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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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