Looks like existing worldwide reserves are 26M tons [0], so this is a big find.
[0] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-lithium.pd...
[0] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-lithium.pd...
Before, Lithium was important, but not nearly in the quantities needed for EV's. Now that EV's have picked up, more people will be looking for Lithium, and that will make all the difference.
That was certainly true of oil. As reserves got depleted, progressively more advanced techniques allowed people to extract from more difficult locations.
Maybe you meant that, but it’s worth stating outright, as no amount of money can fix that.
Let's not be fooled again!
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/global...
> LONDON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - Global sales of battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrids (PHEV) rose 20% versus a year ago as strong growth in North America and China offset lower sales in Europe, according to market research firm Rho Motion.
However what's actually happening is that demand is going up, but at a rate slower than before. Imagine that in 2022 demand increased by 60% YoY but in 2023 demand only increased by 40% YoY (these are approximate figures). You are measuring the second derivative which is decreasing from a big positive value to a smaller positive value, which is not usually described by the word "slow". Intuitively "slow" means the second derivative has become negative.
Increasing position less fast is the definition of slowing down, as I said. Increasing speed less fast is, of course, not the definition of slowing down, it's decelerating; we agree on this.
But you are equating demand to "speed" (rate-of-change of position), and I am equating demand to "position" (not a rate-of-change). If demand is analogous to speed, then what is is measuring the rate-of-change of?
Acceleration decreased such that it is negative. Negative acceleration is "slowing down."
Ok, let’s substitute that into the original comment, instead of:
> demand has slowed down recently
we get:
> speed has slowed down recently
Nothing to do with the rate of change of speed, just speed itself. In other words:
In terms of _speed_, this would indicate that _speed_ was once higher and is now lower.
Let’s translate that same sentence back substituting speed with demand:
In terms of _demand_, this would indicate that _demand_ was once higher and is now lower.
That statement cannot be true as 2023 demand was the highest ever.
Where it could be different is in places like power generation. You might talk about peak demand in Watts, and daily demand in watt-hours.
We just weren't looking very hard to find lithium compared to lead till very recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
It's very hard to find anything volatile in nature, pretty much by definition. Exceptions are things that are continually generated, eg you can find reactive oxygen in nature because plants keep making more. That or things that are only volatile once you purify or transform them in some way.
If all of world's bauxite reserves ran dry, we would move to the next best sources, and this would impact aluminum prices less than typical yearly variations in electricity costs near smelters.
Nearly all aluminum minerals are potential ores for aluminum, the only question is how much other, undesirable material (mostly silica) you need to remove. Bauxite is nice because nature did a lot of the early separation process steps (slightly acidic rains washed away silica over millennia).
There are plenty of known deposits of unknown size and quality. They are just by definition not included in the reserve. As demand grows those will be explored and included in the total count.
If Thailand has 14M and there are two others with >14M then total known resources must be at least 42M tons, no?
Those people are probably using different prices, and not communicating them.
YC Summer 24?
Lithium can be a lot more prevalent in some waters, they are already competitive commercial mining operations from briny lake beds. Utah's Salt Lake for example is 21ppm and is mined at $2/kg
Because turning resources into reserves is expensive only a limited amount is done before it is mined.
"What you think is out there" differs from resource in that a honest answer to the former would need to involve doing a lot of statistics on the 99+% of "empty space" of earth's crust that could potentially be exploited but that has not been explored, based on the data points you have of the areas that you have explored.
While resource refers to specific deposits that someone has done work on to show they exist, not the best estimate of how much material is there to be mined.
Sorry for being nitpicky, but people on the internet constantly get this wrong. No-one maintains a number for "how much lithium (or oil, or any other material) we believe there remains to be mined", and every number that occasionally gets misused to represent that is off by multiple orders of magnitude.
World lithium resources are close to 100M tons, but usable part, reserves, is about 1/4 of it.
Notice how it is also stated in the article: “We are trying to find out how much can we use from the resources we found. It takes time,” Rudklao told The Nation.
So they don't know how big are the reserves.
This likely doesn't mean a straightforward +15M tons to the world's supply.
Plus it's far away from the environment, so recovery will be uncomplicated.
Classic Clarke & Dawe
So it's in another environment?