With India also discovering a very large amount of lithium reserves very recently, lithium might end up being abundant and accelerate the EV transition even faster.
[1] https://innovationorigins.com/en/india-discovers-5-5-of-worl...
[1] https://innovationorigins.com/en/india-discovers-5-5-of-worl...
Even looking at the year-after-year increases in known lithium resources over the past decade shows massive increases.
Lithium will not be a scarce material. The only difficulty in a speedy transition is planning: deploying capital at the right places so that there's not too much mining nor too little. Making enough battery production capacity, but not too little.
There is a ton of money to be made in batteries, but there's a lot of risk due to uncertainty of size of market and timing.
Some of the the largest oil fields currently known were only discovered in the past decade or two. I wouldn't be surprised if battery materials follow a similar discovery curve.
I also believe (but could be wrong), that a not insignificant amount of the success of oil alternatives today (which helps to slow demand growth) is due to a flurry of research that started with the price shocks of the 70s that were definitely not due solely to supply-demand issues.
In that framing, peak oil happened - we just proceeded to reframe reality around a substitute and choked down a decade of stagnation in the energy economy.
Petroleum reserves are basically tsr sands and fracking which is low EROEI, even with the industry externalizing costs like methane leakage, vast freshwater consumption / pollution.
For example it used to be you burned a barrel of oil to get 20 or 30 out back in the easily accessible light sweet crude days.
Shit like the tar sands is more like 2:1 EROEI.
All those people complaining about EROEI no longer seem to have the slightest concern, despite it being a significant hurdle for future fossil fuel use.
And the EROEIs get even worse if any sane carbon taxation / sequestration costs are applied, if any widespread damage from fracking is charged (as in set-your-tapwater-on-fire stories), or the horrific environmental destruction of tar sands (which use ungodly amounts of freshwater to try to get the oil out of the mined sands).
I guess that claimed EROEI on fracking is 5-10x. No idea what it is like in practice, I assume there should be a distribution that could be analyzed.
Tar sands peak at 5x, and I bet that is only in the best case. Why tar sands is still a thing, does any Canadian know? Is this because oil/gas has penetrated the Canadian government lobby and made it too big to fail?
You're almost certainly onto something here. Much like why water cooled nuclear reactors are still a thing, despite molten salt reactors having been around for about 60 years (as in, before any of those water cooled reactors melted down with a catastrophic hydrogen explosion, caused by you know, all that water).
We don't have an energy shortage. We have political obstructionism.
"True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh"
https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1088739/global-oil-disco...
Interesting I see an opposite trend but that's a 7 year window. AFAIK discoveries are slowing and the general trend is for newly discovered fields to have lower returns on energy.
More than total lithium, I would want to know how pure it starts and what the access to water is like at any given site.
Being rich in natural resources is a bit like being a really hot girl around a bunch of abusive predatory men. They'll shower her with gifts and tell her how amazing she is until she says: "no, I don't want to sleep with you" and all hell breaks loose.
examples include Saudi Arabia, Norway and Alaska. Oh no wait bad examples.
Saudi Arabia, Norway and a few Gulf min-states (Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain) are the rare counterexamples that kind of prove the rule. There's a great FT article[1] about the Iraqi man who helped lead Norway's oil revolution in the proper direction, and it was really not obvious. Why Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain managed to use their resources successfully (of course to an extent a matter of debate, human rights being a big problem in most of those places) and other dictatorships failed, even in similar scenarios (same religion, royals) is a tough one to answer.
https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
Their economy is pretty much exclusively oil-based, very few other industries.
If you run the numbers their fund will fund current expenses for only a decade or so if oil stopped completely. Which isn't really enough time to start other industries for their citizens to have jobs.
So they're basically completely dependent on oil, with maybe a short runway for afterwards. They did not break the curse.
But my point is that the curse is that there is a stimulus to stop doing any other businesses. And it seems that Norway has largely avoided that by forcing as much oil money as possible out of the economy(oil fund)
But they are still locked into the curse - the basically is no other economy.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund is a strategy to escape the resource curse. It's like a hot girl with high self esteem and a handgun in her purse.
Alaska is one state in a country that has other things going for it. It's like a hot girl with a protective older brother.
Alaska has the Permanent Fund for much the same reason.
Sample details: https://www.texastribune.org/2017/08/21/ut-system-oil-money-...
I think 'resource curse' got it a bit backward although effect is straightforward and obvious - it allows a-holes aka bottom of society to rise, gives them extra booster rockets to rise fast (ie capture diamond mine, or oil fields like ISIL and sell via Turkey which was their primary income).
Norway got it right because well its Norway, similar would happen if it was found ie in Switzerland. Some basic human decency ingrained deep in population and thus also in politics and those who set things up for future. If that's not present and society is more everybody-for-themselves, then yes it becomes the curse and more burden than benefit.
Combine these factors and you end up with a country trapped in producing mainly only that one natural resource.
This is also why Saudi Arabia is building seemingly insane megaprojects: to lure in enough production and construction to kick start a on industry unrelated to oil.
I didn't know Alaska was a country.
I don't really know much about Norway's petrolium history, but I can't say I'm surprised that they weren't invaded for their oil, which is in the sea to begin with.
To put my cynic’s hat on: Having something the super powers want sounds like a great way to stop being so sanctioned. Great negotiating leverage.
Lithium become abundant, no way. Not with the amounts we're using up per capita and the enormous population on this planet. the green revolution is just getting started and there's definitely not enough to go around.
Combining these numbers, Tesla's 1.3 * 10^6 battery packs shipped in 2022 would have taken 7.93 * 10^21 joules to manufacture. This is more than 10 times annual global energy production and is clearly in error.
Another way to spot-check and reject this number is to note that 3 million barrels of oil would cost in the neighborhood of $240 million. Getting that much energy from coal might cost only $75 million per vehicle but it's still a proposition that would see Tesla losing approximately $100 trillion dollars per year on sales of 1.3 million vehicles.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/02/investing/tesla-deliveries-pr...
[2] https://www.ocean.washington.edu/courses/envir215/energynumb...
[3] https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
Presumably, they don't stop being lithium after 8-10 years.
Batteries last far longer than 8-10 years, I'm not sure where you are getting that bad number. But even if you were right, our very first attempts at recycling already recover 95% of input metals:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/heres-what-redwood-lear...
And every year we discover massive new amounts of lithium resources, because until the mid 2010s, nobody really bothered to look for lithium.
FUD about amounts of lithium should be abandoned as a stall tactic; they no longer pass basic sniff tests arms are easily shut down hard. Other stall FUD needs to be invented if the energy interchange is to be stopped.