While this is true, these battery solutions tend to offset the much larger externalities of the fossil-fuel based technologies they help make redundant.

The li-ion externalities is mostly incurred once when mining. Although it's still in it's infancy, recycling li-ion batteries is already possible, and supposedly profitable. Especially when you can get an enormous batch of cells of exactly the same model as you would with this project.

The biggest problem in recycling li-ion batteries is that you may need different processes for different cells, so you need to sort them first.

> The li-ion externalities is mostly incurred once when mining.

I agree with your comment, but lithium is not mined. This is a common misconception and should be noted since we're chatting about externalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Extraction

Actually, this has changed since the price of lithium increased 300% since 2014. Australia now has operating lithium mines, and there are mines in construction in portugal too.

http://www.lithiummine.com/lithium-mining-in-australia

http://www.savannahresources.com/assets/mina-do-barroso/

There is significantly more extractable lithium than needed at any rational forseen rate of ramp-up. The impact of mining has to be borne by all real goods which depend on mines, not just this one.

You are adopting implied reductionism around the "cost" side without having done the work (in my opinion) to justify that this concern outweighs the upside benefits of ceasing to use coal.

PS a lot of the minable lithium which isn't in Chile, is in Australia. So, we have low-miles lithium!

Erlich/Simons anyone?

There's some interesting politics going on wrt lithium in Chile. Seems like the regulators don't want to increase output as lithium extraction uses a ton of water, and the Atacama is one of the driest places on Earth.

Presumably that is why the same company is trying to kick off in Australia as well, even though we have higher regulatory and labour costs here.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-albemarle-exclusive...

Lithium is number 3 on the periodic table.

Human ingenuity not going to stop finding extractible sources anytime soon.

...is here where I mention the building potential of a helium shortage?

We need more gas Wells to extract helium from!

Lithium can be reclaimed from batteries. It's going to be a challenge for the industry [1], but it's also going to be very important.

[1] https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...

Lithium is one of the more common elements in the Earth's crust. More abundant than many familiar everyday materials like copper.

Sure, extracting copper has costs too, but I don't see the same handwringing about that.

so is silicon, yet it is expensive.

As Li becomes more valuable, more methods of extraction will become worth it.

All materials are finite resources.