This seems like a simple case of "demand increases, price increases in the short term, production increases, things balance out" -- a textbook example of how a market is supposed to work. Did I miss something?
Yes. You missed that it's an ad disguised as an article. Maybe someone need people to invest in lithium, or to make lithium based companies look good, or to divert attention to lithium from other things...
All in all, someone from an entity with a lot of money involved sent a PR guy with a story to tell to journalists. And the journalists were happy to write it down because it's interesting enough, serious enough, and doesn't require too much work.
> The next dozen years will drain less than 1 percent of the reserves in the ground
That's actually an extremely large portion for such a short length of time (this is the entire planet we are talking about). That projection doesn't paint a very sustainable future compared to oil (yes I hate oil), I hope it's efficiently recycled or replaced with better tech.
Assuming lithium reserves work anything like oil reserves, the quantity of reserves depends on market process. When oil sells for $20/bb, oil that costs more than that to extract doesn't count towards the reserves. As the price goes up, the reserves increase, because you can extract oil from more challenging circumstances. This is why we've had 20-30 years of oil reserves for the last 50 years.
That is a big assumption but yes, I understand that "reserves" != "all", and you rightly describe the interrelationship between price and what is considered "extractable".
Even so, as an initial "world reserves" estimate, it's absolutely puny. Take into consideration that past the first "dozen years" demand will increase massively, at full adoption lithium will likely be short lived as a primary material to base batteries on. We don't know the extraction potential for whatever the "remaining" and "unknown" reserves are but thankfully EVs aren't intrinsically tied to lithium like ICE is to oil, so if lithium becomes overmined we are more likely to switch to other materials than go to extremes to extract more of it.
So, it took almost 100 years until the mainstream understood what should have been blatantly obvious to anyone who thinks about it: Oh right. Oil is limited.
I mean, sure, if we search long and hard enough we will probably almost always be able to find/produce something, but I don't think asking 1 million per liter of gas would be such a great idea.
Hoping that there will always be a scientific breakthrough just "right in time" to solve our resource problems is great. I love optimism. It's also extremely irresponsible to depend on it.
Concentration isn’t the whole story though. Plastic is 100% plastic, but it’s still hard and expensive to recycle.
Lithium batteries need to be removed from their device. Then removed from their casing. Both these steps are for things made tamper proof to some degree.
Add transportation, labor and environmental [1] costs.
In general recycling of mtls used in electronic devices is dirty and expensive.
Now a car with a big battery will change a lot of these numbers. But the problem remains: we look for tech solution (i.e. e-cars) to our social problems (bad cities, “weak” ppl [2])
[1] the Chinese are increasingly reluctant to import the worlds trash.
[2] as a kid my wife used newspaper for toilet paper at an outhouse, no one owned cars and her grandparents village was a three hour walk (no roads). That’s strong. My mom drove me to school. That’s weak
Reserves means currently known. There has been little serious exploration until recently. Lithium is more common in the crust than lead, and we currently mine more lead. I'm not concerned.
I'm totally blown away by how much oil and gas we have found and those are not recyclable.
Unlike oil, lithium can be recycled in extremely high percentage.
By the time this will be a problem in 100 years, we'll have long moved to something else, like graphene or whatever.
I don't know why people are freaking out about it so much. My guess is it has to do something with oil propaganda. After all, the best myths are those that have a "seed of truth" in them. So once the oil industry started its anti-lithium propaganda, a lot of people must be thinking "well, it does ring kind of true, doesn't it?", even though their "facts" are 99% misleading.
>By the time this will be a problem in 100 years, we'll have long moved to something else, like graphene or whatever.
You know, that's not inevitable, it's more of a religious viewpoint. There's no contract humanity signed to guarantee timely delivery of scientific breakthroughs.
Because you're blindly assuming we'll have a break through in battery technology in the next 100 years. Shrugging off a shortage of lithium as a non issue because we'll just come up with something better is irresponsible.
In the history of humanity was never a case when technological advancement was doomed by a lack of a resource. Aluminium was extremely limited and valuable and no one was givinf damn and for a good reason - it does barely cost anything due to the massive technological paradigm shift. In fact, if people think about it more then five seconds, then pretty much every particle on this planet is limited and can be a potential bottleneck. Breaking news, let's all just die to protect our previous mother Earth.
I don't care about doomsday scenarios, because I kept hearing them every day, if there is anything more irresponsible then it's blind alarmism.
