There are externalities to lithium ion battery production. Lithium is a finite resource and the environmental impact needs to be considered as well. Its shortsighted to only consider cost.
The li-ion externalities is mostly incurred once when mining. Although it's still in it's infancy, recycling li-ion batteries is already possible, and supposedly profitable. Especially when you can get an enormous batch of cells of exactly the same model as you would with this project.
The biggest problem in recycling li-ion batteries is that you may need different processes for different cells, so you need to sort them first.
I agree with your comment, but lithium is not mined. This is a common misconception and should be noted since we're chatting about externalities.
You are adopting implied reductionism around the "cost" side without having done the work (in my opinion) to justify that this concern outweighs the upside benefits of ceasing to use coal.
PS a lot of the minable lithium which isn't in Chile, is in Australia. So, we have low-miles lithium!
Erlich/Simons anyone?
Human ingenuity not going to stop finding extractible sources anytime soon.
Presumably that is why the same company is trying to kick off in Australia as well, even though we have higher regulatory and labour costs here.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-albemarle-exclusive...
[1] https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...
Sure, extracting copper has costs too, but I don't see the same handwringing about that.