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Misleading way of looking at it. Lithium and sodium are not the major cost (or weight, or volume) inputs to making batteries, and crustal occurrence is very di
by hwillis 3y ago
Misleading way of looking at it. Lithium and sodium are not the major cost (or weight, or volume) inputs to making batteries, and crustal occurrence is very distantly related to cost. We mine things from places with 100x-1mx higher concentrations than natural. Water concentrates lithium into brines and clays for us. Sodium's low density causes it to create massive domes underground that are extremely recoverable. In contrast many metals aren't naturally concentrated.
Lithium batteries aren't made of lithium. They're made of nickel- or iron, or manganese, or cobalt. In iron and manganese batteries the #1 price factor is the manufacturing- the energy, solvents, and machinery used to deposit materials onto film.
Likewise sodium batteries are not made of sodium. There's 13x more iron in them than sodium. There may also be large amounts of manganese or vanadium. The cost of manufacturing is also higher per kWh.
- asow92 3y agoThis sort of misses the point of sodium ion batteries though, no? One of the main objections to lithium ion batteries is the need for cobalt because of how it's sourced through "artisanal mining" in Africa.
- coryrc 3y agoLFP has no cobalt.
- thebruce87m 3y agoAnd can be regularly charged to 100%, and lasts for a greater number of charge cycles.
- scottLobster 3y agoLithium batteries are made of lithium to a point that there is a lithium supply bottleneck if we want to use lithium-ion batteries as the base chemistry for the green transition. It will take time to mass produce things regardless, but I imagine Sodium has far fewer bottlenecks.
- epistasis 3y agoThere is no lithium bottleneck, we merely haven't even bothered to catalog all the lithium that is easily accessible.
- specialist 3y agoYes and: No long term shortage with occasional short term crunches. Mostly due to lag time bringing new supplies online. Like with every commodity market.
- jandrese 3y agoThe lithium bottleneck idea comes from people who go "looking at the current lithium supply we would run short if we instantly started producing 10x as many batteries as we do today", completely ignoring how markets work. It's great if we can get a chemistry that avoids the need for lithium, but it won't be a showstopper if we don't.
- russdill 3y agoLithium is still part of the cost of producing batteries and their production still requires a large number of lithium mining operations. Having a ton of lithium mines around isn't exactly what's destroying the planet, but having fewer would be more better.