Chart: Lithium prices are through the roof this year | Hacker News Reader

Chart: Lithium prices are through the roof this year

canarymedia.com

49 pointsorangebanana170 comments

The graph shown in the article is based on yearly averages, and has one data point per year. I was curious whether the price spike had anything to do with the invasion of Ukraine, so I found a better graph[1]. Turns out the answer is no. Lithium prices rose dramatically through the autumn and winter of 2021, and hit their peak in late March of 2022.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

I am hoping for Sodium based batteries breakthrough more than increased lithium mining. All those static grid storage don’t need weight advantages of lithium. Neither home storage.

Iron flow batteries are already in commercial use. For example: https://essinc.com

The 'cells' cost practically nothing to manufacture and utilize a membrane already common in lithium ion battery manufacturing, and there's nothing dangerous or toxic in the battery system. It's iron (in various oxidation states), salt, and water.

It's been a while since I looked at the whitepapers (which they've since pulled) but I think the secret sauce was how they managed the electrolyte's pH level.

What is the energy density of these batteries? Last time I checked, it was infeasible to replicate something like a powerwall in even 10x the volume. Which means it is a non-starter for EV.

GP says "All those static grid storage don’t need weight advantages of lithium. Neither home storage." so it might have been in that context, thus not relevant to EV

Nickel-Zinc is probably closer to reality. Sad that there’s so little talk about NiZn batteries.

Because the dendrite problem has not been solved, and specific weight and efficiency is lower than lithium. (descending order of problems IMO).

It has been solved in modern cell designs. A lot of this is just outdated criticism.

For stationary energy storage, you don't need li-ion batteries at all.

That's what every company says, until they're in the field for a while then start dying.

Also, nickel is worse than lithium (metal) in about every way, so lifepo4 batteries are better on every dimension than NiZn: specific capacity, environmental impact, lifespan, specific power...

These problems seem to be really solved now. They’ve already are in the field and none of those doomsday scenarios seem to be happening.

NiZn batteries are actually recyclable, where as LiFePO₄ batteries are not.

You're ignoring that they are worse on every metric but below-freezing charging than lithium batteries:

NiZn: 70 to 85Wh / kg

Lifepo4: > 180

NiZn: 1000 charge-discharge cycles

Lifepo4: 3000 cycles

NiZn: significant self-discharge

Lifepo4: negligible self-discharge

NiZn: nickel is more expensive than all the metals in lifepo4 and more environmentally damaging to extract

There's nothing good about them, even if the dendrite problem was solved (which I doubt).

Lifepo4 can be recycled just fine, provided there's actually enough of them to be recycled, which won't be for a long time since they last so long.

NiZn almost certainly cheaper than LiFePO₄, at least once they get to scale. Problems like self-discharge or cycle-life likely vary depending on cell design. I'm sure you can design a cell that has less of these problems. It is also much easier to recycle than LiFePO₄ batteries, which is a big advantage. LiFePO₄ are basically never recycled in practice.

Should be noted that no one is suggest that NiZn is the end-all be-all battery chemistry. It is just a neat idea that is worth investing in, and will work in a lot of circumstances.

Nickel is $12/lb, lithium $31/lb.

Nickel atomic weight is 59, lithium is 7. $12 * 59/7 == $101

There's one electron per nickel atom and one electron per lithium atom. Nickel is 3x more expensive than lithium on that basis alone. The only useful place I see for NiZn is drop-in replacement for alkaline cells, not mass storage. Nickel is the one of the most expensive part of lithium batteries: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/08/nickel-price-surge-could-thr...

I'm not sure where you get the idea that it is cheaper.

> LiFePO₄ are basically never recycled in practice.

Because they haven't reached end-of-life yet. No one is going to recycle perfectly good batteries.

In static service even lead-acid batteries are great.

Poor efficiency and limited lifespan, ongoing maintenance costs drive the costs up. Lithium iron phosphate is cheaper unless you don't use the batteries (i.e. emergency standby).

Note that the Tesla Powerwall is already quite heavy: 97 kg (250 lb). A sodium based battery will double that, which would make the logistics of transport and installation harder. So weight is not totally irrelevant for home storage.

Expect groups with lithium claims to interfere with cheaper competitive elements.

Every single pumpjack well in Texas is pulling up brine water extremely rich with lithium that could be cheaply extracted with evap pools. It just hasn’t been profitable until now. Lithium typically isn’t mined like gold, silver or diamonds, with a handful of exceptions.

