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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Lithium is roughly as abundant in earths crust as Lead. A normal car’s lead acid battery has ~9kg of Lead, while a 100kWh battery pack needs ~16kg of Lithium which currently costs around 1,100$.

It’s not that Lithium is actually going to be in short supply, it simply collects in different areas.

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The difference is that it takes very little lead to make a lead acid battery because the entire car is not powered only by that battery.. that is not the case with EVs. It is estimated that it takes 500,000lbs of ore needs to be mined to get enough material for a single EV car's battery

The volume of a kg of lead and lithium is also just vastly different

In cas anyone else was curious, I just looked it up: Lead has about 21.3x the density of lithium.

Do you have a source for that estimate? Seems truly absurd. I found a source that you are perhaps misquoting: 400,000 gallons of water are used produce 1 ton of lithium from brine [1]. It also apparently takes 8 kilograms for an EV battery [2]. So 3500 gallons per vehicle.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mining-lithium-for...

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

You don't have to make lithium from brine. In Australia it's mined out of the rock, it's only South America that it's from brine.

Brines are being used in Silver Peak, NV. [1]

[1]: https://desertfog.org/aerial-of-silver-peak-nev-lithium-mini...]

https://qz.com/2156463/why-elon-musk-wants-tesla-to-start-mi...

>the average electric vehicle battery requires around 10 kg of [lithium]. In turn, 5.3 tons of lithium carbonate ore yield one ton of lithium

This would suggest that 53kg of ore would be enough to provide one car's worth of lithium.

thats wild, the idea you could fairly easily lift the ore needed to make a lithium battery. I thought electric cars were significantly heavier than ICE cars because of the battery? maybe its other minerals that make up the rest of the battery?

Yes, the bulk of the weight are metals like nickel and manganese. Lithium is a critical component but isn’t the dominant component of the battery’s mass.

The vast majority of lead used today is recycled. The rest is mined incidentally while extracting silver.

I could see this happening for lithium also. Get the quantity in global circulation to the level we need and then live off that for the future.

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