Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine

Re:Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine by cptskippy on Friday February 25, 2022 @08:38PM (#30474533)

Napkin math but...

A Tesla Model 3 with the smallest pack size is 54kWh which is the equivalent of just under 1100 MacBook Air batteries.

In 2017 the global demand for laptops was 161,600,000 units.

Tesla shipped over 900,000 vehicles in 2021 which is the equivalent of 990,000,000 Macbook Airs.

So if laptop demand remained static, in the span of 5 years our annual demand for lithium still saw a six fold increase.

I'm willing to bet it's closer to 10x or 20x increase in demand for lithium. Did we have that much production capacity open up in the same time frame?

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Re:Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine by CyberRage on Saturday February 26, 2022 @05:55AM (#30476637)

Lithium-ion batteries is just one, albeit very popular, option.

You have batteries that do not use lithium at all.

The battery market is going to see several different technologies for different use cases.

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Re:Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine by cptskippy on Monday February 28, 2022 @12:55PM (#30502784)

That's true however there aren't currently any other viable batteries chemistries with the density offered by lithium based chemistries.

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Re:Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine by CyberRage on Saturday March 05, 2022 @11:13AM (#30568705)

Well considering CATL is launching commercial sodium-ion batteries. I would tend to think otherwise.

There's also other interesting investments in air breathing cathode batteries.

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