With a stat like "less than 1%" the order of magnitude is at least 1/10 of 1% otherwise it's an invalid format for a statistic, it's also most likely >= 0.5 because of rounding... 0 is also less than 1 so with your logic the statistic is meaningless.
Yes, all "X is less than Y" statistics are meaningless unless there the convention you mention is strongly held by journalists when they interpret studies - which is unlikely.
i.e. it'd be very easy for a study to say "we have shown that it's likely that the effect size is less than 1%" and then a journalist to interpret that as <1%, and then for a reader to incorrectly think "they wouldn't have said this if it were actually 0.1% or lower".
> can increasing scientific knowledge and technological innovation overcome any limitations to economic growth posed by the depletion of non-renewable resources?
> Stanford University economist Paul Romer has observed, "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.”
on the other hand, population does not simply add up, it multiplies. _Reason_ magazine ignores the existence of famine and war and pollution. Abundance is not a law of nature.
The reason lithium is used for batteries is that it is an excellent anode the lightest metal. Lithium will always be used for batteries that need to be light.
Sodium is not fundamentally better material than lithium, though. It's just a bit more abundant (but lithium is very abundant and can be extracted from actual ocean water, though because of lithium's abundance, that will never be the cheapest way to get lithium).
Lithium is the third lightest element and the lightest (regular) metal. Sodium is much heavier.
Battery based on aluminium theoretically can have much better capacity than lithium both per volume and per weight. But it is much harder to make batteries from it. Still there were a progress of making non-rechargeable fuel cells based on aluminium. As aluminium is safer to handle even compared with gasoline, loading/unloading few bars of it from a car should not be a problem.
We can't be sure that there won't be a breakthrough that will make all our phones and cars run on adenosine triphosphate, like everything else on this planet. But right now we have to work with what we have, and whatever knowledge and experience we thus gain will likely be useful post-unexpected-breakthroughs anyway.
In terms of energy density, maybe, but the magic of ATP is the whole process of creating it and the precision with which it is used to power things :).
Yes we can, because "breakthroughs" don't happen over night. There's often at least a decade between the first lab result and wide industrialization of technologies like these. That means you can use today's lab results to predict the "breakthroughs" in 10 years.
I'm no expert whatsoever but if there's no promising lab results currently for lighter batteries than lithium, then I doubt they'll be replaced any time soon.
A new tech may or may not replace lithium ion. But, I think that energy storage and logistics may change into a heirarchy.
The power company or energy creation things will be at the bottom. Battery's above that and then new things like super-capacitors or new types of batteries like software defined batteries. The competing technologies don't have to eliminate the other solutions they can work on side of them until they reach where they should be.
A novel idea for lithium is that much of our lithium recycling is done in other countries. If the government were to classify lithium as strategic security material, it would severely limit its exportation. Ergo retaining more of it domestically and encouraging domestic recycling. Lithium may arrive but it can never leave, so to speak.
An idea that the EU, China or any of your other large trading partners would never allow to fly for more than a split second without introducing reciprocal measures.
Can anyone comment on the feasibility/state of the art for extracting lithium from seawater?
I've found an article [0] which describes a specially made membrane which allows lithium ions to pass, but nothing larger. If it's really possible to scale this up cheaply, the supply of lithium will be constrained by the supply of power, not scarce mineral deposits.
Example: My 15" 2017 laptop has a <80Wh battery. A Nissan Leaf has around 24000Wh battery (between 24k and 40k depending on model).
A Nissan Leaf battery is on the smaller side of what many believe is required for a mass adoption EV, yet still around 300 times larger. A small Tesla Model 3 is around 50 kWh[1], over 600 times larger. A large one at 75 kWh[1], over 900 times.
I wouldn't use those words (temporary problem) since I think we should be better at recycling batteries already, but yes - once the amount increases, so does economic incentive to build recovery facilities. Tesla has said they plan to do it.
Typically when a lithium-ion battery is recycled some metal parts are extracted (the battery contains metal plates which are relatively easily separated), but the lithium usually is not as it’s a lot more complicated to extract. Economically it is a lot cheaper just to mine new lithium, so proper recycling facilities don’t often exist.
In the U.K. lithium-ion batteries are usually discarded in a landfill, and often treated as hazardous waste:
Yes. Tesla's standardization on one or two cell types allows them to build specialized machines that can efficiently and quickly disassemble and recycle the components of the cell. (EDIT: That's the idea Musk presented, at least. I do know Tesla has done some battery recycling, but I don't know if they've implemented this method at scale, yet.)
