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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

"Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various alternative chemistries are being explored which could help in different ways."

Lithium is abundant as far as its total share in the Earth's crust goes, but it is my impression that mineable concentrations are rather rare, unless you are willing to spend obscene amounts of energy on purification. That is why only a few countries in the world actually produce lithium commercially.

We have some reserves of lithium in Czechia, but they would only be economically mineable if the bulk price rose significantly (as in, ten times or so), plus the mining methods would introduce a lot of poisons into the environment. Mining is usually seriously dirty.

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Until recently, there wasn’t much demand for lithium. That’s the main reason for limited mining, in my opinion.

The cost of lithium was 9% of the cost of a lithium ion battery cell according to one analyst last year. Battery packs cost more than just the sum of the cells.

If lithium rises in price, it will affect battery prices, but a 10x increase would “only” double the cost of the battery cells, and the packs would be slightly less affected than that.

Realistically, there should be plenty of lithium for less than that, but it takes time to ramp, and lithium mining does not have to be destructive. The mining can be as simple as evaporation ponds in the desert[0]. (You’ll need refining either way.)

https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-24-the-big-picture-lithium-...

What is the origin of the claim that lithium makes up 9% of the cost of a battery cell? Anode material is the majority of the cost, according to this: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

In reality it's 50% of the cost, so a 10X increase in input price would amount to a 5x increase in cost. Battery production has become a resource extraction problem.

https://www.newsweek.com/precious-metal-values-are-raising-b...

> In 2021, lithium comprised 9 percent of the cost of a battery cell. Nickel represented 12 percent of the cost. But for 2022, those numbers have risen to 13 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

I had just glanced at the Google summary, so I only saw the first part. Call it 13%, then.

It is not anywhere close to 50%. The cathode is made of more than just lithium. 50% is an incorrect interpretation of the graphic in the article you linked.

Great, so we have to solve shortages of lithium and nickel. Nickel's cost is also up ~3x over the past few years: https://ycharts.com/indicators/nickel_price#:~:text=Nickel%2....

My point remains: battery production has become a resource extraction problem. Even completely optimizing manufacturing to the point that it costs nothing would only reduce the cost of batteries by a quarter.

Which just shows that you don’t understand commodity pricing. If gold was as common and accessible as lithium, gold would be a lot cheaper.

What don't I understand? Ultimately price is determined by supply and demand. Gold's supply relative to its demand sets its price. If some massive load of goal was dumped on the market, we'd expect a downswing with increased supply and no commensurate increase in demand (although gold being bought by speculators might distort this).

We're seeing a big upswing in lithium demand, mostly for EVs. And supply isn't catching up leading to higher costs, which will in turn lead to higher prices and consequently lower demand. Unless greater supply is secured or demand is reduced, this increase in price is going to persist.

And tautologies will persist in being tautologies.

Higher prices will result in investment in increased production, shift of demand to lower-priced alternatives, and investment in alternatives. Increased investment results in cheaper and larger production of everything.

Unobtainable lithium is a strange choice of hill to die on.

Increased investment does indeed incentivize the exploitation of less accessible reserves that would not otherwise be profitable. But those higher prices have to be sustained to keep those additional operations profitable. If prices goes down, those mines close and diminished supply pushes prices back up to equilibrium.

It's not unobtainable lithium I'm worried of. It's difficult supplying 50x as much lithium over the next couple decades with no significantly increase prices.

> But those higher prices have to be sustained to keep those additional operations profitable.

That is not, in fact, the case. A higher price need persist only long enough to pay the capital cost of developing the resource. The millionth ton is routinely much cheaper to extract than the first ton.

And, of course, we don't need 50x lithium production in any case. That is your private fantasy. No, thank you, not buying.

If the predicate is that mining of a commodity cannot ever expand, the how is building new nuclear supposed to work? Where does the Uranium and Gadolinium for fuel rods come from?

> The mining can be as simple as evaporation ponds in the desert[0]. (You’ll need refining either way.

The OP you are replying to lives in Czechia, they are not blessed with optimal location. Most of the world isn't.

The optimal location is a paradox, it is a desert, At the same time it has to have abundance of water for extraction and evaporative pools. Very few locations have that. Extracting from non-optimal locations costs more.

like 4 people are trying to explain this to you, but you keep repeating the same thing

I'm pretty sure it has almost exclusively been one person that has been explaining, and they have received numerous rebuttals from other people, but okay.

And no, I did not suggest the person I was replying to should do this in Czechia. Every country doesn't need to mine every resource. Thanks for throwing in a strawman.

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