>I wonder if lithium will give us the same geopolitical results as petrol Highly doubtful. Lithium is one of the most common elements, and the oceans contain h

>I wonder if lithium will give us the same geopolitical results as petrol Highly doubtful. Lithium is one of the most common elements, and the oceans contain hundreds of billions of tons of dissolved lithium. The concentrations are low, but there is plenty of research on sea water extraction [ie., 0] which also may dovetail very nicely with other efforts like desalination (using the resulting concentrated brine), and we're moving to a world with a lot of potential cheap solar/wind energy that will result in extraneous power in need of economic applications. Lithium is also very recyclable. Places with more lucky concentrated lithium certainly can have some economic advantages in pricing, but not in fundamental supply as happens with fossil fuels. At the end of the day that sets a pretty hard ceiling on global pricing, let alone strategic level pricing. Any first world nation with any coast could embark on sea water extraction if they felt it was important enough, combined with aggressive recycling operations, and then just be set. Very different dynamic then consumable fossil fuels. Edit to your other post: >Everything is everywhere That obviously isn't true, oil isn't everywhere. Lots of places simply don't have any domestically at all, at any price. And it's a fuel, unlike lithium. It gets used up. Obviously getting together all the infrastructure for a lithium using energy economy is going to cost a lot, but so did (and does) fossil fuel infrastructure. And surely many countries won't actually bother because of comparative advantage elsewhere, but the fact that they could naturally will reduce the geopolitical leverage. ---- 0: Innovative lithium recovery technique from seawater by using world-first dialysis with a lithium ionic superconductor : https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.desal.2014.12.018 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.desal.2014.12.0...