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A comment on Economics of Electric Vehicles Mean Oil's Days as a Transport Fuel Are Numbered. Parent comment

Re:Economics of Electric Vehicles Mean Oil's Days as a Trans... by mises on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @11:50PM (#20873845)
Transport != store. I can transmit, assuming there's a sink on the other end (though loss is an issue over distance). Considering there is neither enough lithium nor enough cobalt to make a Tesla for every American, battery tech will be a huge bottleneck.
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Re:Economics of Electric Vehicles Mean Oil's Days as a Trans... by luckydata on Wednesday September 04, 2019 @12:17AM (#20873964)
Who says that we don't have enough lithium?
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Re:Economics of Electric Vehicles Mean Oil's Days as a Trans... by presidentscroob on Wednesday September 04, 2019 @12:44AM (#20874054)
There's likely plenty:

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-enough-lithium-in-the-world-t...

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Re:Economics of Electric Vehicles Mean Oil's Days as a Trans... by imtringued on Wednesday September 04, 2019 @04:04AM (#20874983)
Future lithium batteries won't use cobalt.
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Re:Economics of Electric Vehicles Mean Oil's Days as a Trans... by mises on Wednesday September 04, 2019 @10:32AM (#20877529)
Any source on this? I understand there alternative technologies, but most have disadvantages in terms of power density, longevity, price, etc.
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Re:Economics of Electric Vehicles Mean Oil's Days as a Trans... by WorldMaker on Wednesday September 04, 2019 @06:56PM (#20882192)
Cobalt reduction has already been happening at a rapid pace. 2018 article mentioning Tesla cut their Cobalt needs by volume over 60%: http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/te...

Even if we can't get Cobalt to 0% (and there is plenty of research into other battery composites happening right now), the problems with Cobalt seem less to do with scarcity and a lot more to do with geopolitics (Cobalt is primarily sourced today as byproduct extracts of mines for minerals such as nickel in countries like Columbia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). There's even indications that cobalt could be recycled from existing battery composites (as we do today already for lithium), but no economic incentive to do such because it isn't scarce enough to try.

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