For a counterpoint, see Simon Michaux's work on what full electrification entails from a resource perspective.
Are we going realistically find enough undiscovered lithium reserves that is the same size as our known reserves as of 2022, even assuming that he is off by a factor of 4?
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/kaust-spinout-wil...
We have not run out of any mineral ever and I don't believe we ever will.
Is mineral not a finite resource? I don't understand your source of optimism here.
[1] Helium may be one of the exceptions here, but I would guess even that is produceable with some future nucleaf technology given enough money.
Because historically we do not have technology complex enough to need specific minerals. Now we do.
> Most of these needs we can fulfill with many different minerals. And the amount of all [1] minerals in earths crust is staggering compared to any foreseeable futre, so we are just going to flip to whatever is easiest/cheapest to dig.
There is another factor at play though: energy required to extract the minerals. Ones deeper in the earth's crust are likely more energy intensive to extract and perhaps even purify. At some point it won't be worth it.
Right, the issue is cost of extraction (in materials, energy, and externalities, the only real currencies), not exhaustion of the reserves. I think Simon would argue 1) that the degree to which the current economy depends on fossil resources (e.g. for metal-working; how do we reach the required temperatures without melting an electrically-powered heating element?) has not been grasped by policy-makers or the public, and 2) that we are already in energy decline, exacerbated by ongoing failure of ecosystem services. In other words, he thinks we have bled too much momentum and triggered too many blowbacks to "level off" at current living standards, if that were even a viable path forward (given the rate at which we are destroying the biological basis for human life, it is not).
And we are probably going to burn fossil fuel to obtain the energy for this?
You can look at recently-proposed remote green hydrogen facilities as inspiration. Similar to hydrogen, since you don't need to worry about connecting to the grid, you can build solar and wind generators pretty much anywhere that has a ton of sun and wind, extract the lithium onsite, and then ship it to where it's needed.
The thing is, there's always only certain amount of known reserves.
When there's not enough known reserves of something, the price will go up, and it is pretty lucrative to look for more, or even come up with new ways of getting that thing (see fracking).
When there's too much known reserves, the price will go down, and it might not be worth it to look for more, because not only you won't get as much money, but the people who currently own reserves will lose money as the price goes further down (for similar example, see landlords being NIMBYS because new housing lowers their property).
So yes, we do have 50 years of known reserves of Uranium on current consumption. But we also had 50 years or known reservers of it thirty years ago. Known reserves of stuff tend to keep around that number.
That of course does not mean that there is literally unlimited amount of minerals in Earth's crust - but we do have enough of stuff for quite a while, Earth is a pretty big planet.
Edit: that said I'm myself not convinced by "solar + grid scale batteries" strategy, I would rather see nuclear power and keep the batteries for cars.
https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/
I found this unconvincing, a little like saying there isn't enough coal in Wales to power everything if all global shipping switched over to steam engines. When there's demand for a resource that wasn't there before, there tends to be new discoveries of it, new ways of mining it, and new geographical territories of interest. Similarly, sometimes the resource is replaced by a completely different substitute - we power our cars with gasoline and internal combustion engines, not coal and steam engines like we used for early locomotives. There's already promising developments for extracting lithium from seawater, where there's more than enough for every person on earth to have multiple tons of it:
https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provi...
I also won't necessarily call that a counterpoint, it's just a related issue. It can be true that both a) replacing existing electrical capacity with renewables will be easier and cheaper than we thought in the past, and b) scaling up the grid to account for increased electrification in buildings and vehicles will still be very hard.
https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
Shorter 72 page one focused on mining resources
Policy/math is based on older modelling that used greener European factories in early 2000's that are now replaced by Chinese.
Long video, but informative.
TLDR: We don't have enough minerals (including reserves) to completely switch our energy from ff to renewables, assuming our current energy consumption flatline, and our renewable technology efficiency and mineral consumption remain the same.