I read that lithium is above x15 more expensive than 18 months ago (https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium)

So, what makes you think battery prices are going to continue falling ? Isn't lithium mineral the main cost in building these batteries ?

The price increases have been because of supply and demand mismatches and speculation that happened because of Covid as production stabilises so will the prices. This is temporary aberration which should avg out over a decade.

Well, the covid/speculation shockwaves have affected many other goods, but I don't know any other asset that got to x15 in that timeframe. (maybe there are some others, I haven't tracked all of them tbh)

So I wonder if you can really rule out that the increase in demand for EV isn't the main factor in lithium's x15 price increase. And if it's the case, I don't see how battery prices could go down in the next decade, since increasing mining isn't spontaneous and demand is not going to decrease.

Solid state, Na based, grid scale non-Li batteries, improved (i.e. cheaper) recycling of battery metals.

There are a lot of reasons that would reduce the cost of batteries even if the mining+processing of Li didn't grow (which it will).

I'm definitely pro-EV. As soon as it's practical for us I'll get one. However, I do worry that there are so many dimensions to optimising EV batteries (degradation, fast charge / discharge, stability, temperature tolerance, weight, cubic volume and price) that we might not be able to find anything that really changes the game. By which I mean a doubling of capacity, so 200kwh easily in a car, by my maths that's what we need to keep a light van (3.5t say) busy for a whole shift. Or in my case to tow a caravan 300 miles.

The only thing preventing manufacturers from putting 200KWh in a full size van or truck is cost, and with battery cost reducing 90% per decade, that should not remain a barrier.

The cost drops of the last decade will likely not continue going forward. It is more likely that lithium ion batteries will end up kind of like Nickel-based rechargable batteries: a huge spurt in cost reduction as they become mainstream, then not much after that. Lithium ion chemistries have a few more cost reductions to go, but not another 90%.

Semiconductors spoiled us into thinking we could ride one technology idea down an exponential curve forever, but most technologies don't have that kind of progression. By the way, semiconductors didn't have that kind of progression either - chips from 10 years ago look very different than today's.

It's all about the experience curve. For every doubling in production, cost drops 10-25%. There are very few exceptions to this.

Nickel battery production has decreased as they're being replaced with Lithium batteries so they're no longer riding the experience curve.

Semiconductors have a relatively constant price per chip but a regularly decreasing price per transistor.

We need about 1000TWh for the clean energy transition, half for cars and half for the electrical. There might be better substitutes for the electrical grid, but cars are going to use something that looks a lot like a lithium-ion battery, like sodium ion.

So I figure we've got solid demand from our current 500GWh/year up until at least 32TWh/year or so, 6 doublings, which should lower the price by about 90%.

Look at the other side. Tesla's battery day announcement in 2021 promises 56% cost reductions in 4 years via 6 enhancements: silicon anodes, cobalt-free cathodes, dry electrode process, structural batteries, tabless electrodes, larger cells.

Only the dry electrode process is particularly innovative or risky, but the others still add considerable cost reductions. Not all of Tesla's innovations may pan out, but they're just one of many companies and Universities researching batteries, many of whom are more innovative than Tesla is.

I'm fully on board with you with Wright's law, but that's what we have some idea of demand for, but not what we can supply. Battery supply has a lot of constraints, and they will eventually lift, but not necessarily quickly.

Also, Tesla has a very spotty track record on predicting its own innovations (yes, even on battery design), so I wouldn't take that prediction too seriously.

It wasn’t a 15x price wing, but large commodity price swings aren’t that unusual. Oil briefly went negative due to COVID that’s larger than an infinite price swing.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCOILWTICO/

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/20/investing/oil-prices-negative...

Not sure why you're being downvoted, but this is the right answer

You can't predict the markets.

It is difficult to predict markets fast, reliable and precisely enough to reliably beat them. It is certainly possible to predict markets and be good at it, people do it all the time

They have a lot of variability. It's the difference between predicting the weather and predicting the average weather (that is, the climate).

It's easy to predict the markets, just as it's easy to predict the weather.

I predict it will rain sometime in the next month at my address. I also predict that it will freeze hard in the same time period.

This is a useful prediction, given that I will be winterizing my yard today.

