
World Lithium Supply (2010) - julianozen
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
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ChuckMcM
As others have pointed out, Lithium mining is actually quite modest. When the
price goes up those efforts will increase. And should we begin to desalinate
sea water, one of its potential "waste products" is excess lithium.

But that said, the real "win" comes when we have capacitors which are
mechanically storing charge.

Today you have two choices, one is a "plate" capacitor which builds up a
separation of charges between two plates, limited by the dielectric constant
of the material holding the plates apart, and chemical separation of charge by
binding electrons to the atomic structure of two materials that can will
exchange electrons given the opportunity.

Mechanical storage of charge will probably involve a nanostructure of
dendrites and spheres which are filled and emptied using magnetic fields. An
early example was magnetic bubble memory which the presence or lack of charge
in a small bubble, moved through a "racetrack" by manipulating the fields
around the bubbles could be "read" or "written". If the charge carrying
capacity of the bubbles was significantly improved, one could imagine a device
where each bubble stays within the dielectric limits of carrying charge, but
the total population of bubbles holds significant charge. As with the chemical
process an internal "resistance" is present by the mechanical limitation of
pulling charge out of the device (that is the rate of chemical reaction in a
battery) but unlike a chemical battery such a device would by "fillable" at
the same rate as it was "drainable".

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jhayward
This is an interesting calculation to do but the specific example needs
improvement.

First, the calculation of the available supply is based on known, existing
reserves economically retrievable at current prices. Changes in demand will
change both the known reserve quantity and the price. Lithium is currently
about $1/kg, so there is plenty of room to grow price to increase supply
without affecting the cost of batteries. So a reasonable estimate of lithium
supply has to include both demand volume and price. Reserve growth based on
demand volume and price is a very tricky thing to forecast.

Second, the choice of 3.4 billion vehicles to "bring the entire world to North
American levels" as a goal is an unrealistic number for many reasons. Regional
economics, geography, and social density vary quite radically around the
world. The built infrastructure varies and supports many different
transportation modalities. It also doesn't take in to account changes in
technology, infrastructure, and social organisation during such a radical
transition. So a more reasonable estimate would be to simply replace all
vehicles on the road with BEVs.

Last, the note could also be improved by doing sanity checks. For instance,
could the world production capacity of any other energy storage mechanism,
including oil, hydrogen, ethanol, etc. support 3.4 billion vehicles? It's
always useful to compare what you are calculating to the alternatives.

There are currently about 1 billion cars in use in the world. Using just the
reserve numbers quoted in the article it seems economically feasible to
replace them all with Lithium chemistry battery electric vehicles.

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closetnerd
> Using just the reserve numbers quoted in the article it seems economically
> feasible to replace them all with Lithium chemistry battery electric
> vehicles.

Are you taking the efficiency of recycling lithium batteries into account? As
I understand it, recycling lithium batteries isn't that efficient, and the
average lifetime of lithium batteries, currently, is relatively low in
relation to the usable lifetime of a car.

The main point of the article seems to be about raising the very real concern
that lithium is yet another finite resource which we do need to be aware of.

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nkoren
This is a good analysis reaching a solid conclusion. The author is quite
correct that the world cannot support billions of cars using long-range
Lithium-based batteries. However, it probably will not need to.

First: most cars are used for urban journeys, and most urban journeys are
relatively short-range (roughly 12km in the US; half that in Europe). You
could have a vehicle with a 30km range and it would suffice for >95% of your
travel needs. Hydrocarbon fuels, with their high energy densities, made range
a secondary design consideration -- there was little downside to designing for
the 99.9th percentile of use cases. But range is fundamentally more costly in
battery-based vehicles, which changes the design logic. I expect both users
and the industry to recognise that it's better to design for the 95th
percentile of use-cases, and rent larger vehicles for the rest.

Second: infrastructure will be developed which mitigates/eliminates range
concerns. Things like in-road inductive charging on motorways would make
intercity travel possible even on a tiny battery.

Third: In contrast to most of the 20th century, in the 21st century, cities
are becoming denser and more walkable, public transport is generally becoming
better, and younger generations are less enamoured with the car than they used
to be. These trends don't look to reverse anytime soon.

