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Comment by coder543 | Hacker News Reader

You have too many assumptions about the availability of lithium, and lack of “easy” reserves. That’s the fundamental disconnect here. Lithium is not inaccesible, and it is super common. The “hard” ways to mine lithium aren’t that hard.

We’re not talking about gold or platinum, where your discussion points would be relevant.

I’m not wishing over here. But anyways, I’ve tried to explain the reason why the market disagrees with you, and why people are rapidly seeking to integrate batteries into the grid and into cars, which would not be possible if you were correct about lithium becoming insanely expensive.

Battery production will keep scaling at a huge rate, and the prices will be fine. A modest price increase is irrelevant to anything discussed here today.

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Lithium is far from easy to extract. It also needs to be refined on-site because its raw form is too low-density to economically transport. So most lithium mines require large amounts of water to fill brine pools. The number of sites that are actually viable to produce lithium are not nearly so common.

Again, the market disagrees with you not me. Lithium commodity prices are rising, and so are battery prices. People are indeed seeking to integrate batteries into the grid - I'm not disputing that. I'm pointing out that these batteries are actually becoming more expensive [1], not less and it's unlikely this trend will reverse on a dime.

1. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...

Commodity prices are rising… causing more mines to open… causing more supply… which will cause prices to drop. Why do you keep pointing to that? Your argument makes no sense. That’s how commodities scale.

> Commodity prices are rising… causing more mines to open…

Yes.

> causing more supply…

Yes

> which will cause prices to drop.

Nope! Remember, the expanded supply is only profitable to operate at higher prices. So the price will drop if demand drops and then supplier will operate the more efficient extraction sites. But if demand stays high, so will prices.

You should be linking to evidence that prices will rise uncontrollably if you want to support your argument that battery production won't keep increasing.

I will remind you that this is your absurd argument:

> By comparison, the entire world only produces ~400 GWh of batteries each year. So it'd only take a decade and a half of global battery production to satisfy the storage demands of just the USA. The rest of the world would be left with zero EV or electronics production for a decade and a half and no grid storage to show for it.

> Thanks for the site: it's a good tool to demonstrate just how unfeasible energy storage really is.

Which is totally different from "battery prices might increase a little", which I have repeatedly indicated is not a problem, and I even pointed out that it is a possibility a long time upthread from here.

Again we're talking about 6,000 GWh of grid storage for just one country. And that's also competing with batteries for EVs, and batteries for electronics. That site estimate's for storage necessity are also pretty optimistic. Most estimates for a completely decarbonized grid - not using peaker gas plants - call for weeks of storage not days: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

And again, battery production is scaling like crazy. That is an undeniable fact for now. You're the one speculating that it will suddenly stop, and you have presented flimsy evidence at best. Your entire argument falls apart if batteries continue scaling at a reasonable price.

> Your entire argument falls apart if batteries continue scaling at a reasonable price.

The only logical choice is to assume that the battery industry will keep doing what it has been doing, unless you present some strong evidence to the contrary, which you have repeatedly failed to do, as has been pointed out by myself and others. The commodities are behaving as expected, which is to say that they're rising in the face of new demand, since supply hasn't had time to catch up.

You're proposing that the sky is falling, but it looks just fine to the rest of us.

I'd check out something like oil which is a large and high dollar market.

The relationship between production and price is well established, and no, production does not move inversely to price. This is because the marginal cost in almost any of these areas is higher per unit of production as production increases. That also of course makes sense logically.

Gold as well, same thing. You start by grabbing gold nuggets of the ground. The effort to mine more gold has not gotten easier, it's gotten harder over time.

I already addressed all of this with the difficulty of extraction. I even called out gold earlier in the thread, possibly more than once.

The abundance of lithium is nothing like the abundance of gold, and oil is a different subject altogether because we have extracted a truly staggering amount of it, and then burned it. We’ve extracted something like 135 billion tons of oil, and a “mere” 250 thousand tons of gold. So, hundreds of thousands of times more oil than gold has been extracted.

Lithium is about 20ppm (parts per million) in the Earth’s crust. Gold is about 0.001ppm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

Lithium is 20 thousand times more abundant than gold, roughly.

Lithium is reusable, analogous to how we handle aluminum. As demand is ramping up, we will need to ramp up extraction, but we’re not throwing it away, and eventually we will get a lot of our lithium from recycling.

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