Making a prediction better than an expert's is hard. Useful predictions are often easy.

If my father in law decides to plant 1000 acres in wheat next year, he is making a prediction about the markets. Given the situation in Ukraine and with global climate, wheat prices are one of the most difficult to predict precisely. But he is a low cost producer compared to many, so he knows he is likely to make a profit whether the price is high or low. A precise prediction would be nice, but producers everywhere operate with imprecise but useful predictions all the time.

«Situation» in Ukraine is at mid-WWII level (1942), so plant the wheat. It will be tough to produce and export wheat in Ukraine for next two years at least.

If the war in Ukraine continues, oilseeds are the most profitable planting choice.

Lithium is a very small input to batteries, by mass. I forget the exact number, but I think only a few percent by weight, and it's not a major part of the cost. There's also this breakdown:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

I would expect battery prices to stall on their drop, or even rise a bit, in the next year or two, before dropping again massively in price. There has been a lot of supply chain disruption, and an absolutely massive increase in demand. But lots more production capacity is being built.

Small input by mass but already 50% of the battery cost, from your link So if it does x15 in price, then battery goes x7.5 ? That’s still terrible for battery price

No, the cathode is 50%, and the cathode is not just lithium.

How much of the price of the battery is the raw lithium, and how much is the cost of manufacturing? For most technological goods the prices of raw inputs are almost irrelevant; you don't see chip prices going up because of the cost of raw silicon.

(Exception: solar panels, because those have the least processing over raw silicon and are therefore more price sensitive)

With the numbers on that chart, the relative molar masses of lithium and lithium carbide, and assuming 160g metallic lithium per kWh, at current exchange rates, I got $132 per kWh.

Which is a surprise, but so is a x15 increase in a raw material cost.

Two things are happening here. One, we're bringing on much more Lithium production all around the world. The price increase is coordinating that, but people can also see the writing on the wall. There's plenty of innovation happening in Lithium mining and extraction.

The other thing is we're innovating in battery chemistry. It would not surprise me if Lithium were only one of many options in ten years, depending on the storage capacity and number of cycles needed per kg. Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt. Iron, aluminum, and others are a possibility, for stationary batteries where weight doesn't matter.

I know people here are very skeptical of every battery advance press release, and rightfully so. But nonetheless, some of that is going to pan out, and the world of energy storage is going to fundamentally change the economics for cars, airplanes, and grid storage within the next decade.

Is it likely that current cars would be compatible with batteries that are that different to not even be Lithium in 10 years?

If I look at say my laptop or phone, they definitely aren't compatible with newer batteries even if it's technically feasible so why would we expect cars to be?

Yes, it is likely. As long as the form factor is well defined or standardized, new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots.

The reason it's not true for laptops is that batteries aren't standard form factor sizes in laptops.

> new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots.

You might notice that Li-Ion AA batteries CAN'T be charged by Ni-Cd or Ni-MH AA battery chargers. Even a smaller change like Ni-MH to Ni-Zn requires different equipment.

It’s a software update to support different chemistries. This is how Tesla supports various pack types (Li, LFP, etc) across vehicles and stationary storage products.

To clarify: did you mean HW update? For instance, I can't imagine a software update changing my battery chemistry from Lithium Ion to Nickel Cadmium.

I think they meant that _supporting_ this type of battery is a software update. Software can't do matter-energy conversion yet.

Your car doesn't have to know about the "chemistry" of your battery. It just needs to know specifics about voltages and power draw and temperatures. This is what drivers do.

This is like suggesting that my computer can't go from AMD to nvidia because they would need to know deep specifics about AMD's proprietary chips to support them. But that's what drivers are for!

That’s because your video card sits on a standard well defined port. Where as charging an EV right now comes a bunch of plugs, voltages, charging times, etc. until a unified open standard is reached where you can go from super charging a Tesla to charging a sodium hyndai is reached, this whole ev dance will remain anti consumer.

It's "just" different charge profile; wouldn't need any hardware change.

Most chemistries can be charged using the same "constant current up to this voltage, constant voltage to the max voltage" method, just need to set the right values.

I'd bet a decent amount of money that most electric cars in the developed world will still use the Goodenough chemistry in ten years.

