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Comment by troymc | Hacker News Reader

That's true. Unfortunately, current Tesla battery packs use lithium, which isn't super-abundant in Earth's crust.

That's why companies like Ambri are looking at using other materials in the batteries they're developing for grid energy storage.

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I think it's more likely we'll see an asteroid mining economy bringing lithium for batteries on Earth than millions of 1km holes with 20 ton weights storing energy for single charges of electric vehicles.

Whatever local (i.e. small scale) energy storage we have in the future you can probably bet (from first principles) with 99% certainty it will be based on the electromagnetic force. Gravity is too weak to be practical for smaller scale storage and cannot give mobile storage units since you have to deal with huge weights. For large scale see the "pumped storage" system already mentioned in this thread. Just for illustration, the "Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station" can produce 175MW of continuous power. If you dropped the 18T weight in the 1km shaft you'd get about 13MW averaged over the 14s fall. Then you have to lift it up again if there are still enough pieces left.

Even if you found a way to store energy in nuclear interactions (i.e. "charge a nuclear battery") you don't want to have a bunch of containers full of radioactive material all over the place. If one thought it through, I wouldn't be surprised if there are in-principle issues for the charging part similar to the ones with gravity.

Since we don't know of any others, this leaves only the electromagnetic force to store energy with sufficient mass (or volume) density in practical ways. Whatever it ends up being (chemical batteries, supercapacitors or something else) the future local energy storage unit will separate and hold charges apart.

In 2011, we mined 0.2% of known lithium reserves.. This would provide over 350 years worth of lithium at current rates. Obviously usage is dramatically increasing but so will our known reserves as the overall level of demand increases. This is also without developing a method to pull the relatively abundant lithium from sea water and without recycling any lithium we're currently disposing of.

Ambri is interesting from a lifecycle and cost perspective but I don't think a lithium shortage is going to have any real impact on prices.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

That's a fine saying but even at 20% YoY increases in lithium usage, we'd still have 35 years or known reserves -- without any increase in exploration or recycling.

As oil & gas have shown, if there's exponential demand for a naturally occurring element, we'll definitely find ways to pull more of it out of the ground.

Increases in known reserves can also be exponential.

The known reserves are 13 million tonnes. However lithium is the 25th most abundant element and you get 20mg of it for every kg of crust, so there is a lot more to find.

"Everybody who has ever claimed that something is doomed because of an exponential function was wrong."

"... or dead."

"The greatest shortcoming of exponential forecasting is the S-curve."

Except all those dire predictions turned out be wrong. We didn't run out of food or resources, and birth rates have now declined in almost every country in the world. Population growth is basically now a complete non-issue. In retrospect, ignoring the Paul Ehrlichs of the world turned out to be the right move - a far cry from mankind's greatest shortcoming.

If we run out of lithium we'll figure something else out, just like we would for any other resource.

Except that then we have run out of available lithium, which means that solutions that require lithium will be inaccessible. Running out of chemical elements is a problem. The helium shortage is a serious problem. High-energy physics is made from helium.

If those physicists hurried up with cold fusion that helium shortage wouldn't be such a problem.

Why is helium found underground with natural gas? My theory is that the helium underground comes from radioactive decay and gets trapped along with methane.

-- I guess there's no need to speculate when you have Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=where%20does%20helium%20come...

We will never "run out" of anything, including oil or lithium. We'll stop wasting these resources the minute their prices rise to a level where something else becomes more economical. Regardless of when that happens, there will be plenty of lithium left for any potential fusion sources that might be developed later.

For peak storage, vanadium accumulators are well established. Lithium cells give you an advantage in density, but for peak storage you are looking at capacity first, and then you consider the footprint. With vanadium you are only limited by the size of your electrolyte tank. The additional advantage is that vanadium reserves are much greater than lithium reserves.

He's not suggesting that we use lithium battery packs. He's suggesting the idea is just plain ludicrous.

Other materials, like lead and antimony?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%...

  Lithium: 33
  Lead: 37
  Antimony: 62

Well they are more common

That table uses a mass-based unit, so wouldn't that tend to create the misleading impression that lighter elements are more scarce? Energy storage capacity depends on the number of atoms, not mass (as you can intuit by comparing lithium batteries to lead or nickel-cadmium batteries -- heavier doesn't mean more powerful).

Well, if Pb and Sb are more scarce than Li by mass, then they're even more scarce when you're counting atoms.

If Ambri's technology does pan out, it will be due to a cheaper manufacturing process, not because they're avoiding lithium.

I thought those numbers were showing that lead and antimony are more common than lithium.

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