It's not like fossil fuels where it is plausible that there are limited amounts. Elements are created by the same processes that formed the universe.
And all the elements in a LiFePO4 battery are exceedingly common.
This is a non sequitur. There is a limited amount of anything on Earth. The pertinent question is: can we get enough of these minerals economically to use them as storage by 2050. If it is not economical, it won't happen.
If you think extracting more than 4x the known global reserves of lithium is going to be economical, I don't know what to tell you.
Today's batteries just aren't suited for grid storage.
It was set to triple, except reasons. Still, "almost tripled" is better than "hasn't even doubled".
35K metric tonnes in 2012,
38K metric tonnes in 2016,
69K metric tonnes in 2017,
95K metric tonnes in 2018,
100K in 2021.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-...
[2] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
There's sufficient known and proven reserves to not put any pressure on proving known resources.
Why expend the capital on techical reports and economic feasibility studies to raise resources to reserves ahead of lead time on production demand?
Because for the better part of a decade, the green transition plan has been to move to solar/wind plus energy storage. The obvious question is, how many machines will we need? What kind? How much will it cost?
The author of this report described how he convinced his management to fund this work. He works at a Finnish government geological survey organization. He told his management, "Who do you think the EU leadership will blame when they realize that we don't have anywhere near the resources needed to complete the green transition as it is imagined today?"
They haven't done the math.
> Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground.
Bear in mind that "minerals being found" is when they first become "resources" (see JORC terminology which has become standard across the global mineral industry) .. when minerals have been proven (tightly estimated by volume and density) and had an Economic Feasibility Technical Report completed and filed they become "reserves" .. known amounts with a costing to extract.
Also bear in mind that mines can open much faster when there is a demand .. mines generally don't open faster unless there is a demand, now that past global supply issues and ramping production of end goods upwards you'll see mines open on proven reserves and more resources being advanced toward reserve status.
I agree with your general point about general EV resources (there's a looming Copper issue and with the processing of rare earths in general) .. but your argument here WRT lithium is overly simplified, there are political issues that weigh more on mid future lithium extraction more than known reserve issues.
- All solar panels are thin film or polysilicon from the late 2000s
- All wind and solar stations are the same size as an average pulled from a single report and "number of power stations" is a metric that matters.
- You need to put energy in a 4 week buffer of 6 year old NMC811 batteries which use double the lithium of a new one (along with nickel and cobalt even though noone would pay more for a battery that is worse at grid storage than LFP, and other chemistries have been scaling since before he started writing this) before putting it in a car battery, and this is more likely than just convincing most EV owners to leave their cars plugged in when parked by offering a discount.
- You need to put energy in the same battery before electrolysing hydrogen with it for transport or feed stock.
- Air conditioning must be able to run during cloudy days in the middle of the night in hot regions backed by the same obsolete NMC battery storage.
- All heating must be backed by batteries and not thermal storage.
- It's impossible to build pantographs, rail, or LEVs.
- That all EVs and Electric motorbikes in india, africa, and southeast asia will be long range US/EU style with built in batteries rather than the already popular battery swap systems for bikes and LEVs.
- Some incoherent mess where km/kWh is used interchangeably with kWh/km and then drivetrain and motor losses were added to get battery capacity for EVs when that was already based on their range for some reason and then multiplied by distance travelled and then thrown away.
- All shipping can only run on NMC batteries or fuel cells, and refuelling or recharging at a floating platform near one of the many areas with world class solar or wind resource you pass is less likely than giving up 75% of your cargo space for battery on short trips just in case you need to do a 25000km trip.
- Meeting demand during off season can be achieved with chemical storage alone, and not by curtailing loads that are added for that purpose such as electrolysers and multi-month thermal storage.
- Improving electrolysers or using CSP to run them or running them in good climates and transporting ammonia is impossoble.
And on top of that, the report completely rejects the idea that a nuclear fleet could meet the required power in any reasonable timescale on similarly shaky grounds. So even if we believe it, you're still completely wrong.
Unless, of course the conclusion you're trying to push is to delay the transition for a century on the faulty premise that adding renewables achieves nothing.
In the course of tracking resources we'd find ourselves dealing with four to five 300 - 2,000 page technical reports for each resource across several thousand companies spanning the globe. Come Annual report and quarterly report filing times we'd also have to deal with each company dropping several hundred pages of report and finnacials.
Prior to onselling that business to S&P some 15+ years ago we sold mineral intelligence to most of the large players in the mineral exploration and production game, from Rio Tinto and BHP down.
While I still have a large contact list I must say I've never spoken to or heard of Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux in Finland ... although I did visit Finland several decades back and was given a nice SAKO rifle system for efficiently finding a target drum of nuclear waste in a forest from 80m altitude in a two second window at 70m/sec.
Still, a great many people have written about and modelled the boom | bust dynamics of mineral exploration and production and time to life of mining operations and their retirement, etc ... specially those large organisations do this on daily basis.
That doesn't strike me as particularly constrained then - it's highly unlikely known reserves won't expand in that time or that we'll find no alternatives.
The question is: do we have enough minerals to switch to a solar/wind plus batteries energy system as a species? There is a controversial report from a mining professor who says the answer is 'not even close'. https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
The author says outright the report is not an attempt at simulating a realistic transition because it's asking first order questions: along the lines of "do we even have enough stuff to try this?". There's no attempt to ask if this is economical or logistically possible because it is not.
The author is convinced that we're all about to be much poorer because the IV drip of cheap energy that the world has enjoyed for at least 50 years is about to be ripped out. Personally, I think what's most likely to happen is that we will fail to get the world's nations to stop using fossil fuels and we will suffer the environmental consequences of that. Plus all the consequences of the resource wars that will follow. It's a shame.
I think our best chance to avoid this is to rush research on mass manufacturable gen 4 nuclear reactors. We need a factory that spits these things out so we can ship them to developing nations because otherwise, they build coal plants. I have high hopes for Thorcon. They plan to use shipyards to build annually up to 200 GW of modular shippable reactors.
Cherry picking reports from 2014 that refer to technologies from 2008 and assuming an order of magnitude more batteries than anyone is seriously suggesting of an old version of a chemistry that is never going to be used for bulk storage isn't science. It's just pathetic.
And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.
It's true he worked in Australian mining (I assume coal). The guy has been working in industrial recycling and 'circular economy' since 2015 https://www.simonmichaux.com/current-work
> And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.
We will literally never run out of fissile material.
The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades and have detailed roadmaps for overcoming the real roadblocks (which are not even issues he considers).
> We will literally never run out of fissile material.
There are no commercially viable or even prototype closed loop breeding programs and there never have been. The current stock of economically accessible fissile material is around 40,000 tonnes and each GW of reactor needs 3-20 tonnes. There are no processes with a doubling time under 10 years because spent fuel needs time to cool, so rolling out your non-existent reactor in place of renewables rather than after one or two generations still requires mining all of it.
Even in the scifi world where breeding is viable, we still need a 70-95% renewable transition to fill the 20-40 year gap.
> The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades
Here is a paper published by IEEE this year, On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research. It is a comprehensive review of the research in this field. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Section D. Raw Material Demand for 100% Renewable Energy Systems
As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits.
Hardly mastubatory, then.
Yes. There are real critical minerals, as well as real broad overviews that highlight them without going into industry specific roadmaps for addressing them.
The limits are entirely unrelated to the paper you first linked because the Michaux analysis does things like assuming all new PV will be CdTe or there will be weeks of battery storage for any electrolysers built in the form of NMC811 batteries.
Trying to conflate the former with the latter or use overviews to pretend said roadmaps don't exist is just as dishonest as your first attempt.