The theoretical energy density of sodium is too low for the weight, this isn't a matter of developing the technology.

What we can look forward to is sodium batteries becoming cheap and reliable, replacing every application of lead-acid, and most, perhaps all, stationary lithium. Great choice for house or grid-level storage, where the lower density is basically harmless.

Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around.

This will never pencil out.

I did say ten years, rather than more.

150Wh/kg is completely fine. A small vehicle with a 100kg battery can do 95% of what is needed for the average person (or as a second family car), it's just a matter of whether the trend of legislating sane vehicles out of existence continues.

> Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around.

This is absolutely not clear. Active lithium is just ~60g per kWh in a battery, or ~1% of the mass of a state of the art LFP battery. Even though sodium weighs 3.5 times more for the same charge, if it's use would allow just a few percent reduction in total weigh, either by reduction of inactive cathode material or some other source, it could easily beat lithium batteries.

Type of material decides on battery's energy density. It's just impossible for battery of "inferior" chemistry to get to same level of capacity.

There is a reason lead ones are not "just" heavy but also physically much bigger than same capacity lithium one.

What will (probably) happen if we get competitive sodium batteries is that they will phase out lithium from the stationary storage so there won't be that huge demand for lithium for everything. Or possibly they will become "cheap EV's battery"

Stationary storage will more like be taken over by iron batteries which are much cheaper. Sodium batteries will happen in cars because not everyone needs really long range.

Sodium is both heavier and less energetic, enough so that the equation points to a worse car: heavier than a car which goes substantially further.

Sodium cannot improve lithium by replacing it in batteries, for physical chemistry reasons which can't be negotiated.

I don't consider it likely that lithium will become so much more expensive that people will want their second-largest purchase, a car, to be inferior in the way that it must be with sodium batteries.

Rather more likely that cheap and good sodium batteries relieve pressure on lithium supply for the enormous amount of battery storage we need to handle intermittent renewables.

If a significant proportion of a lithium battery was lithium, this would absolutely be true.

By weight, something around 1% of a lithium battery is lithium.

Sodium is seen as an interesting alternative, because there are some indications that it can make that 99% that makes up the rest of the battery lighter. Even though sodium is ~3.5 times worse as a charge carrier, if it's use allows cutting enough weight from that rest, it can be a winner overall.

For example, aluminium is, for complex reasons, not compatible with every part of a li-ion battery, and so they use copper connectors internally, typically containing by weight at least 10 times as much copper as they contain lithium. Sodium batteries can use aluminum everywhere, which saves on not just cost, but also more in weight than the weight difference between equal molar amounts of sodium and lithium.

That all makes sense about the weight, and it will likely matter for airplanes. But it doesn't matter enough for cars.

LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are already used by Tesla and have a gravimetric energy density of 125 Wh/kg, much lower than Lithium-ion.

CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg. Even if that doesn't come to fruition, it's already higher density than what's being used in electric cars!

Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway. You might be able to drop weight in hazard protection systems. Battery cycle times are competitive with Lithium chemistry. Contrary to your prediction that it doesn't pencil out, I expect sodium-ion to completely displace Lithium batteries for use in electric vehicles because it pencils out so much better. It will just be so much cheaper and doesn't bottleneck on any materials as you scale up.

As someone who occasionally walks and often cycles, I really hope batteries that are even heavier than lithium don't become commonplace.

Why? compare the weight of SUVs or trucks. It's more than the battery weight, so better hope for smaller vehicles.

I hope for smaller vehicles as well. It's hard to separate "big" and "heavy" statistically because they are highly correlated, but in general, heavier vehicles means higher likelihood of fatality in a crash 1. I suppose we will be doing a natural experiment to tease out the difference over the years as heavy EVs become more commonplace and pedestrian fatalities continue to increase.

> It’s also about weight. Trucks today averaging around 5200 pounds -- that’s a jump of more than a half ton since 2000. And things get heavier as electric vehicles look to become our new normal.

> On average electric vehicles are 10 percent heavier than gas powered cars. For instance, the new electric Hummer weighs in at a staggering 9,100 pounds or more than 4 and a half tons. All that weight can have deadly consequences. Researchers have found that for every 1,000 pounds a car puts on, a pedestrian is nearly 50 percent more likely to die if they’re hit and the more a truck weighs the longer it will take to stop.

