> An extremely dull future awaits of energy flows being largely local or in grids where the best meteorologists and machine learning engineers rake the table.
One thing I'm not sure about -- do we actually have enough lithium to sustain ~ the current price at much higher consumption levels?
Also, lithium, like most alkaline metals, is pretty easy to extract and recycle. Batteries are not yet built for easy recycling though [2]; I can expect this to change as the scale grows.
[1]: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/six-largest-lithiu...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-...
For those that doubt it's possible to collect spent batteries; recycling rates for lead acid car batteries is already 99%. They virtually never end up in landfills.
The sources you link total ~65m tons which is ~17 years of consumption at the projected rate.
In contrast oil has something like 47 years of consumption left in verified reserves (https://www.worldometers.info/oil/).
So it sounds to me like we're relying on recycling or some major new discoveries to actually be able to sustain the current prices used for that estimate (or of course new battery chemistries). I really don't have a feel for how fast new deposits are discovered; I'd be interested to know how fast new reserves of oil were being discovered prior to peak oil.
Compare the efficuency of producing gasoline in 1900 and in 1930. Same with solar panels in 1990 and 2020. Demand-driven research repeatedly demonstrated driving costs down a couple orders of magnitude.
A factory shortage, not a mine shortage.
Also vanadium is 6x as abundant.
By mass. But a vanadium atom is more than 7x more massive than a lithium atom. So lithium is actually slightly more abundant by atomic % of the crust.
There's still SIB, AlS, LiS (4x the capacity per mol of lithium), Fe-air and Al-air