4 ms·

Lithium actually is super abundant

• kube-system 4y ago
  “Abundance” is kind of a tricky concept. 99.999%+ of earth’s resources are not yet within human’s ability to mine. Mostly either inaccessible or too sparsely concentrated or locked in compounds difficult to industrialize. Titanium for instance is also very abundant. But it hasn’t been until relatively recently that humans were able to mine and process it at industrial scale.
• EntrePrescott 4y ago
  depends by what measure… if it's just about how much lithium is theoretically estimated to exist in the earth crust, then one could twist together an argument for lithium to be somewhat "abundant" (even though even by that measure Sodium is, depending on the source, 1000 to 2000 times more abundant). But if it's in terms of practicably available (mineable or otherwise practicably extractable at a sub-exorbitant price) lithium reserves, it's quite bleak actually, and we are currently forced to either rely on a small set of limited reserves, mostly concentrated in a few rather uncertain countries of origin… or to resort to extremely expensive low-yield extraction methods. In contrast: Na (Sodium) is trivially and cheaply extractable from salt, which is readily available everywhere in much larger quantities (be it as sea water or from salt mines which are enormously more common than lithium mining) for cheap.
  • nasmorn 4y ago
    Also in Austria we have one of the oldest salt mines on earth and it is still very pretty there. Salt mining can be done with very little environmental impact.