Oh, OK, so expect the oil companies to interfere with alternatives then.

Ideally, you'd buy these wells from O&G companies at distressed prices using ESG funding and repurpose them for lithium production.

You actually don't even need to buy the well. Currently they pay to haul the brine water away and reinject it into a disposal well.

A quick google search suggests that sodium is 1000x more abundant than lithium. Will distressed prices be 1000x lower?

I think that it's going to be hard to interfere that way, they'll be too busy making money hand over fist from lithium.

The grid storage market, which sodium would serve, tends to be far more price sensitive since the storage is not attached to a massive amount of other tech that is sold primarily based on marketing and emotion, which is what sells cars. Grid storage is pure industrial economics.

I bet lithium miners and lithium battery manufacturers will be happy to hand over the grid storage market for the next decade, as vehicle battery demand will keep far ahead of vehicle battery supply.

This is how the free market works. Sky rocketing price of lithium is the world screaming to entrepreneurs, “Hey! We need lithium!” And the supply will increase to meet the demand, or substitutes will be found for use cases where the price is too high.

The free market unfortunately responds quite slowly in capital intensive markets like lithium (or oil).

Which is working-as-intended, because the market needs to remain in disequilibrium long enough for entrepreneurs to reap the windfall profits to finance the large capital investment. If the market responded instantly, the price would drop quickly, no profits would be generated, and the capital would've been misallocated into an industry with no payoff.

This is the market saying "It's going to take a significant amount of effort to fix this problem. Is it really such a big problem that it's worth sacrificing all the other things that capital could've been invested into?"

More unfortunately, planned economies respond even slower.

It depends on how well they are planned and who's doing the planning. Tesla leaadership has a clear understanding that access to raw materials will be a key challenge in the next 15 years in the move to battery storage based technologies.

Is it really free if we are dependent on the benevolence of a handful of countries? At least lithium has the potential to kickstart a circular economy (recycling).

And in the meantime, capitalists like Musk threaten to coup “whoever they want” for their lithium, worsening conditions and tightening control over the global south

for the HN readers who aren't clued in to everything Elon Musk says over the last two years, i believe parent is referring to this tweet (AFAICT Elon deleted the original, hence screenshot): https://twitter.com/panoparker/status/1318157559266762752

"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." (2020/07/25) -- topic being a coup in Bolivia for their lithium.

i have no background in this situation. personally, i think it's a little ridiculous to allude to this sort of thing and just expect that readers know wtf you're talking about.

Could you give some examples of coups for resources other that oil?

Bananas, hence the term "banana republic".

Plenty in the mid 20th century in South America, etc over agricultural resources.

Hawaii too.

Why are you omitting coups for oil? They are still coups?

Sigh, that tweet was a joke. It was clearly a joke, come on.

We live in a post-joke world now.

Just like his first tweet about buying Twitter?

You mean couping Twitter.

An electric car uses 5 - 30 kg of Lithium, which can be recycled. A gas car uses 25 tons of gasoline, which can't.

Important to note that the lithium does not provide energy, it merely stores it. A lithium battery is equivalent to a gas tank, not to gas itself.

Exactly, it's such a massive improvement over oil pumping infrastructure, which requires absolutely massive and complex and expensive logistics to move around all that physical material. Pushing electrons is superior in pretty much every way.

This weekend had to take the gasoline car for the first time in a long time, and along the way I had to stop and get gas. After months of always having a full charge from the comfort of home, pulling off the freeway to fill up and deal with all that messy infrastructure felt incredibly primitive.

Ideally I could live my life with only occasionally driving in a year. Second best will be switching to full electric. Gas cars and gas infrastructure can not die fast enough. It's like steam engines or horses.

You do realize how much of the world's energy is produced by fossil fuels / chemical energy, right? The electrons don't materialize out of thin air. The energy still has to come from somewhere. And if the world's gas-powered auto fleet were to switch to electric overnight, we'd have blackouts for decades because we do not have the raw power generation capability to make up for that much energy deficit. Nevermind the massive amount of lithium and cobalt mining necessary to do so. That just gets us to square zero. You also need to build nuclear power plants, massively, in order to make up for it. But we're led by complete idiots who didn't see this coming 6 months or 6 years ago.

