Comment by hwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hwillis | Hacker News Reader

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Misleading way of looking at it. Lithium and sodium are not the major cost (or weight, or volume) inputs to making batteries, and crustal occurrence is very distantly related to cost. We mine things from places with 100x-1mx higher concentrations than natural. Water concentrates lithium into brines and clays for us. Sodium's low density causes it to create massive domes underground that are extremely recoverable. In contrast many metals aren't naturally concentrated.

Lithium batteries aren't made of lithium. They're made of nickel- or iron, or manganese, or cobalt. In iron and manganese batteries the #1 price factor is the manufacturing- the energy, solvents, and machinery used to deposit materials onto film.

Likewise sodium batteries are not made of sodium. There's 13x more iron in them than sodium. There may also be large amounts of manganese or vanadium. The cost of manufacturing is also higher per kWh.

Lithium batteries are made of lithium to a point that there is a lithium supply bottleneck if we want to use lithium-ion batteries as the base chemistry for the green transition.

It will take time to mass produce things regardless, but I imagine Sodium has far fewer bottlenecks.

There is no lithium bottleneck, we merely haven't even bothered to catalog all the lithium that is easily accessible.

Yes and: No long term shortage with occasional short term crunches. Mostly due to lag time bringing new supplies online.

Like with every commodity market.

The lithium bottleneck idea comes from people who go "looking at the current lithium supply we would run short if we instantly started producing 10x as many batteries as we do today", completely ignoring how markets work.

It's great if we can get a chemistry that avoids the need for lithium, but it won't be a showstopper if we don't.

Lithium is still part of the cost of producing batteries and their production still requires a large number of lithium mining operations. Having a ton of lithium mines around isn't exactly what's destroying the planet, but having fewer would be more better.

This sort of misses the point of sodium ion batteries though, no? One of the main objections to lithium ion batteries is the need for cobalt because of how it's sourced through "artisanal mining" in Africa.

LFP has no cobalt.

And can be regularly charged to 100%, and lasts for a greater number of charge cycles.

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