It doesn't seem like lithium is actually scarce. Does this help with the more tricky issues developing at the moment? For example, graphite?
Thus, lithium looks like one of the fundamental bottlenecks for grid storage. It can kinda work on high-cost small-size pilot projects, but we probably won't be able to use it for real.
Sodium on the other hand has all of the same desirable chemistry properties, but scales much better. And iron has all the cost benefits, but undesirable chemical properties. (And there are, of course, people working on C-H vs. C-OH bonds that are completely out of the box.)
You decouple the transformation (charge/discharge) from the capacity (liquid volume), with the goal of making the latter "a standard pressure, watertight tank."
But I believe last time they came up here, people said the charge/discharge still needed some work.
Also, long-term storage will very likely use some different chemistry from short-term. High-temperature batteries have some very interesting trade-offs that I have no idea how will pan-out in practice. Things are mostly not settled on that area, it looks like a very interesting thing to work on.
I.e. putting energy into nuclear reactors so that we can produce U-235. Although I guess technically breeder reactors, although like-to-like is less fun fantasy than solar -> fissile.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-23/vanadium-flow-battery...
IIRC, this particular chemistry is an Australian development, as well.
It seems like time is the bottleneck in basically all cases rather than overall capacity as well.
Batteries have no bottleneck. Just lots and lots of things one can improve a bit with some amount of work.
It sounds like a false premise to me.
It's a perfectly fine point to make, and it's one of the things worth optimizing.
Which has generally been a fair assumption: as demand increases and price increases, exploration is incentivized and new sources are found, and capital is invested to increase production at existing / new sources.
But... there are also other ways it can go. Copper? Cobalt? Uranium-circa-1940s? Sometimes, more just isn't found.
Look at titanium. The US had to buy it (through shell companies) from the Soviets for their spy planes, because there were no alternatives.
There was at the time a severe shortage of usable titanium refined metal. Refining Titanium is much more difficult than aluminum.
The soviets had over invested in the ability to produce it, so it was more economic to get it from them than try to produce the capacity here.
Ukraine now barely ranks as a producer while China, South Africa, and Australia are the primary sources.
When demand pops up, different deposits start becoming viable.
Heavy mineral sands [0] seem to be the primary source, with total heavy minerals at ~1% of weight (all mineral components).
Of that, ilmenite [1] is the primary titanium ore (reduced to sand).
So essentially, natural primary physical reduction (of hard rock to sand) is required to meet the current market price for economic viability. There exist hard rock sources, but most would be too energy intensive to exploit, given the low concentration.
The South African Tormin operation is especially fascinating, as it has ore reduced to sand AND then washed over geologic timescales by wave action, separating out less valuable minerals and concentrating the remainder (~25% THM). [2]
Which I guess is the bulk of my point: 'at any cost', there are always more resources to mine; 'at reasonable cost', there can be sharp differentiations between different types of resources (e.g. in titanium: naturally concentrated heavy mineral sands, heavy mineral sands, hard rock).
Something being widespread in the Earth's crust, but at less than 1% concentration, doesn't help us a lot if we need civilization-scale quantities of it.
Or, if copper were distributed like that, we'd probably all use aluminum wiring.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_mineral_sands_ore_depo...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilmenite#Feedstock_productio...
[2] https://www.mineralcommodities.com/operations-projects/south...
Yeah and the low production of lithium is due minimal demand historically. It's not like other metals with a large historic demand. Like copper.
I think it is an interesting lecture if you are interested in a sort of geographical answer of where they might look for it, but at least after skipping around a bit and watching some stretches at double speed, she hasn’t gotten to the sort of economic answer of, like, do there exist sources that can turned into batteries easily (since we are mostly programmers who mostly care about whether or not the batteries will exist to power the devices we want to program).
> do there exist sources that can turned into batteries easily
Yes, but only a few. There aren't many high-concentration lithium deposits. (There are many more low-concentration)
Which is essentially the mining industry in a nutshell: concentration of raw mined feedstock -> economically efficient processing -> finished product (bought by consumers who don't care where it came from, and so has a single market price)
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_carbonate#Production
There is some concerns in terms of total materials for stuff like Cobalt/Nickel but even then, my gut feeling is that those issues are more fear mongering rather than a real issue.