1. https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2022/08/08/size-does-mat...

I dunno that "lighter cars" is a realistic thing to hope for at this point. I do hope to see better bumper crush zone designs, more protected bike lanes, blinking crosswalks, better in-vehicle collision detection systems, etc.

Even if a "lighter" car hits you, it's gonna be a bad day. Better to avoid the collision altogether, no? :)

I "hope" for lighter cars in the same way I "hope" we start taking necessary drastic measures to combat climate change, which is by knowing that it won't happen and advocating for change anyway.

On the other hand, I think maybe hoping that vehicles become no heavier than modern EVs is at least somewhat realistic.

>LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are already used by Tesla and have a gravimetric energy density of 125 Wh/kg, much lower than Lithium-ion.

Tesla uses iron phosphate in its cheaper models, but the high end is still reliant on NMC. I'd be interested to know the maximum range available on LFP.

BYD sells a lithium-iron-phosphate battery with an energy density of 150 Wh/kg. CATL's LFP is 125.

Also, a lithium-iron-phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery, in that the electrolyte works by lithium ionic conduction. The appropriate contrast would be "lithium-nickel".

>CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg.

This is reported as the "single-cell" energy density, and is not directly comparable to the battery pack density.

>Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway.

Surely this isn't because of the stability of sodium, which anyone who watched that chemistry demonstration in high school knows, is significantly more reactive than lithium. I expect the risks to be similar; furthermore, the concept of a dense energy storage that has no risk of sudden release is physically unlikely.

> Tesla uses iron phosphate in its cheaper models, but the high end is still reliant on NMC. I'd be interested to know the maximum range available on LFP.

In theory 490 km, in practice, 380 km. Because they don't degrade as much, after a few years they are closer to what you call the high end models.

> Also, a lithium-iron-phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery, in that the electrolyte works by lithium ionic conduction. The appropriate contrast would be "lithium-nickel".

Correct, I want to point out that John Goodenough was responsible for the basic research which lead to all lithium-ion batteries.

I explicitly intended LiFePO to be included, and I hope for a variety of reasons that it's much more popular than cobalt-heavy formulas in ten years.

Only now do I realise that "Goodenough" is a real person's name, and neither a placeholder name nor a case of Emphasis Via Capital Letters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough

I have been interested in the technology from TexPower:

https://texpowerev.com/

They offer a lithium-nickel chemistry without cobalt. If it can be proven in practice, it would allow comparable density to the best car batteries in a scalable chemistry. The founder is a researcher at the University of Texas who wrote several papers on the chemistry:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/adma.2020027...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240582972...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/aenm.2...

> Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt.

If you split salt into sodium and chlorine, and use the sodium for batteries, what do you do with the chlorine?

Dump it into Californians tap water supply apparently :)

On serious note, Chlorine is widely use chemical, used in cleaning products, bleaching paper and cloth, pesticides , rubber, and some solvents.

Chlorine has lots of industrial uses, so I imagine you sell it. If you produce enough as a by product the cost will go insanely low.

If you had to dump it, you'd probably react it with something cheap to make it inert. This would generate energy, it's akin to combustion with oxygen. You could use that energy to decrease the energy requirements of splitting the NaCl in the first step.

For example, you could use it to turn calcium carbonate AKA limestone into calcium chloride, which is rather harmless. You would get carbon dioxide out of this.

That doesn't sound like a good idea, we already have too much CO2.

Something that might work on a small scale could become an ecological threat on the scale of a billion electric cars.

Bleach. Clorox sells lots of it.

Use carbonate, which doesn't have this problem.

This would be preferred anyway: HCl is nasty, and carbon dioxide is not.

The world has plenty of lithium. Just takes a couple years of mining to catch up.

There’s also a limitless source in the ocean. If prices got high enough we could just filter ocean water.

At what concentration though? At what price does lithium extraction from Sea water become economically viable? It feels to me that this is an entropy problem.

AFAICT, Lithium extraction from sea water is economical at current prices. What's preventing its mass adoption is the certainty the prices will stay at current levels.

