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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

We have colossal known amounts of lithium available as deposits [1], plus many orders of magnitude more in seawater, which likely could be harvested along with its desalination.

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-...

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Extracting from seawater is a great example of a source that will certainly cost a lot more than current price levels to extract.

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.

With current technologies, extraction from seawater is definitely uneconomical. This is because nobody invested in improving the process.

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.

I would be pleasantly suprised if recycling is a focus earlier. But I fully expect huge landfills of batteries in the next few decades.

I strongly suspect you might be disappointed. Battery collection and recycling - even as “raw ore” - should be easily profitable with plenty of motivated parties eventually. In the meantime, redwood materials will probably make quite a bit of money.

Why would I be disappointed?

Recycling is already a key focus, as batteries are very mineral rich, and at scale much cheaper to refine locally than to mine & import with long supply chains.

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.

This is new information to me. Do you have a source for car batteries being recycled at a 99% rate?

Lithium abundance in battery waste is probably higher than in natural deposits. I doubt that huge landfills of battery waste will exist for very long as Lithium demand continues to soar.

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