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