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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

15,000,000t×0.004 = 60,000,000kg. 60,000,000kg/63kg per car [1] ≈ 952,000 cars, about 55% of Tesla's production last year.

[1] https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...

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Yikes, looks like EVs are gonna be resource-constrained real soon unless new battery tech emerges.

Swear I read an article recently about cuts to a lithium project in Australia due to dwindling demand.

Here's an article about it:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-18/kemerton-lithium-proj...

Including: "Demand for lithium has dropped by more than 80 per cent in the past year and nearly 11 per cent in the past month alone."

Lithium is one of the most abundant solids in the universe. The earth has plenty, it's just going to become more and more economically feasible to extract it. You can even get reasonably large amounts from seawater if you have cheap energy.

Citations very sorely needed on every single one of your wild speculations.

These are not "wild speculations", they are all widely know facts. It is more common in the earth's crust than lead, tin, uranium, etc which we mine magnitudes more per year [1], and there are significantly more reserves in seawater [2], where extraction is mostly limited by how much energy we need to use to extract it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... [2] https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provi...

Dull speculation is more on the nail.

Do you know how many billions of dollars worth of platinum group elements (platinum; Pt, palladium; Pd and rhodium; Rh) are literally lying on the roads and roadsides of G20 countries?

As dust from in use catalytic converters it's substantial. And unrecovered.

There's a problem with economic feasibilty - extraction costs (digging up and processing every road surface and road side) are prohibitive - greater than the value of the material.

From your [2]

    The advance is still not likely cheap enough to compete with mining lithium on land,

In a nutshell this is still very much the issue with mining seawater for Lithium, Uranium, etc.

The 0.2 parts per million (PPM) is a problem, a literal ceiling on diminishing returns, the more you extract the less remains and it's tricky to keep processed seawater from mixing back with unprocessed.

Per [1], lithium is somewhere between "too rare to consider" and 33rd in the list of elements sorted by abundance. The yield of the other quoted elements from their respective ores are magnitudes higher than that of lithium, and those ores are also important sources of other metals such as silver as byproducts of the refining process, so there is relatively much more value in exploration and mining those elements vs lithium.

Your claims of economic feasibility are still well within the range of speculation, you haven't backed up your claims with any serious evidence or analysis. Your claims of abundance are of the flavor of "wait and see how much more we find" which is speculation by definition.

More lithium deposits will be found now that it is more desirable. The earth has plenty.

And if we run out, we can finally make Teslas useful by recycling them!

I don't see how EVs are any more viable than ICEs if they continue to be as crassly oversized and overpowered.

A 20 KG e-bike can get a person around with 0.3 BHP, so 200 KG and 30 BHP is already pushing the boat out.

But people want another order of magnitude on top of that.

It's difficult to move a family and groceries around on an ebike, as it is to transit multiple people (many underaged), move the elderly, disabled, obese, or pretty much anyone who doesn't fit into the image you appear to have of people transiting.

Somebody's not travelled to Asia then ...

From India to the Philippines and out to Indonesia rides a population on petrol engine scooters and motorcycles that exceeds the US population ans is currently transitioning to EV bikes.

Many are elderly, disabled, ride with multiple passengers, few are obese to US standards.

I have, and in both of those countries it is difficult and dangerous. Safety standards are extremely different, speeds are slower - traffic conditions and quality life is so uncomparable to the US that I'm finding it difficult to believe that if you've been to those countries you're not intentionally cherry picking here.

Or new lithium sources

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