This is all completely irrelevant, and has been discussed to death. The price of the lithium in the Tesla battery is on the order of $150. If it goes up to $1500 because we run out of easily extractable resources, it's going to be economical to extract it from seawater, where there is 230 trillion kilograms of it. Also, it might be economical to recycle the lithium from old batteries (currently it's just not worth it).

I'm sure extracting lithium from sea water would have to pass serious environmental testing.

Shouldn't be much different from extracting salt from seawater, which we already do.

We already do it when making salt. We just throw most of the none NaCL salts away.

Lithium extraction is already done from brine, effectively from "fossil seas".

Why? It could be simply done in the countries where there are no eco-nazis, which is most of the world's countries - especially countries in warm seas where it shall be done.

I assume the "eco-nazi" part is why you're being downvoted, but I think your basic premise is absolutely correct. If the Western world outlaw this practice it will just happen in places like China and India instead.

With significantly less environmental oversight and regulations. The pollution could perhaps end up crossing over to western countries at higher levels than any domestic, well-regulated, production would emit.

The other side effect of added regulations is generally that the extraction gets more efficient too in order to maintain higher profits, so it helps stretch out the resource for longer too.

And in a whole lot dirtier and environmentally damaging way.

I think your data is bit off:

https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mc...

53M tons of lithium available = 53000M of kg = 5300M of Tesla batteries can be made...

Also, that's just the lithium deposits we know about now.

Actually, no, that's the lithium deposits that we know can be extracted at the current price. If the price goes up, the reserves rise immediately, because more of what we know becomes extractable.

“reserve” estimates refer to current economic viability.

The lithium production market is still a fairly new market, so even though USGS and others have made some reserve and resource estimates already, it is premature to make any firm conclusions about future resource discovery and production. We’ve learned at least one lesson from the peak oil debate: higher prices do indeed spur innovation and increased production, at least they have in the U.S. Interestingly, almost the entire increase in global oil production has come from an increase in U.S. oil production. That is, the rest of the world has barely managed to stay in place on the treadmill of oil production, even in the face of far higher oil prices.

With respect to the notion of peak lithium, there is a substantial difference between this commodity and oil because there are many ready substitutes for lithium that can be used in the manufacture of batteries. The USGS report cited by OP states: “Substitution for lithium compounds is possible in batteries, ceramics, greases, and manufactured glass. Examples are calcium and aluminum soaps as substitutes for stearates in greases; calcium, magnesium, mercury, and zinc as anode material in primary batteries; and sodic and potassic fluxes in ceramics and glass manufacture.” These substitutes may all face similar resource constraints as lithium, but there is a fundamental difference between changing battery chemistries and finding substitutes for oil more generally.

Source: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough...

> aluminum soaps

what kind molecule is an aluminium soap? I've tried googling but it's kinda useless, it's just soap advertisement for pages.

Dictionary says

> aluminum soap

> noun, Chemistry.

> any of the salts formed by higher carboxylic acids and aluminum, as aluminum oleate, aluminum palmitate, and aluminum stearate.

Your numbers are off. Tesla requires 9kg of lithium per 10kWh. If 85kWh model has in reality 95kWh, then you'd need 85kg lithium per car. World reserves of lithium are roughly 16 million tons, so, it would suffices for a bit under 200 million Teslas.

Lithium production was 43000 tons last year, which would produce 500.000 cars, even if we wouldn't need lithium for anything else.

https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268790/countries-with-th...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-...

Lithium’s atomic number is 3. I’m fairly certain there is a lot more of it. Because it is not a gas like hydrogen or helium, very little must escape earth.

What's the recyclability of Lithium in batterie?

Probably depends on how much an organisation wants it done and who can do it: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iphone+recycling+robot

Meanwhile, China has recently stopped accepting a lot of recyclable waste: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-10/china-ban-on-foreign-r...