Re:Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine
by scythe on Friday February 25, 2022 @01:08PM
(#30470212)
>Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery.
There's a lot of misleading information out there on the Internet. Actually, searching led me to one of my old comments, which is still true ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15883035 ). The old link about ocean extraction died, so here's another one:
The bottom line is that both the raw quantity and the prospective capital expenditures on lithium are way, way smaller than what we were looking at in terms of oil extraction. We're not running out of lithium, and we're not destroying the environment to get it.
I suspect oil industry PR could be behind all of this run-out-of-lithium hokum, which inevitably comprises articles based on "[presently] economically viable" resources and does not consider the actual availability of lithium in Earth's crusts and waters, which is much higher if you include low-grade ores that are not presently viable. It's obvious who benefits from this widespread misconception.
The simple fact is that if the price of lithium were to jump by a factor of 10, it still wouldn't affect the price of a Tesla that much.
Now, when we talk about grid-storage batteries, we might want really huge amounts of storage, and then sodium-sulfur / zinc-bromide / etc becomes relevant. But currently, grid-storage batteries are LiFePO4 simply because they're really cheap. That seems like a pretty good problem to have.
There's a lot of misleading information out there on the Internet. Actually, searching led me to one of my old comments, which is still true ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15883035 ). The old link about ocean extraction died, so here's another one:
https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv...
The bottom line is that both the raw quantity and the prospective capital expenditures on lithium are way, way smaller than what we were looking at in terms of oil extraction. We're not running out of lithium, and we're not destroying the environment to get it.
I suspect oil industry PR could be behind all of this run-out-of-lithium hokum, which inevitably comprises articles based on "[presently] economically viable" resources and does not consider the actual availability of lithium in Earth's crusts and waters, which is much higher if you include low-grade ores that are not presently viable. It's obvious who benefits from this widespread misconception.
The simple fact is that if the price of lithium were to jump by a factor of 10, it still wouldn't affect the price of a Tesla that much.
Now, when we talk about grid-storage batteries, we might want really huge amounts of storage, and then sodium-sulfur / zinc-bromide / etc becomes relevant. But currently, grid-storage batteries are LiFePO4 simply because they're really cheap. That seems like a pretty good problem to have.