I gotta tell you, I travel 50K+ miles a year, and stopping every two hours for 30 minutes to fill up my car would be a primitive nightmare not much better than riding a horse. I also cannot envision an emergency infrastructure built on electric in its current form. What are you going to do, run ambulances and fire trucks on electric, when the power grid goes out during a natural disaster and people need help the most?

At any rate, I'm actually pro-electric hybrids. I think hybrids make the most sense of any tech I can imagine, but no one seems to really want to invest in the concept. My roommate had a Volt for a while and it seemed to be the best of both worlds (charging for inner city transport, with gas as a backup for longer distance travel). Until batteries get probably about 2-3 times more dense in storage capacity, there's no way they can supplant gas cars and diesel powered semi trucks.

And we should still be massively expanding nuclear power supply, 10 years ago.

>I gotta tell you, I travel 50K+ miles a year, and stopping every two hours for 30 minutes to fill up my car would be a primitive nightmare not much better than riding a horse.

I've seen people drive 250km per day on a 150km battery with public charging, this is literally the worst EVs have to offer and they are getting better every single year. If anything, it makes even more sense for people like you to get an EV because the saving potential is so high to begin with. Yes, you might need a super fancy EV dedicated to your specific driving pattern but who cares?

50,000 miles a year is about 200 miles a day assuming you're driving 250 days a year. If you get a car with 300 mile range that's only once a day. Just plug in overnight and you will spend approximately 0 minutes per year filling your car.

It seems that you are just reciting a long litany of pre-canned arguments that have told to you in order to maintain the status quo. For example:

> You do realize how much of the world's energy is produced by fossil fuels / chemical energy, right?

Assuming I'm ignorant of the current energy infrastructure is a weird thing to say when I point out in my very comment.

> The electrons don't materialize out of thin air. The energy still has to come from somewhere.

Yes and even passing familiarity with the world of energy shows that electrification of everything is going to be so economically efficient that it's unavoidable.

> And if the world's gas-powered auto fleet were to switch to electric overnight, we'd have blackouts for decades because we do not have the raw power generation capability to make up for that much energy deficit.

First, the idea of an overnight switch is ridiculous and uninteresting point to make, the entire point of the original article is that we have massive lithium price spikes, and we are barely into the transition.

...

> Until batteries get probably about 2-3 times more dense in storage capacity, there's no way they can supplant gas cars and diesel powered semi trucks.

This is again completer disproven by what's happening in the market right now. Maybe 10 years ago you would have been able to say this with a straight face but you'll need to update your list of talking points now.

> And we should still be massively expanding nuclear power supply, 10 years ago.

If you look at the nuclear plants we were constructing 10 years ago, and where they are now, you will see that we dodged a massive bullet by not building nuclear then. The time to build nuclear might have been the 1980s, but around then nuclear has already been massive over-ordered, and we would have needed EVs or heat pumps something like that to start shifting more of our load to electric.

Since the 1980s, construction productivity has barely changed, whereas manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof. So in 2010, building nuclear, a construction project, was in incredibly risky proposition. And it failed miserably, saddling South Carolina electric customers with something like $20-$40/month extra on their bill for decades, for a project that will never be finished.

Nuclear is a dead tech, unless SMRs come in significantly under their projected costs, or if they can somehow drastically cut their manufacturing costs early in the late 2030s or 2040s. By then we will have an extra two decades of cost drops in solar/wind/storage too, so it is hard to imagine SMRs dropping at a faster rate. But you can't count them out entirely.

you’re comparing the fuel to the tank . how much fuel is spent to put energy into the lithium ?

I'm heading off the criticism that electric cars aren't green because of resource mining. But compared to gas cars...

And to answer your question: none. New electricity generation capacity in the States is expected to be carbon negative over the next two years because of retiring coal. We're adding mostly renewables, but some NatGas too. However, the duty cycles of NatGas generators are expected to decline as they switch to a peaking role as renewables cover base energy.

Every time I hear new "country/state X achieved Y% of renewable power generation for Z hours", it's usually during warmish sunny weekeds (usually sundays) with relatively low power use and high sun and wind generation.

If we switch eg. 30% of the current cars to electric, and most people charge them in the evenings/during the night, the math for renewables is a lot different, and without building nuclear, totally unsustainable.

Please show that math. There's no math that can justify capital costs of $20B and a 20 year delay for 1.5 GW of capacity.

