> “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...
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.
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...