There's also sodium, which makes for almost as good batteries for much cheaper.

Not for use in motor vehicles. Very good for infrastructure though.

No, they are great for cars. For infrastructure iron batteries are much better. Iron batteries are not suitable for cars though.

> Isn't lithium mineral the main cost in building these batteries?

No, and I have no idea why anyone would think that. Raw material costs are generally not that significant, most costs in manufacturing come from labor and capital.

The lithium in a $15000 75kWh battery pack costs around $1600 at current prices. There is a lot of room for the price to fall even with rising raw material costs, as manufacturing gets more efficient and capacity is built out.

And also, rising raw material prices will cause production to expand, which will eventually push prices back down.

This source tells a different story: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

IIUC 50% of the cost of a battery is coming from lithium

Manufacturing is only about bout 25%

That's not what the infograph tells you. It says that 50% of the battery cost comes from cathode materials, which is true for some chemistries, but even in those cases that's not because of lithium, but because of cobalt.

Which is precisely why the industry is moving to chemistries that don't use cobalt, pushing the materials price back down.

Also, lithium isn't the cathode, it's the anode. The cathode is primarily nickel (III) oxide, which is unstable and so stabilized with cobalt, aluminum and/or manganese.

Technically most Li ion batteries are created in the discharged state, with the lithium in the battery provided by the cathode at the time of construction, and then moved over to the LiC6 anode via charging.

Electric car production would have ground to a halt over the last 2 years in the face of a 15x increase in raw material costs if it accounted for 50% right? That doesn't seem to have happened.

First that wasn’t a 15x price swing, you read the chart incorrectly click on the 5 year view again. That said, Price shocks happened in both directions from COVID it’s just another supply disruption not any kind of a long term trend.

As to cost, it depends on chemistry but you need ~0.16kg of Lithium metal/kWh or 16kg for 100kWh battery pack. At current prices that’s ~1,300$ worth of lithium meaning the majority of battery pack costs are still from manufacturing and other materials.

https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=li&u=...

November 2020: 40k$ Today: 562k$ Okay, 14x, not 15x

But yeah, on average if you look to previous price, maybe it's more of x8 price increase. 18 month ago was the all time low of the data on tradingview, I give you that.

About the weight details, are you sure your figures are correct? First result on google gives me way higher numbers (minimum 80g/kwh, but likely more than 160g/kwh) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-lithium-li-ion-vehic... Also, another comment in this thread gives 60g/kwh, and another 160g/kwh

> minimum 80g/kwh, but likely more than 160g/kwh

Units… 160g/kwh is 0.16kg/kWh, 80g/kWh is 0.08kg/kWh

But yes, it varies based on chemistry. 0.16kg/kWh is on the high end.

My bad, I read 16g/kwh. Nevermind.

The other thing people seem to underestimate is the how strong the used battery market is between repairs to another car, after market conversions of internal combustion cars and conversion back into stationary storage. Even the 24kWh of the Nissan Leaf battery pack, having suffered from say 20% degradation is still 20kwh of battery storage, more than a days worth for most households.

For example one of those original Leaf batteries will still fetch nearly £2000. The 40kWh and above much more because they open the possibility of re-batterying an original Leaf.

>Even the 24kWh of the Nissan Leaf battery pack, having suffered from say 20% degradation is still 20kwh of battery storage

This is not quite true. The failure rate and capacity decline dramatically incr

I guess this is also true for Hackernews repl

I mean you couldn't sell is warranted as a 20kWh pack. That much is true. But for most home stationary storage purposes I'm not sure how important the exact capacity is, things like shifting power use onto the low side of a dual rate tariff and maximizing the potential of roof top solar.

It depends on the use case. For time-shifting loads and playing power arbitrage, maybe not much. But in some cases having a few days of autonomy can be nice during a storm or ~freak~/"new normal" weather events. If you live in the US West, wildfires are increasingly common (and we're just getting started) and much of California is expected to have to learn to deal with rolling brownouts and blackouts for the next few years during the warm season while PG&E is upgrading and burying their sparkly infrastructure. And if you live in Texas, I guess you're just signed up to pay infinite dollars for power whenever the market demands it.

