We were never going to 'run out' of lithium.

But that does not exclude short tern shortages, and together with other relatively expensive and scarce elements used in lithium batteries is one of many reasons why the push for BEVs everywhere was far more problematic than enthusiasts allowed.

In the case of lithium though, this is potentially capable of answering much of the issues involved.

On reading this, the first question I asked myself was 'how much of the world's resources of lithium are in such brines?'

Here is an article which gives the world's lithium resources at 89 million tons, most of it in brines:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/legendary-lithium-riches-bolivias-salt-flats-may-still-just-be-mirage-2022-05-23/

It also talks specifically about the Salar de Uyuni lithium resource in Bolivia, which is the largest, at 21 million tons, so far substantially unexploited due to a variety of issues, including environmental concerns, the normal process, issues in the climate there about using evaporative solar techniques, and the large amount of magnesium in the brine.

This process is not dependent on evaporation and is highly selective for lithium, so may enable tapping into that resource for a start, as it seems in addition to be very environmentally friendly,

The process would also appear able to decrease the price of the lithium in the battery,

One of the reasons that folk got over optimistic about future price falks is that top down 'analysis ' just extrapolated previous rates of decline into the future, when an increasing proportion as the technology and production advances is simply the far more sticky material costs, hence the recent rises, not falls, in battery prices.

You need fundamentally new technology to break that link and force prices lower still, and you can't just read that off from historic rates of decline.

I am having a look to try to find out how much of the current price of batteries is in the lithium, but it may take a while as you have to be careful, as the high grade lithium required is way more expensive than the less processed stuff straight out of the ground.

This would appear to have good potential to some extent at least to actually drive down the cost of lithium batteries at a fundamental level though.

And I very much welcome that, although some here may imagine me to be anti battery or whatever.

Working to the nearest planet for accuracy, I have fudged up some figures - false precision is extremely misleading. so I will keep it very, very rough.

Price of battery grade lithium carbonate which contrains 20% by weight lithium:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/606350/battery-grade-lithium-carbonate-price/

At $37,000 per metric ton, that is $37 per kg, times 5 for a kg of lithium, comes to $185/kg lithium

Typical of the confusion is this article on battery weight:

' Besides lithium, EV batteries also contain many other minerals, such as cobalt and manganese. A typical EV battery has about 8 kilograms of lithium, 14 kilograms of cobalt, and 20 kilograms of manganese, although this can often be much more depending on the battery size – a Tesla Model S’ battery, for example, contains around 62.6 kg (138 pounds) of lithium.'

https://blog.evbox.com/ev-battery-weight

!! That is going to be the weight of lithium carbonate, not lithium, in the Tesla S
Divide by 5 and you come to 12.5kg of lithium, which makes sense, which the figures in the article don't.

Taking an EV battery as using around 10 kg of lithium, then you come out to a cost of $185 * 10 = $1850 for an averagish EV

Guessing it as 70 KWh, we have something like $25 per KWh of the battery cost being for lithium

This is going to help reduce costs, but can't by itself reduce them enough to make them hit the $50KWh really needed for full competitiveness with ICE at the cheaper end of the market.

It sure can help supply though, and environmental impact, as well as cost, so is very welcome indeed.

the California Energy Commission estimates that there’s enough lithium here to meet all of the United States’ projected future demand and 40% of the world’s demand

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/04/the-salton-sea-could-produce-the-worlds-greenest-lithium.html

The article doesn’t give enough specifics to check the claim but it could impact price and scalability.

Lithium mines produced an estimated global total of 130,000 metric tons in 2022, a peak in production. This is a significant increase from 2010, when global lithium production was just 28,100 metric tons

https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/

I can't understand this fixation on Lithium; first it was lead now it's Lithium. I consider Li as a bridging technology and not worth all the time and effort spent on it. There are other materials far more abundant, safer, cheaper and better suited for storage of electrical energy than Li. Why not concentrate on e.g. Aluminum, Magnesium, Graphene, Sulfur etc. etc.. Perhaps it would be better to involve AI for choosing tech. solutions to optimize relevant results instead of leaving it up to greedy and short-sighted corporations and investors.

Thanks for the link, Gryf, which I admit I had not looked at in much detail before, as I thought it was mainly concerned with reprocessing, which I was already pretty confident can be done efficiently at good cost.

You have to be careful comparing Moore's law and other geometric expansions, especially in power electronics.
Moore's law refers to the number of transistors per unit area.
Transistors process information and a smaller transistor can process the same amount of information as a larger one.
However, batteries and solar cells, etc process power and this is proportional to the size of the object.
Thus, while you get more efficient at making the devices, you do not get any benefits from making them smaller.
However, as Dave says, you can probably expect the price of electrolysers to fall as production scales, just not 2x every year.