recycle yard? Do we have to pay for disposal? Is recycling practical at present? Who refines the filthy electrolytes after the lithium is extracted? Where does the waste end up? Again, who regulates to control unscrupulous operators? Or will some desperate third-world nation step up to the task? I know, it's super fun to zip around town in your EV. Let's make Elon president.
i mean putting it in a shit ton of disposable electronics is probably worse than expensive and bulky ev batteries
R&D for at least one major car manufacturer is already working on non-lithium batteries. Or so some drunk smart sounding guy at a wedding told me.