In a functional grid, each home shouldn't need its own battery system. But we've neglected ours for so long, both technically and politically, that there's no real hope in improving it in the short term, so homeowners can either take it into their own hands or just go without electricity a week or two out of the year.

What's the source of this claim, especially the "still" part. I could never find newest data which would confirm it easily.

With how solar and wind electricity prices are still falling at similar rate. I think people don't realise how fast the move to electric is going to be as battery production keeps going up. Think about it just like pc gets cheap each year. Vehicles and fuels are also going to get cheaper as battery and electricity prices get cheaper

It all depends on supply, as well as safety. As long as we have an excess of supply of the materials needed to produce the batteries and the increased production doesn't lead to safety issues with the batteries (remember -- Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances) then all will be fine. However current trends do not indicate continuing trends. If the switch to battery stored power occurs very quickly, there is potential for a price shock.

> It all depends on supply, as well as safety.

The safety part seems to be completely ignored. I would not want to have around me a 10 year old battery pack.

> Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances

So is petrol for that matter - a Tesla Model 3 extended range battery pack stores 82kWh of energy, whereas a 60L tank full of unleaded is holding 570kWh of energy

Gasoline is not in itself an incendiary bomb, it has a specific meaning:

— it burns for a long time - it resists suppression

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device

If you want gasoline to meet the definition you have to make napalm out of it.

Sure. When was the last time you had to store gasoline in your residence though? Do you have to manage fuel storage on your person to power devices? Does Amazon have to send you a box with petrol in it when you order a laptop? There is infrastructure around petrol and designated places to contain it and dispense it. We don't have that yet with battery power. Most people just ignore the X with the trash can on the device and dump batteries in the garbage. I don't know about you, but people where I live have to go out of their way to find a place to drop off their old batteries responsibly, and I think I am the only person I know who does.

Pretty much everybody stores a massive amount of gasoline energy on their property every day, as gas in the tank in their vehicle.

And disposal of car batteries will never be an issue. Even the smallest and most degraded of Nissan Leaf batteries is worth $2000 or so.

You are not engaging with my point and are trying to work around it. You know that you are doing that and I know that you are doing that.

The real issue is copper.

https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/pdf/0722/The-Future-of-Copper_...

Is it true we will run out of lithium in 20-30 years?

We'll never "run out of lithium".

The question is "how much will lithium cost?"

It can be extracted from the ocean, there are undeveloped known mineral deposits and you always expect there are unknown deposits to be found. Production will grow as demand grows, when there is lag because new sources take time to develop and proven demand is needed before someone spends a lot of money developing a new source there will be cost growth, when new sources, recycling, etc. develop, prices will drop.

In 20-30 years one of the alternatives (like sodium batteries, we'll never run out of sodium) aren't so unlikely to be found.

> It can be extracted from the ocean

Indeed, and we already have research into using concentrated desalination brine to recover lithium from [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of desalination plants are positioned in Arabia [1], so we'd trade dependency on these dictatorships from oil to lithium.

[0] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em0...

[1] https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-large...

Why can’t you build desalination plants elsewhere?

They certainly can be built elsewhere, however it's currently cheaper to import. It is very common to import when it's cheaper than producing domestically despite it having a history of problems like shortages and fluctuating costs. Helium and rare elements(which aren't very rare) are some examples. Rare earth mines were shutdown in countries when China started undercutting prices.

It would have done the world a lot of good, had the WTO, EU and US actually taken massive reaction to Chinese price dumping politics. Instead, all we got was a bit of verbal acrobatics.

Desalination plants are expensive to run (you either need a lot of energy or a lot of space for a solar evaporation plant) and create a lot of extremely toxic brine, which means you only want them when you don't have an alternative source of drinkable water.

Recovering lithium from the brine is essentially just using the waste these plants generate as part of their operation.

For the same reason you "cannot" drill for gas in Germany: it's very hard to do something that someone else can do cheaper. It requires constant work against the market, either by tarifs or subventions. And desalination will always be cheaper if you have to do it anyway, because the (local) value of water is so high

There's a massive difference. You buy lithium once, and from then on it's cheaper to recycle it. If Arabia cuts off our supply, our current EVs are still useful.

