The price of a given commodity rises due to demand increases -> people look for more of it -> people find it -> the commodity is eventually mined or otherwise exploited -> prices moderate.
It happened with oil and now it's happening with lithium.
It happened with oil and now it's happening with lithium.
A good battery lasts years, maybe decades. And in theory it can then be recycled.
Sourcing lithium is something we've been thinking a lot about, whereas we haven't reached peak fossil fuels or scarcity. There are plenty of places to continue drilling: the US, Greenland, the Arctic Circle, Antarctica ...
The problem with fossil fuels is the carbon entering the atmosphere.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-produc...
It's hard to extrapolate a trend though - there was a dip caused by COVID, and global oil use has been growing since then, but it's still not back to where it was 4 years ago.
Also a lot of people think peak oil means that we suddenly won't have any gas available. No. Peak oil means all the easily extractable oil is gone, and so all future projects need to use more capital-intensive, technologically-advanced extraction techniques that cost more, and so the price of oil goes up, and then we use less of it while it's replaced by other technologies. Which is exactly what's been happening for the past ~5-15 years. U.S. is back to being the world's top oil producer, but all of it is in shale oil fields that aren't economically viable below ~$50/barrel, and so gas will never go back down to the $1/gallon it was in the 90s.
The OPEC countries could produce far more oil far cheaper, but they don't want to. There are plenty of oil fields left. Not to mention fighting economic war against Iran and Russia, two huge producers.
It is likely we are or have peaked.
The way I see it, we bootstrapped our existing tech off high energy density oil.
If it were gone, we would find it extremely difficult to repeat it all.
Now that we have built all this up, it is also our opportunity to bootstrap something far more sustainable, or we do risk a serious regression and a lot of people die.
Longer term, we use oil for far too much.
Getting off of it preserves a resource we may well find need of again.
If another collapse happens, and without oil, people could believably bootstrap straight from electricity + batteries. There'll be endless amounts of quality scrap material and manuals. A lot of critical small scale appliances can be powered by hand-cranked motors.
If we were to collapse, we would be left with some remnants that we would be unable to reproduce!
The tech needed for that runs on fuels we would find ourselves unable to procure.
That's coping, not building or bootstrapping.
Longer term the same processes that turned algae and other life forms into oil are still happening and try as we might we aren't going to stop them, but they proceed at what is likely a pace that will take long after humans are extinct to replenish what we have used.
This is unfortunately not true.
The vast majority of our fossil fuels are formed from carbon that was sequestered into cellulose in plants, before anything had evolved the ability to digest cellulose. It piled up, and eventually compressed into coal. Look up the ʾCarboniferous Period" for more details.
These reserves are no longer being formed because we have fungi that break down these materials and return the CO2 to the air.
Planet Earth will never again have oil and coal reserves of the size it did 200 years ago.
The above processes are costly, but we know how to do it.
That being said they're astronomically more efficient than even an ideal carnot engine.
An easier to recycle battery that had very slightly fewer charge cycles could be a net win. For scale this depot has enough lithium for ~10 billion of EV’s using Tesla’s battery chemistry and pack size as a benchmark. How expensive it is to extract is however unknown.
Fun!
That was not what I was trying to say.
The math is something like:
MTBF cycles * capacity of battery = usable "life" of the battery
usage of lithium by mass in the battery * best recycling technology recovery rate = recoverable lithium per battery
((mass of lithium in battery - recoverable lithium per battery) / usable "life" of the battery) = lithium effectively used up per joule of energy used from that battery
It may be that that number is zero grams, or a few picograms, so it doesn't matter. But I don't think with current recovery rates on battery recycling that's true. So, while a failed battery has the same mass of lithium as a new battery, effectively every charge-discharge cycle "uses up" some lithium, which ultimately ends up wasted as recycling byproducts or unusable salts.
In a battery lithium is not consumed completely after every use like oil. The lithium in a battery is used hundreds or thousands of times. When the pack is dead it can still be downcycled and eventually the individual cells recycled. With the lithium being recovered and reused.
Yes, there is or will be a “lithium rush”. But it will look a lot more like gold or aluminum than oil.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/alumi...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ev-lit...
It's always fun when we go masks off on HN.
Yes I'd call that a failure in management.