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" Annual vehicle sales are 90 million, give or take. Assume 50kWh per battery, and around 850 grams of lithium carbonate per kWh. No recycling, no tech improvem

" Annual vehicle sales are 90 million, give or take. Assume 50kWh per battery, and around 850 grams of lithium carbonate per kWh. No recycling, no tech improvement, full market penetration, no savings from autonomous vehicles or the like and it is 3.8 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent - market price assuming today’s lithium price of $60k works out to $230bn, or the dollar equivalent of 23 days of global oil consumption. Assume more normal lithium pricing of $20,000 and you get 8 days of current run rate oil consumption for a year’s worth of lithium vehicles at 100% market penetration. This is existential for commodity trading houses longer term: they can sell more lithium, copper and nickel but the core businesses they are in are big, lucrative and going to shrink and there is no certainty that lithium is not going to disappear into vertically integrated supply chains that do not need freewheeling intermediaries or “financialized capital”. [...] This math for lithium stands before we consider really disruptive things such as: maybe lithium isn’t it for grid storage, or even autos? This is the latest from the Sadoway lab - if we are going to use primarily sulphur and aluminium for batteries they will be laughably cheap. A tried and tested way to make money in materials science is to “do it better, with more available materials and less energy” - this is all three if commercialized. Over the last few years cobalt demand estimates have been crushed by developments in cathode chemistry due to cost and performance improvements in simpler chemistries - I am sceptical that this is the last time that today’s “unobtainium” becomes tomorrows chopped liver. Maybe new nuclear works, even if at low levels of total energy provided simply for stability and security reasons? Perhaps we can do a lot more pumped hydro than we thought? All the while the solar wafers get thinner and more efficient and use less materials…. the preponderance for everyone now calling for longer term structural energy inflation when papers like this are coming from Oxford which take account of these dynamics seems deeply unwise if you are doing anything but playing quarterly revisions. "

theptip 4y ago
I found this quoted passage quite interesting too. > An extremely dull future awaits of energy flows being largely local or in grids where the best meteorologists and machine learning engineers rake the table. One thing I'm not sure about -- do we actually have enough lithium to sustain ~ the current price at much higher consumption levels?
- nine_k 4y ago
  We have colossal known amounts of lithium available as deposits [1], plus many orders of magnitude more in seawater, which likely could be harvested along with its desalination. Also, lithium, like most alkaline metals, is pretty easy to extract and recycle. Batteries are not yet built for easy recycling though [2]; I can expect this to change as the scale grows. [1]: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/six-largest-lithium-reserves-world/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/six-largest-lithiu... [2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-of-money-so-why-arent-we-recycling-lithium-batteries/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-...
  - cyberlurker 4y ago
    I would be pleasantly suprised if recycling is a focus earlier. But I fully expect huge landfills of batteries in the next few decades.
    - sgrove 4y ago
      I strongly suspect you might be disappointed. Battery collection and recycling - even as “raw ore” - should be easily profitable with plenty of motivated parties eventually. In the meantime, redwood materials will probably make quite a bit of money.
      - cyberlurker 4y ago
        Why would I be disappointed?
    - BluSyn 4y ago
      Recycling is already a key focus, as batteries are very mineral rich, and at scale much cheaper to refine locally than to mine & import with long supply chains. For those that doubt it's possible to collect spent batteries; recycling rates for lead acid car batteries is already 99%. They virtually never end up in landfills.
gerdesj 4y ago
Please break up your thesis into paragraphs, its quite hard to read en masse. You might like to qualify your stats - eg annual vehicle sales are 90M - where? worldwide or US or lol. 50kWh for a car battery? Where did that come from? Please slow down a bit and bring us outsiders in on your vision for energy usage.
- Jedd 4y ago
  This is a quote from the article.
hedora 4y ago
> This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people–every great city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing–was the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every centre of population, the value of existing house property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;–this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air. - H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914), speaking of the consequences of the coming availability of limitless energy production. https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/the-world-set-free/ https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/the-world-set-free/ This book was about 100 years ahead of its time, in my opinion. It predicted the world wars, atomic weapons, and cheap clean energy would all arrive at once, in about 1950. It even has an insightful passage on gender identity, and one of the villains is clearly based on Putin.
tuatoru 4y ago
> This math for lithium stands before we consider really disruptive things such as: maybe lithium isn’t it for grid storage, or even autos? This is a key point. There are several chemistries, at least, that are near competitive in various applications with lithium despite being manufactured in much smaller quantities and so being much earlier in their learning curves. Off the top of my head:- Vanadium redox flow - been around since the 1980s at least as an idea, now being realised by various people. Ambri's molten calcium salt batteries. PolyJoule's organic polymer-based batteries (based on chains of carbon atoms as the "ion"). CATL's sodium-ion batteries. Iron-air, aluminum air, aluminum sulfur, lithium metal, sodium metal, various alloys. The point is that sticking with lithium is the worst case. It only happens if all the alternatives fail, despite them all being in commercial use today. It's all upside, with a known and mild downside. By which I mean that batteries can only get cheaper, either very quickly, or only quickly.