OTOH you have to buy gasoline regularly. If supply gets cut off, current vehicles are scrap metal.

"we'll never run out of lithium" is the new "640k ought to be enough for anybody".

As we make lithium battery capacity more affordable, it gets applied more broadly, and the rate of use goes up. There is a very finite amount of any resource here on earth, and while we can get things more and more efficient, there will be a moment where we can no longer extract lithium (or other materials) required for battery production. Treating these as an endless resource is the same error we made with fossil fuels, just hopefully without as much climate change as a direct result...

I am more concerned about the safety issues. People forget that rechargeable lithium cells are incredibly dangerous to charge, store, transport, and dispose of. On top of this large fires caused by them are pretty much impossible to extinguish.

> “We brought over 1,000 pounds of Purple-K and we introduced that to the fire hoping we could kill it and choke it out. The lithium ion fire laughed at the Purple-K. Didn’t put a dent in it.” Officials soon determined that the best course of action would be to allow the fire to burn itself out until it could be managed.

...

> Once the fire had diminished to a controllable level, firefighters applied high-flow water in an attempt to cool the batteries while applying approximately 28 tons of dry Portland cement to smother the burning lithium ion batteries until there was no longer any active fires at the site.

* https://www.ehs.com/2021/07/morris-lithium-battery-fire-high...

The oceans of earth contain enough lithium for every human to have 4000 teslas.

Thats… 200 MWh per person worth of lithium.

Or energy storage equal to 200 tons of TNT.

Unlike fossil fuels it is not consumed and will be recycled.

In short, there’s a few orders of magnitude of more lithium around than anyone will ever need. It all comes down to price of extraction.

Taking enough out of the oceans for everybody to have a Tesla won’t even take 0.1% of what’s there.

What an odd claim, I haven't heard anybody say that we will "run out" of lithium, much less at a particular date.

More likely, we will stop more lithium extraction, and get most of it from recycling old batteries. 20 years from now is probably too soon for that, but 30-40 seems like it could be possible where we can circularized the lithium economy.

(Circularization assumes that per capita needs are not every increasing, and that population levels off, which seems likely to me but definitely not certain)

I heard (on here I think) that copper shortages will be a factor before lithium runs out?

We ran out of easily extractable copper a long time ago. OTOH copper is available in hard to extract, highly diluted quantities pretty much every where. It's just a matter of price.

NIO has a pretty cool battery swap tech which treats batteries like replenished fuel, over the course of the cars lifetime. The battery gets swapped many times depending on the charge levels and location.

https://joinyaa.com/guides/nio-battery-swaps-coming-to-ameri...

I kinda wish Tesla would merge with them in China.

The car companies should standardize their batteries as well and provide market differentiation on how the car makes efficient use of the power. That would eliminate a lot of waste, kinda like the USB-C standard for mobile devices. EU needs to get on this.

Not sure about reliability of battery swapping. First thing is that one needs now 2 batteries per car while one battery is being charged somewhere. It’s technically hard problem to connect and disconnect 1000s of cycles coolant lines and thick wires to the very bulky and heavy object. While it works nicely in the demos with new cars it brings huge problems in the reality after couple years.

2 batteries per car is assuming everyone is charging at the same time. In reality there are people driving their cars while batteries are being charged and new batteries being built. The batteries charge time efficiency over time also plays a role as infrastructure scales.

I wouldn't be surprised if we will see this tech in the US soon. Especially after we get back to a somewhat normal business environment with China. Next election I hope. Consumers win when they have more choice.

I'd go as far as to say it doesn't make sense except as an exceptional process, a battery upgrade or replacement due to manufacturing fault. Moving 300kg+ batteries around is just not very sensible.

Maybe it might be possible for heavy plant machinery where removing the battery and transporting it to the charger is easier than transporting the machine back to the charge point.

There is a Nio battery swap station next to my nearest Tesla station (Lier South, Norway). No idea how well it works, but it certainly does work. According to Nio they had four million battery swaps in China by the end of 2021. Of course they don't say how many problems occurred.

I'd think you'd be charging the battery as normal 80% of the time and only swap when you're for longer trip.

But yeah, that seems more viable for stuff like electric scooters/motorcycles, as the cost of infrastructure would be much lower.