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Comment by hallway_monitor | Hacker News Reader

This seems suspiciously high. Even 60,000 tons would almost double the global supply. I would be surprised if this turns out to be accurate.

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Lithium is not actually rare. I think this is a big source of continuing confusion in discussions on battery-electric electric vehicles (of all types: bikes, cars, trucks, buses, vans, airplanes, ships, trains, etc) and renewable energy (grid storage).

Production capacity equals demand, roughly. That should not be surprising as production capacity costs money and you don't invest in more production capacity than you have demand. Proven reserves ALSO are some fairly low multiple of demand, for related reasons.

Cobalt however.... To a lesser degree Nickel is being stressed as well.

It's why LFP chemistry is so important. If that can handle mainstream use cases (commuter cars, medium range busses/trucking, etc) then BEV scaling to the entire economy becomes a lot more feasible.

LFP is well suited for stationary applications, since its energy density isn't as high as LiIon. I know Tesla uses it in some of their non-US EVs, but those are pretty range limited. The battery system on my house uses LFP cells. They're also extremely thermally stable, and don't require any cooling systems.

LFP's lower energy density is at least partially made up for by its higher packing density. Other Li-ion chemistries need "firewalls" to prevent catastrophic propagation of thermal failure, but LFP cells can be packed tightly without such barriers.

It’s fine for 250 miles range entry level electric cars. That’s equivalent to top of the line 5-10 years ago. Barely qualifies for “pretty range limited.”

That's fair. I don't think there are yet entry level (sub $20k) 250 mile EVs in the US yet are there?

No, but I think an LFP battery could help enable one.

It’s 20,000 tons in stage 1 which is still huge.

https://investingnews.com/company-profiles/controlled-therma...

Hell’s Kitchen is expected to have a minimum 30 year life. Stage 1 of production is slated to begin in 2023, with a 20,000 tonnes per annum lithium hydroxide facility along with the generation of 49.9 megawatts of renewable energy from the integrated geothermal power plant.

And there is about 99% change they will not reach that. The amount of Lithium projects that have not reached there targets in the last decade is amazing. Even the expansion plans of the 'big' lithium producers have been massively delayed.

There has never been a single geothermal lithium project that was actually successful.

“Could” and “will do so very shortly” aren’t mutually exclusive.

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