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Comment by mradek | Hacker News Reader

Is it true we will run out of lithium in 20-30 years?

We'll never "run out of lithium".

The question is "how much will lithium cost?"

It can be extracted from the ocean, there are undeveloped known mineral deposits and you always expect there are unknown deposits to be found. Production will grow as demand grows, when there is lag because new sources take time to develop and proven demand is needed before someone spends a lot of money developing a new source there will be cost growth, when new sources, recycling, etc. develop, prices will drop.

In 20-30 years one of the alternatives (like sodium batteries, we'll never run out of sodium) aren't so unlikely to be found.

> It can be extracted from the ocean

Indeed, and we already have research into using concentrated desalination brine to recover lithium from [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of desalination plants are positioned in Arabia [1], so we'd trade dependency on these dictatorships from oil to lithium.

[0] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em0...

[1] https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-large...

Why can’t you build desalination plants elsewhere?

Desalination plants are expensive to run (you either need a lot of energy or a lot of space for a solar evaporation plant) and create a lot of extremely toxic brine, which means you only want them when you don't have an alternative source of drinkable water.

Recovering lithium from the brine is essentially just using the waste these plants generate as part of their operation.

They certainly can be built elsewhere, however it's currently cheaper to import. It is very common to import when it's cheaper than producing domestically despite it having a history of problems like shortages and fluctuating costs. Helium and rare elements(which aren't very rare) are some examples. Rare earth mines were shutdown in countries when China started undercutting prices.

It would have done the world a lot of good, had the WTO, EU and US actually taken massive reaction to Chinese price dumping politics. Instead, all we got was a bit of verbal acrobatics.

For the same reason you "cannot" drill for gas in Germany: it's very hard to do something that someone else can do cheaper. It requires constant work against the market, either by tarifs or subventions. And desalination will always be cheaper if you have to do it anyway, because the (local) value of water is so high

There's a massive difference. You buy lithium once, and from then on it's cheaper to recycle it. If Arabia cuts off our supply, our current EVs are still useful.

OTOH you have to buy gasoline regularly. If supply gets cut off, current vehicles are scrap metal.

"we'll never run out of lithium" is the new "640k ought to be enough for anybody".

As we make lithium battery capacity more affordable, it gets applied more broadly, and the rate of use goes up. There is a very finite amount of any resource here on earth, and while we can get things more and more efficient, there will be a moment where we can no longer extract lithium (or other materials) required for battery production. Treating these as an endless resource is the same error we made with fossil fuels, just hopefully without as much climate change as a direct result...

The oceans of earth contain enough lithium for every human to have 4000 teslas.

Thats… 200 MWh per person worth of lithium.

Or energy storage equal to 200 tons of TNT.

Unlike fossil fuels it is not consumed and will be recycled.

In short, there’s a few orders of magnitude of more lithium around than anyone will ever need. It all comes down to price of extraction.

Taking enough out of the oceans for everybody to have a Tesla won’t even take 0.1% of what’s there.

What an odd claim, I haven't heard anybody say that we will "run out" of lithium, much less at a particular date.

More likely, we will stop more lithium extraction, and get most of it from recycling old batteries. 20 years from now is probably too soon for that, but 30-40 seems like it could be possible where we can circularized the lithium economy.

(Circularization assumes that per capita needs are not every increasing, and that population levels off, which seems likely to me but definitely not certain)

I heard (on here I think) that copper shortages will be a factor before lithium runs out?

We ran out of easily extractable copper a long time ago. OTOH copper is available in hard to extract, highly diluted quantities pretty much every where. It's just a matter of price.

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