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Comment by 93po | Hacker News Reader

There is virtually no way we will ever run out of lithium. It is massively abundant. It's just a matter of how much it costs to extract it. And we'll surely have fusion energy/abundant energy in 100 years and it will make the cost of extraction very close to zero.

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Yeah it's called a rare earth mineral because the concentration in ore is so low not because there's little of it in total.

It does unfortunately mean that you need to excavate a lot to mine it which is not great for the environment either (even though lithium is currently key to most renewable technologies)

Lithium is not a rare earth mineral. Typical weight fraction in ore is 0.5-8%.

> Typical weight fraction in ore is 0.5-8%.

The lithium mine in question is 0.22%, doesn't seem like your range is that typical.

There's also 180 billion tons of lithium in sea water, which is 1.3 million years of lithium at our current usage, and it would require no mining. It only requires electrodes in water with special coating to keep sodium at a minimum, and of course electricity. The coating is the part that's still being worked on, but they have one that that provides a 1:1 ratio of lithium to sodium.

I’m sure the nuclear physicists 100 years ago assumed the same about our fission energy output by today.

The total world energy production in 1920 was about 60 terrawat-hours. Today it's about 29,000. So while energy still costs a decent amount, there is a massive amount of it. And most of it could be fission based if society wasn't dumb.

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