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Lithium may be available everywhere, but it doesn't mean we're producing it in a consumable way. We're producing about 130kt of lithium. Assuming 75kg of lithi
by Incipient 4y ago
Lithium may be available everywhere, but it doesn't mean we're producing it in a consumable way.
We're producing about 130kt of lithium. Assuming 75kg of lithium per car battery, that's about 2mil cars/year. We produce around 60mil cars/year currently.
That's not including any other lithium use.
- pjc50 4y agoI wonder how much goes into disposable vape batteries.
- yread 4y agoMultiple mines will come online this year and next (for example Cinovec in EU with ~30kt/year)
- Robotbeat 4y agoYup. "Wow, if we use more lithium, we'll need to produce more lithium! This is such an insightful comment and not at all tautological..."
- Robotbeat 4y ago75kg?? Where are you getting that figure? Most common figure is around 160 grams of lithium metal per kWh (you can do better, as the theoretical minimum is half that, and some DO do better). Base Model 3 is around 60kWh (giving it about a 250 mile range), so just under 10kg per car, so even your 130kT/year gives us 13 million cars per year. Obviously we're not going to be mining a whole bunch more lithium than we currently use. This is obvious, so saying that if we use more lithium we'll need to mine more lithium is just a tautology and is no useful insight at all!
- Incipient 4y agoThat number I had been referencing was incorrectly lithium carbonate. Misquoted on some EV website. My apologies! Definitely a lot less of a gap, but still a huge increase in the entire supply chain needed, very quickly.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wolfram74 4y agoGood thing the specific energy density of lithium is only critical in portable storage, grid level storage has lots of other options from alternative chemistries, compressed gasses, thermal storage, and even possibly hydrogen fuel cells.