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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

> we are not short of any of those materials

For the most part you are correct. But building the mines, refining, supply chains, etc takes time. So you are perhaps missing one of the main points I was trying, maybe unsuccessfully, to make: we need to deal with the 'right now' and not just worry about how we'll be fine in 50 years.

Lithium is a perfect example. We have plenty in the ground. We don't have plenty of mines. We should be allocating Li carefully until those issues are resolved in 5-10 years.

If we only base our energy policy on how things will be in a decade we will delay the transition while inflicting maximum pain on the population(energy and food shortages, rampant inflation, lower standard of living, etc).

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> We should be allocating Li carefully until those issues are resolved in 5-10 years.

Well intentioned policy like this can have the reverse effect.

If you limit lithium usage you will limit demand, which can reduce the effort expended to build new mines.

Did I suggest that? I mean we should be realistic about Li availability and incentivize its usage appropriately.

In fact, we do not have "plenty" of lithium. There's not enough lithium in the world to put in all the batteries for all the EVs we'll need to replace ICE vehicles. This is entirely orthogonal to the fact that recycling lithium ion batteries is expensive, difficult, and potentially dangerous in the case of any type of mishap.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...

That article mentions "reserves" 5 times and cost/price not once. Same type of articles were written about peak oil and then the price of oil went up and magically reserves grew as it be came profitable to find and extract new sources of oil.

That's because reserves are what matters. I don't care if there's billions of tons of lithium at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, nobody's ever going to go get it because it's too dangerous, difficult, and expensive. The same thing with space mining. Nobody's going to go mine asteroids because it's stupidly expensive. For all intents and purposes, if we can't get to it, it doesn't exist.

And let's not forget about all the problems that "innovative" methods of oil extraction such as fracking have created, over and above the fact that it's provided more oil to burn. Lithium mining itself is already an environmental disaster, and it seems highly unlikely that increased demand for the product is going to improve the environmental impact of extracting it. You know, tragedy of the commons and all. The fact that "peak oil" came and went is not a capitalist success story.

You seem not to understand what "reserves" actually means.

It does not exclude easily accessible material. It only excludes material not assessed yet because there has been no need to, as existing reserves will last more than long enough to perform further surveys.

Not at all. If there were billions of dollars worth of whatever on the bottom of the Mariana trench, people would build advanced technology to extract these billions, without any further incentives than the market demand.

A comparable case in point: commercial space launch companies. Arguably, commercial large-scale aviation, too.

Well, that brings us back to earlier in the thread.

It's not only about money-expensive. If it gets more energy-expensive to produce/store/route/... energy than the amount of energy we end up with in the end, the game is over.

So, in practice, there are limits to reserves. There is, of course, the possibility that these limits can change with new technologies, which in turn depends on money-cost as you mention.

If you go to the source of that claim, you'll see that it's basically about proven reserves, using current tech and know how, basically how we did it for oil, when we were supposed to run out of oil in 1872, 1919, 1960, etc.

We've just started looking for the thing at the scales we need it now, prospecting and extracting and processing it will improve.

But we do have more than enough sodium, and sodium-ion batteries could be "good enough" for most applications with technology advancement.

Maybe, but I am skeptical. Do you know when lithium ion batteries were invented? Okay, truthfully, neither do I, because accounts vary, depending on what you mean by "invented" and "lithium ion battery," but it was definitely in the 1970s. The first prototypes were created in the mid 80s, and commercial introduction wasn't until 1991. This stuff is all up on Wikipedia, so you can just look it up if you doubt it.

Even if the research is being done, we've got decades before something commercially viable comes out. The need exists now. Anything that isn't essentially ready to go by 2030 probably isn't going to do squat to help us.

CATL (the biggest EV lithium-ion battery manufacturer in the world) has announced last year that it will bring sodium-ion batteries to market in 2023. We'll see. The technology is in many ways similar to lithium-ion, so more rapid advances are not surprising, especially considering the amount of investment being made compared to the 80s and 90s.

Lithium is 0.002% of the Earth's crust. The Earth's crust weighs 2.77 * 10^22 kg. Each car needs about 30kg of lithium. Therefore we have enough lithium for about 2*10^15 cars.

Yes, we're going to liquify the earth's crust and efficiently extract all the lithium...

Please do not post low-quality, shallow, dismissive remarks. If you have meaningful information to offer, post that instead. If not, don't.

Why not post this to Op instead, after they posted a comment full of irrelevant information? The actual amount of Li found in the crust is irrelevant.

The quantity of Li in the crust is directly relevant. It provides an overwhelmingly more meaningful measure than "reserves", which only identify how much is in the next place people will dig when their current seam is tapped out.

What the number shows is that there is no possibility of ever tapping out all available lithium, no matter how many batteries are manufactured. Once the world is saturated, used-up batteries will become the main source for materials to build new batteries from.

The more immediate limitation is rate of manufacture of batteries, because building battery factories takes a long time.

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