Fourth: Cars which require drivers spend > 95% of their lives parked. Vehicles
which _don 't_ require drivers can provide taxi-like on-demand personal
transport -- but as a public mode, for a fraction of the price of an actual
taxi -- and they can be in essentially continuous service. Depending on the
nature of the demand patterns and consumer acceptance of ride-sharing, one
Robotaxi can do the job of 20-40 cars. Given the cost and convenience of such
a transport system, it can be reasonably assumed that many people would forego
private car ownership altogether, and rely on Robotaxis exclusively. While
this wouldn't take cars _off the road_ per se, it would certainly reduce
vehicle sales dramatically (while rendering parking lots anachronistic).

I expect that these trends, over the next 30-40 years, will produce a roughly
20-fold reduction in car ownership in the developed world. This will be offset
somewhat by still-rising car ownership in the developing world, but the bottom
line is that the industry is likely to shrink down to a size which the earth's
lithium supply can handle.

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swimfar
If we assume that people continue to drive the same number of miles per year,
the robotaxi concept won't actually reduce the number of cars being produced*
. (number of cars produced/year=number of people * average number of miles
driven per (person* year) * (1/average life of a car in miles) ). But it would
do two other things. It would reduce the number of cars in existence at any
given time potentially freeing up space (garages, driveways, parking garages,
street parking, etc.) for other things. Also, cars would wear out faster (in
time) which means you would shift the average age of cars on the road down. So
on average it would also increase the safety and efficiency of cars on the
road as well.

Imagine 10 people who drive 10k miles per year who own cars that last 100k
miles (just for the sake of simplicity). Right now, those people would each
own one car for 10 years. In the system you suggest they would all share one
car which would be replaced every year. So they would be driving a
(technologically) new car every year. Of course this assumes that none of them
ever want/need to drive at the same time. Perfect usage like that is not
likely, but you can see that shared usage would still have this effect (even
if it is not as large).

* Neglecting the damage to cars which is not due to driving wear, e.g. corrosion. Taking this into account we would expect to see a reduction in the production due to being able to get more miles out of a car before it "can't" be driven anymore.

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nkoren
Your formula is incorrect; time is more of a factor than mileage, when it
comes to vehicle deterioration. This is why you routinely see taxis with more
than 300,000 miles on their engines.

Furthermore, automation itself will reduce wear-and-tear. I worked on the
driverless pod system at Heathrow Terminal 5. One of the things we found was
that wear-and-tear on the system was almost negligible -- probably less than
10% of what you would see in a human-driven vehicle. This was partially due to
the fact that it was driving on a smoother surface than an ordinary roadway --
but also due to the extremely conservative and consistent acceleration/braking
behaviour which the vehicles achieved, which put much less stress on many
parts of the system. Although those are essentially hand-built prototype
vehicles, I expect them to last ~400,000 miles before requiring significant
refurbishment.

Based on these observations,I feel quite comfortable predicting a dramatic
decline in the rate of vehicle sales within the next several decades.

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wrd
The author's numbers represent a lower bound on the amount of lithium required
-- in reality, the amount of lithium required to produce all of those cars is
much greater than just what's in the car. Each processing step from lithium-
bearing ore to advanced lithium electrode materials has some yield less than
1, which quickly compounds. E.g., if there were only 10 steps between ore and
electrode material (optimistic) and each step had an average yield of 90%
(again, optimistic), then only 34% of the material in the ore would actually
make it into the electrode.

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allworknoplay
It seems weird to assume we'll be on lithium batteries for the foreseeable
future. I have twice in my career bet against improvements in battery
technology, but even I think we'll eventually get ultracapacitors working
reliably for transportation.

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api
I have wondered why a few car companies continue to work on hydrogen despite
the success of the Leaf and the Tesla and the obvious advantages of plugin
vehicles. Perhaps this is why: they don't think Li-Ion can scale in production
to meet the needs of the massive mainstream car market.

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yzh
That's why people are developing magnesium-ion batteries, which has much
higher capacity and charge-discharge efficiency.

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meesterdude
So, if we run out of lithium, what are we switching to? lead-acid?

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marcosdumay
Sodium? It may be a great alternative for applications less sensible to
weight.

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pbhjpbhj
>applications less sensible to weight //

Such as?

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marcosdumay
Uninterruptable power supplies, off-grid solar or wind installations, well I
can't think of any other, but those two are quite big already.

Such battery must compete well with lead-acid ones so they'll probably be hard
to create, but in theory they could be much better.

