Recycling lithium is typically more expensive than extracting it through mining. Recycling companies claim a recovery rate of 95-98% so certainly lithium is lost and that's ignoring that smaller batteries often don't even end up in the recycling stream. But the important bit is the cost - if it's more expensive than mining then the recovery isn't economical then either there's a government subsidy or the lithium ends up diluted in the trash stream. You'd have a point about nickle or cobalt because they're particularly valuable but lithium is not so it is effectively being consumed.
> 0.2% of global aviation fuel is already biofuels
But it's not even clear that biofuels reduce CO2 due to production, processing & transport as well as land clearing for scaling it up. [1] suggests that biofuels can actually end up emitting more CO2 than the fossil fuels they replace (for example here's an earlier study [2]). And that's ignoring the substantial scaling challenges that SAF faces on the production side. I hope it works out but the lesson with huge risky bets is that many don't pan out and all we have now is large risky bets left which makes me pessimistic we'll succeed just because we run out of oil (assuming we even do which again seems highly unlikely to me because that's not how economics works).
[1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-should-we-measure-co2-em...
[2] https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climat...
As to lithium being consumed, it’s still around we don’t actually need to recycle it to be available to humanity in the future. We’re talking hundreds to thousands of years from now before mining becomes an issue, current economic issues are largely meaningless. Unlike oil, these are the early days of the lithium economy. Making a big battery pile somewhere is perfectly reasonable form of recycling.
As noted in the MIT article:
> Since most natural ecosystems absorb and store carbon, while farmland in active use tends to produce it, this land use change can create more climate-warming pollution
Basically the land is changed from a carbon store to a carbon producer for biomass meaning you're no longer sequestering the carbon which is where you get extra carbon in the ecosystem even if you're not having any carbon in the transportation & production.
Much of the world was covered in forests for literally millions of years. Dig down a deep as roots go, count up the carbon in a given acre, and divide by a few million and you get essentially 0/year as the long term rate.
Transitions between forests and farmland basically store or release a fixed quantity per acre though it’s a slow process for deep root systems.
Oil is consumed, lithium isn’t. There’s plenty of lithium to electrify the world multiple times, but it’s just an element so you can literally recycle it for billions of years.
> You've got regulatory approvals, cost of retrofitting existing engines / figuring out how to make them drop-in without needing petroleum, etc
0.2% of global aviation fuel is already biofuels, the regulatory processes is already involved and we’re talking a 50+ year timeframe here there’s plenty of options without retrofitting existing aircraft.
As to boats, weight and volume are a non issue so they scale just fine into the 24,000 TEU behemoths. Upfront costs are prohibitively expensive though operating costs are presumably. That said, there’s many options, ships are one of the few cases where hydrogen is a realistic possibility.