“People used to think gold was worth fightin’ over, and that shit gets made by every supernova, which means pretty much every planet around a G2 star will have some. Stars burn through lithium as fast as they make it. All the available ore got made at the big bang, and we’re not doin’ another one of those. Now that’s scarcity, friend.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn
If you wanted to invest in lithium, someone should warn you that individuals without special knowledge should not get involved with picking commodities. You'll be buying a lot of volatility with no increase in expected return.
These are the top three holdings in Global X Lithium & Battery Tech ETF (https://www.globalxfunds.com/funds/lit), together composing about 43% of that fund's holdings.
There was another quote in TFA about the potential to over build mining capacity and flood the market.
But sure, buy this and hope it "surges" more than the general market. Given that billions of devices already have lithium cells in them and the historical performance of the Lithium ETF is still quite disappointing compared to the broader market, I wouldn't hold my breath that this time is any different.
The potential returns are enormous, but so are the risks. Remember any number of things could disrupt the price, from novel battery tech, to new mining opportunities. That’s the long term, the short term is just crazy.
an efficient market is a model that assumes the same information is available for all players, so don't put too much weight on it. it's an approximation that's sometimes useful.
Through what mechanism could a market know about the future? The market isn’t God or an oracle. It’s just a bunch of actors going back and forth.
You and I can’t predict the future, why would averaging out guesses be any better?
And if we’re both using the average of our initials guesses to correct our guesses, then the spread is reduced.... which looks like less uncertainty when in fact nothing fundamental has changed!
What the market is very good for is as a heuristic to solve the NP hard problem of how much to produce. (Misses first worked on this and then Hyek got the bank Of Sweden prize in economics).
It might cost more, but it’s certainly abundant; we’re not going to run out of it. No I would even go so far as to say that a rise in the price of terrestrial lithium would be a good thing. In the short term it will hurt, but there’s a lot of runway in that graph before we hit serious scarcity. As the price rises I could honestly see someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos finally astroid money off the ground. I don’t have much hope for Mars in our lives, but asteroid mining absolutely could happen.
This could be a safe source of pressure, partly political if people realize it will be easier to move in space than Afghanistan, to make that happen. For those of us you dreaming of a future for the species beyond Earth, I think this might be the realistic start.
Correct! However, since lithium is abundant, there are so many other cheaper sources of lithium (for instance, geothermal brines) that ocean extraction will never be the cheapest source (although it is sufficiently cheap if it were the only option).
At what environmental cost? How many gallons/sec are you processing, how much energy is used per gram of Li? Without burning fissile fuels or building expensive new nuke plants, how will it work?
mining asteroids in our lifetimes would primarily be useful for harvesting raw materials for constructing things in space, not sending the materials back down to earth.
It may be useful for some raw materials - for example, osmium ($13,000/kg), rhenium ($2,750/kg), and iridium ($30,000/kg). All three of those are elements that are probably common in the Earth's mantle, but nowhere near the surface, and are mostly found in meteorites; all of them are used in high-performance alloys (high-temperature, corrosion-resistant, etc.)
Doubling the world production of any of these would greatly reduce the prices of aerospace engines and electronics (iridium is used for crucibles growing high-quality semiconductor crystals). And that's easy, because the quantities involved are so low - under 1 ton of osmium per year, 10 tons of iridium, and 40 tons of rhenium.
There are other materials like that. It's all about searching for the competitive advantage, the materials that can't be found on Earth in reasonable quantities. All the nickel and iron and titanium will indeed probably stay up for in-space use.
That really depends on the assumptions you’re making about why it’s done. Large scale mining for building materials and fuel requires an existing space industry for demand. Saving on Dv only makes sense if you have something proven so out there... like mining. Either way there needs to be a truly enormous initial investment in propulsion, and so much more. Making an absolute fortune, and/or breaking foreign control over vital resources could be the key to getting that funding.
Not necessarily. In the near term, mining asteroids means mining near-Earth asteroids, not those from the belt.
The changes we'll need to make to propulsion systems are more about their operations - we need more types of engines that can be frequently shut down and restarted.
You need to first send equipment to do the mining and sending back - that part is very expensive, and if it's only to be used for sending stuff back to Earth (safely), then mining in space has very bad returns.
Asteroid mining is absolutely awesome if you move as much of the process as possible to space - every kilogram you use up there to build something is a kilogram you didn't have to launch upwell.
What you'd really want to do is develop a working zero (natural) gravity solar-furnace process that works.
It'd probably involve some kind of centrifuge design... but I wouldn't rule out just making something screaming hot and then suddenly introducing kinetic energy.
