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You have to be very careful with claims about relative abundance. Take water as an example, 2/3 of our planets surface is covered in it and yet for practical pu

You have to be very careful with claims about relative abundance. Take water as an example, 2/3 of our planets surface is covered in it and yet for practical purposes it's useless to us for drinking or watering crops. Regardless, I didn't make any claim about abundance of lithium, only the current manufacturing capacity. My point about Iceland is they already have huge amounts of geothermal power and they should be able to develop it and sell it back to Europe as green electricity. Currently 70% of their power consumption is used to smelt aluminium so it's not like they are constrained.

xyzzyz 6y ago
> Take water as an example, 2/3 of our planets surface is covered in it and yet for practical purposes it's useless to us for drinking or watering crops. It's not useless, it just requires too much processing and transportation to be practical. The issue with water is that for what we need it, we really require enormous amounts of it. This is not the case with lithium, where required amounts are trivial in comparison. Just to make the point: a truck-load full of lithium is worth around $300,000. To desalinate the same truck-load worth of salt water, it costs about $20, that is, 4 orders of magnitude less. If you don't have to desalinate, but instead can just draw fresh water, it will be around $1-2 for a truck-load. Obviously, trucking in water is still too expensive, because we need lots and lots of water, truly insane amounts compared to anything else.