Especially since wind power is stronger at night than during the day, and it's trivial to tell electric cars to charge when it's cheapest to do so.

Reduce corruption maybe?

In slovenia (back then yugoslavia), in the 1970/80s with all the communist bullshit and bureaucracy we built one in 6-7 years, and it still works.

Wouldn't that be nice! If we can fix that we could build subways and high speed rail for a reasonable price too! But not even China can build reactors in a timely fashion for a good price. It takes them over 10 years and about $10B per.

You'd have to build a lot more wind turbines while you switch cars to electric, and/or invest in some grid scale storage.

yes. And?

The math doesn't change at all, you just need to build things so that supply keeps up with demand. It's not rocket science.

natgas is not carbon free so not sure where you get to carbon negative in 2 years

According to projections, we'll have more natgas capacity, but the plants will be running less often because they're only supplementing renewables rather than providing base power.

By carbon negative I just mean that generation will emit less carbon two years from now despite generating more power.

That still doesn't mean no resources are spent producing the electricity that powers your electric car. (Which is what you claimed: "And to answer your question: none.") Just fewer resources than would have been required it electricity production had been as carbon intensive as today.

It's just a matter of time until the energy put into oil extraction exceeds the energy gained and must be "subsidized" through nuclear power and renewables.

Imagine how cheap cars would be if they only needed 1 kg of gold. Mass is not predictor of cost across materials.

Gold is 3 orders of magnitude more expensive than lithium so this seems like a somewhat useless analogy.

Let's phrase it a different way then. A typical car used to use about $30,000 of gas and $50 of Lithium. Gas prices have doubled and Lithium has gone up 10X.

Recycling is more of a dream than reality. Lets never forget that recycling economics usually never add up.

That's a pretty strange statement. Lead acid batteries have near 100% recycling. If lithium prices stay high, recycling is a great source of materials. All it takes is a small amount of policy if we want to have recycling be standard practice. And there are already a ton of lithium battery recycling startups, but there's so few old batteries that they are pretty much limited to recycling batteries that fail QC.

recycling economics is largely a product of material value, homogeneity, and technical feasibility. Look at some classic examples:

Steel: high value, reasonably homogeneous, easier than raw ore --> almost all get recycled.

Paper: low value, moderately homogenous (different fibre lengths can't easily be separated), quite feasible but results in lower quality of material than inputs.

Plastic: low value, very heterogenous, complex organic chemistry means significant manual segregating of inputs is needed making financials not work.

Lithium: Very high value, reasonably homogeneous, technical details not fully worked out but I expect low difficulty - no complex long chain organic compounds to worry about maintaining.

The hard part of recycling lithium will be doing it reliably in safe and low labor. It's totally possible, and possible to do profitably, but it will just be really complicated to do it cheaply and reliably.

Looking at it another way, the value of plastic and wood/paper comes from the molecular structures. The value of steel, aluminum, lead (from lead acid batteries), and in future lithium/nickle/cobalt (from LiIon batteries) comes from the raw elements. The latter tend to be economically recyclable, the former do not.

High labor costs for recycling are almost entirely due to heterogeneity. In the future, car batteries will be quite homogeneous.

Currently Lithium isn't recycled because there's not much of it in a battery, and it used to be cheap. Nickel was what was driving the economics AFAICT. Today's high Lithium price is changing that.

You don't seem to be aware of how difficult it is to extract "virgin" lithium. Plastic recycling doesn't add up because a lot of plastic feedstock is a byproduct of petroleum refining. Turning mixed plastic back into feedstock is not viable because there are cheaper sources of feedstock. So the only way you can recycle plastic is by separating it which means "game over" because that is a difficult problem. It's better to just return the plastic back into the soil and let geological processes compress it into coal or oil over thousands or millions of years.

Plastic recycling, yes. Plastic is nearly impossible to recycle because it degrades so much in use (and it's usually attached to other things, contaminated by food, etc.)

The vast majority of iron and steel has a very high recycled material percentage. This is a problem for applications where low radioactivity is a requirement, as almost all iron and steel around the world is now contaminated with fallout from decades of atomic testing.

Copper, heavily recycled because of its high value.

Aluminum also has high recycling because of the immense energy needed to smelt it out of its ore.

There are at least two companies providing near 95% recovery of materials from lithium ion batteries. With prices low, there wasn't much economic incentive. Now there's massive economic incentive.

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