theptip 4y ago

I found this quoted passage quite interesting too. > An extremely dull future awaits of energy flows being largely local or in grids where the best meteorologists and machine learning engineers rake the table. One thing I'm not sure about -- do we actually have enough lithium to sustain ~ the current price at much higher consumption levels?

nine_k 4y ago
We have colossal known amounts of lithium available as deposits [1], plus many orders of magnitude more in seawater, which likely could be harvested along with its desalination. Also, lithium, like most alkaline metals, is pretty easy to extract and recycle. Batteries are not yet built for easy recycling though [2]; I can expect this to change as the scale grows. [1]: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/six-largest-lithium-reserves-world/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/six-largest-lithiu... [2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-of-money-so-why-arent-we-recycling-lithium-batteries/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-...
- cyberlurker 4y ago
  I would be pleasantly suprised if recycling is a focus earlier. But I fully expect huge landfills of batteries in the next few decades.
  - sgrove 4y ago
    I strongly suspect you might be disappointed. Battery collection and recycling - even as “raw ore” - should be easily profitable with plenty of motivated parties eventually. In the meantime, redwood materials will probably make quite a bit of money.
    - cyberlurker 4y ago
      Why would I be disappointed?
  - BluSyn 4y ago
    Recycling is already a key focus, as batteries are very mineral rich, and at scale much cheaper to refine locally than to mine & import with long supply chains. For those that doubt it's possible to collect spent batteries; recycling rates for lead acid car batteries is already 99%. They virtually never end up in landfills.

gerdesj 4y ago

Please break up your thesis into paragraphs, its quite hard to read en masse. You might like to qualify your stats - eg annual vehicle sales are 90M - where? worldwide or US or lol. 50kWh for a car battery? Where did that come from? Please slow down a bit and bring us outsiders in on your vision for energy usage.

Jedd 4y ago
This is a quote from the article.

hedora 4y ago

> This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people–every great city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing–was the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every centre of population, the value of existing house property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;–this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air. - H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914), speaking of the consequences of the coming availability of limitless energy production. https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/the-world-set-free/ https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/the-world-set-free/ This book was about 100 years ahead of its time, in my opinion. It predicted the world wars, atomic weapons, and cheap clean energy would all arrive at once, in about 1950. It even has an insightful passage on gender identity, and one of the villains is clearly based on Putin.

tuatoru 4y ago

> This math for lithium stands before we consider really disruptive things such as: maybe lithium isn’t it for grid storage, or even autos? This is a key point. There are several chemistries, at least, that are near competitive in various applications with lithium despite being manufactured in much smaller quantities and so being much earlier in their learning curves. Off the top of my head:- Vanadium redox flow - been around since the 1980s at least as an idea, now being realised by various people. Ambri's molten calcium salt batteries. PolyJoule's organic polymer-based batteries (based on chains of carbon atoms as the "ion"). CATL's sodium-ion batteries. Iron-air, aluminum air, aluminum sulfur, lithium metal, sodium metal, various alloys. The point is that sticking with lithium is the worst case. It only happens if all the alternatives fail, despite them all being in commercial use today. It's all upside, with a known and mild downside. By which I mean that batteries can only get cheaper, either very quickly, or only quickly.