You're aware that the recoverable reserves of lithium are determined by the price, yes? So if the price of lithium rises, it becomes economic to mine lithium which is known but is currently not worth extracting.

Quote from Appendix C of the government report pointed at by [2]: https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/2015/mcsapp2015....

> Reserves may be considered a working inventory of mining companies’ supply of an economically extractable mineral commodity. As such, the magnitude of that inventory is necessarily limited by many considerations, including cost of drilling, taxes, price of the mineral commodity being mined, and the demand for it. Reserves will be developed to the point of business needs and geologic limitations of economic ore grade and tonnage. For example, in 1970, identified and undiscovered world copper resources were estimated to contain 1.6 billion metric tons of copper, with reserves of about 280 million metric tons of copper. Since then, almost 480 million metric tons of copper have been produced worldwide, but world copper reserves in 2014 were estimated to be 700 million metric tons of copper, more than double those in 1970, despite the depletion by mining of more than the original estimated reserves.