> 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.