Then there are two main options...
A) Make a crude re-entry shield out of the waste products + some of those other resources you're not keen on harvesting for the primary use of sending to earth, and you put a nice candy core in the middle. Aim the landing trajectory at some shallow ocean.
B) Taking things UP in to orbit is expensive. Taking them back down is probably less so, though our current vehicles aren't based on completing that task so they'd need to changed to handle cargo both ways.
Option C could also be fun... if we ever get space elevators working things could go a lot like in science fiction. (The orbital elevators and start of a planetary ring from Gundam 00 jumps to mind as a reference; 3001 also had the idea much earlier but in less detail)
You've got to find a way to go from over 20,000k per second to stationary on the ground. For any worthwhile mass of asteroid you bring back to Earth, it's going to require one hell of a heat shield during reentry.
So maybe you leave the heat shield in orbit, but you've still got get it there.
I think space mining becomes possible when you're no longer cornered by the rocket equation. That is, it's going to require a breakthrough in propulsion systems.
> I think space mining becomes possible when you're no longer cornered by the rocket equation. That is, it's going to require a breakthrough in propulsion systems.
I think near-Earth space mining and manufacturing is what can help us get over that limit in some way - LEO is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System ∆v-wise, so whatever part of your mission you don't have to lift upwell makes for huge savings in fuel (and for many missions, you can use weaker and more efficient engines once you're on a stable orbit).
I imagine that platinum will be the most important metal mined from asteroids and returned to Earth. Thick platinum shielding should hold up well on atmospheric entry.
I don't see how asteroid mining can be viable economically. You still need an enormous quantity of petrol to send things in space and judging by the rarefaction of said petrol its price is bound to increase a lot.
Cryogenic engines burn hydrogen from electrolysis and their fuel can be produced from renewable resources. All their atmospheric fuel is returned to the ocean by the water cycle, so little fuel is lost to the vacuum. Engine tuning limits greenhouse emissions. Magnetic projectiles can reach escape velocity with the right design.
Instead of one giant rocket, imagine swarms of small, reusable, low-emission projectiles whose payloads assemble into larger apparatuses in space.
It's irresponsible to say that you want something to become absolutely more expensive just so some other amusing method of production becomes comparatively less expensive. The idea behind solving problems is to make life better, not make live hard so it can be made almost as good as before.
This is why the imperialists countries like USA, Britain, France etc are going to foment war in countries like Congo where people live like animals and work for peanuts to dig out cobalt:
Let's make a million dollars no matter who dies. It aggravates me that I don't see any comments here relating to what is happening in Congo and all the multinationals supported by the all good US/Britain/France etc. Why do you think the arena of war is being shifted to Africa? Are you ready to wake up? Or do you care about what is happening as long as you have a new toy/mobile to play?
You are not comparing the harms in this poorly-written Daily Mail article to any alternative.
Fossil fuels have disastrous harms for people, communities, and ecosystems. In order to show that cobalt mining is worth avoiding, you have to show why it is worse than the alternative it helps to replace. In this case, the cobalt (about 15 lbs per car) would replace gasoline consumption. I would be compelled to believe that, per car's worth of material and emissions, the net harms of the gasoline supply chain and exhaust effects on the environment outweigh the net harms of cobalt mining.
If we specifically want to speak about the dirty geopolitics of fossil fuels, that would be a several-days-long conversation. Countries with large oil reserves or where oil is a large contributor to GDP include Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria. The oil economy solidifies autocrats and corrupt systems in these countries.
Pretty sure that if you want a mineral cheap, you'll want there to be peace, not war. Extracting something in the middle of a war zone is super expensive.
If anyone is intentionally fomenting war because of cobalt or oil or whatever, it's because they want that mineral or commodity to be expensive, not cheap.
That would help explain oil interests wanting to foment war in the Middle East. The idea is to /prevent/ the Middle East from cheaply extracting oil, thus increasing the price of oil.
I actually don't doubt the Daily Mail about this particular story. Mining abuses in Africa include some of the worst crimes committed by Western civilization (vide: the concept of "Western Civilization" may be outdated), over things some of us in technology would consider essentially valueless today.
Chocolate is almost as serious a concern as cobalt and diamond. The legacy of colonialism created a food and infrastructure vacuum in Africa which is typically filled by mineral extraction and labor exploitation.
I feel exactly the same and am amazed by how readily some people invest their money into and anticipate owning products that are based on slavery and other kinds of suffering as well as the destruction of our planet.
