https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/form-energy-brings-in-mor...
The scale of investment required makes it quite hard for new companies to compete on cost:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/battery-industry-sca...
I worry the answering that question requires answering this question: whose negative externalities?
What I like that I'm hearing about this CO2 battery, whether true will have to be seen, is that it might rely on off the shelf components, that's great, means the supply chain can be simple, and has longer life in the first place. And that while potentially even cheaper?
If your process gets 90% of the lithium out of the battery, after 7 cycles more than half of the lithium is gone. Therefore Mining can’t stop even when the market doesn’t grow anymore.
We don't know how long that process will go on, but in any case the amount of lithium needed will be a steady state, assuming constant need for batteries. But much more likely we will see ever increasing demand for batteries, just as we do for steel or copper or whatever minerals power our current economy.
/s
Personally of course, I don't think this matters at all: old lithium batteries degrade into salt and don't contain harmful chemicals. There's no real indication we'd ever have a problem dealing with them, even if it was just throwing them all into a big hole till the hole looks enough like a natural lithium source to mine again.
If a product has twice the lifetime then you are going to have half the waste. I'm not sure how that is irrelevant.
For batteries this is definitely true: we're not even close to storing weeks worth of every yet, and the more you can store the more flexible and useful they become.
I am very interested in this question, but those who raise it never have answers about the negative impacts of mining lithium.
For example, the amount of lithium needed for an EV is an order of magnitude less than the amount of steel needed. What is so bad about lithium mining that it's 10x worse than iron mining, pound for pound?
Nobody has ever answered my request for environmental concerns with a concrete environmental lithium mining concern, such as acidification that can sometimes happen with iron mining.
I've researched and researched, found nothing, which leaves me thinking that the worst case scenario for lithium is no worse than the worst case for iron.
Meanwhile, we have such immense documented harms from fossil fuel extraction that nobody ever questions again, or with the same intensity that's reserved for supposedly toxic lithium batteries.
The apparent benefit is massive, so any delay seems to cause massive harm to the environment.
I think we need to flip the question: where is the proof that coal/oil/iron is better for the environment than mining and recycling batteries? (BTW, it's at least 20 years now for grid batteries, with lifetime going up all the time...)
So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
Lithium is also extracted via brine, as opposed to hard rock. Most of the environmental reporting has been on the brine approaches, which currently are in high elevations of South American mountains, and the problem appears to be mostly the use of land and taking that land out of the ecosystem for economic use as drying pools. But the same problem occurs with mining, too!
means recycling of lithium batteries will be a thriving business. (i.e. big difference from recycling of say tires or plastic bottles, more like, pretty successful, recycling of aluminum, and even better than it)
No one made fortune in Li-ion recycling in all those years. Li-ion cells remained disposable.
Spodumene is dispersed among other minerals into rocks and it only forms a few percent at most of those rocks, if not only fractions of a percent.
The rocks must be crushed and spodumene must be separated from the other much more abundant minerals, by flotation or similar mineral concentration techniques, before going further to chemical processing.
So your 670 pounds must be multiplied by a factor like 100, varying from mine to mine.
Some multiplication factor must also be used for the iron ore, which is also mixed with undesirable silicates, but iron oxide may reach up to a few tens of percent of the rock, so the multiplication factor is much smaller.
> The mine sets a chemical-grade specifications benchmark of 6.0% Li2O minimum and 0.8% Fe2O3 maximum.
Spodumene is 0% iron. How much lithium does it contain on a Li2O basis? 8%, I think:
You have: lithium + aluminum + 2(silicon + 3 oxygen)
You want:
Definition: 186.089
You have: (2 lithium + oxygen) / 2 _
You want: %
* 8.0282762
/ 0.12455974
No, as it turns out. The paper linked just before that says that none of the rock is quite that lithium-rich https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/segweb/economicgeology/arti...:
> The lithium ore zones comprise mainly spodumene, apatite, and quartz, with some ore zones returning upward of 5 percent Li2O.
OTOH, that paper is from 01995, so maybe there are new findings since 30 years ago. It says the reserves there were 4% Li2O. Later in the paper, it explains:
> The hanging-wall lithium zone in the main pegmatite is generally richer (up to 5% Li2O, equivalent to 60–80% spodumene) than the footwall lithium zone
That seems to contradict adrian_b's strong statement:
> Spodumene is dispersed among other minerals into rocks and it only forms a few percent at most of those rocks, if not only fractions of a percent.
It could still be true at other mines.
I do think a plug-in hybrid would be better for when I'm not traveling, but I bought this car specifically for travel.
A 20 gallon tank produces 400 pounds of CO2 for every fill up.
Even manually filling a tank by lifting a series of five gallon containers would seriously reorient the average person's conception of their fuel usage.
If the processes to extract Lithium from recycling become cheap enough to compete with the prices of mined Lithium, then that happens.
Processes still need to be invented/scaled for that to happen: the only real way to deal with damaged or charged cells that I know of is to deep freeze them, shred them, and then defrost them slowly.
But in either case: Lithium is going to end up as waste. Making it cheaper to make cars affordable and the grid more stable means that disposable batteries will be even cheaper.
I don’t know how modern batteries fare in landfills: Most modern solar panels, for example, are relatively clean (mostly aluminum, silicon, copper, wee bits of lead). But not a waste management expert.
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/responding-recovering-...
They've been working hard at recycling, and the biggest challenge at the moment is actually getting old batteries for the process. There's not many in-service batteries reaching end of life yet, so they mostly deal with production scrap.
[0]https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2025/03/12/energy-dome... [1]https://energydome.com/energy-dome-inks-a-strategic-commerci...
Once R&D costs are covered, capacity scales with the size of the gas bag. Without competition from EVs or the volatility of resource extraction markets there's a clear path to profit here for 10hr+ grid-scale energy storage.
Round trip efficiency is way worse than lithium, but that might not be meaningful for grid batteries. You just want something that cheaply scales.
"Grid batteries" are also a wide concept, from retired electric car lithium packs to 100-hour-scale batteries like what Form is building. You need 3 types of battery, though the two fast ones may want to be unified: - grid stabilizing/synthetic inertia (1~20 C charge/discharge rate) - day/night PV energy shifting (0.15~0.3 C charge/discharge rate) - multi-day weather pattern smoothing (around the 0.01 C Form Energy is targeting)
Other than that the grid stabilizing kind needing much higher security/criticality due to bugs/errors in it's behavior threatening e.g. the European super grid, they would all benefit from co-locating with large solar farms and being connected on the DC side to share AC-side current capacity of the as-built infrastructure (from the inverter/converter through the lines and nearby transformers).