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I thought the price differential was not going to happen as there was a serious drop in the price of Lithium over the past year; but I looked it up and the lith

by jbm 8mo ago

I thought the price differential was not going to happen as there was a serious drop in the price of Lithium over the past year; but I looked it up and the lithium price drop is more a 5 year trend, with the last few months having a sudden surge in the price. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

hunterpayne 8mo ago
Increased production of Lithium is why. However, that only drains the (very limited) reserves of Lithium more quickly. Currently we have about 75 years left of it at previous extraction rates. More could be found, that is unlikely.
- lovich 8mo ago
  I thought there were a few massive lithium sources found in the past few years like the one in Thailand which have significantly increased our estimates?
  - hunterpayne 8mo ago
    Sure, but by like 2 years. Lithium is rare. It sits between Cobalt and Scandium on the list of abundance in Earth's crust. And the vast majority comes from one place in South America. They are always revising estimates up and down a bit. But Li demand just keeps rising and rising. And a single grid scale battery takes 10 years of current Li-ion battery production worldwide to build. So do we have enough Li at current rates, sure. We don't have anywhere near enough to do anything like replacing even a fraction of FFs with renewables. I guess that's the real headline here. That's why people are experimenting with Na-ion. Putting it in a production car today, that seems...what's the word...homicidal. Making a grid stabilization battery (not for backup) with large amounts of space between cabinets to see what happens, that seems more wise.
    - kgc 8mo ago
      That 10yr per grid scale battery estimate seems high since we have built many grid scale batteries as well as millions of EVs in recent history.
      - hunterpayne 8mo ago
        We have many grid stabilization batteries. There are 0 grid scale backup systems. 1 year of worldwide Li-ion battery production could backup just California for about 90 minutes.
        vablings 8mo ago
        There are virtually zero singular grid scale power systems these days. It is a mix of CCGT, Solar, Wind and Nuclear.
- Qwertious 8mo ago
  Draining lithium reserves isn't that important - batteries don't use up the lithium, once the battery dies you can just suck out all the lithium and re-use it (and battery electrolytes are ~100% lithium, compared to lithium ore/brine being anywhere from 0.1% to 15% lithium - an order of magnitude difference). And since modern batteries are more efficient than old batteries with the same amount of lithium, we effectively increase the circulating lithium capacity over time. In 75 years we won't need to extract more lithium - except the fraction needed to replace permanently-lost batteries. Incidentally, you should be very careful when talking about "<resource> reserves", because the definition of a reserve is usually "<resource> that is profitable to extract" - and when we "run out", prices will go up and thus currently-unprofitable sources will become profitable, and POOF! Our <resource> reserves have increased, purely through the power of semantics. Also, over the decades resource extraction becomes cheaper and thus more sources become profitable. Personally though, I don't think any of that will matter -IMO the future is proton batteries, AKA Hydrogen batteries (which use an electrolyte of "ionic hydrogen", H+, which has 1 proton and 0 electrons - people claim lithium is the lightest metal, but it has 3x the protons of hydrogen). I think that the recent TABQ batteries, or something like it, will become commercially viable within 75 years (although who even knows what batteries will look like in the year 2101).
  - hunterpayne 8mo ago
    Nobody has ever recycled Lithium, just reused the cells that lasted longer than average. We have no idea how to actually recycle Li. We don't even understand the physical mechanism that causes it to exhaust. We think if we just let it sit around for a few decades, it might just come back on it own. We don't know though. As for reserves, while you understand the economics you are missing the physics. For example, there is Li (and U) in the ocean. We don't extract Uranium from the ocean not only because it isn't economical, it isn't even energy efficient. This is because moving a billion tonnes of water takes more energy than the 3 tonnes of Uranium you would harvest from doing that. For Li, its takes just as much energy (and money) as its just as rare. In other words, there is a floor on that economic extraction argument specified by a positive EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).
    - 8mo ago

by jbm 8mo ago

hunterpayne 8mo ago

Increased production of Lithium is why. However, that only drains the (very limited) reserves of Lithium more quickly. Currently we have about 75 years left of it at previous extraction rates. More could be found, that is unlikely.

lovich 8mo ago
I thought there were a few massive lithium sources found in the past few years like the one in Thailand which have significantly increased our estimates?
- hunterpayne 8mo ago
  Sure, but by like 2 years. Lithium is rare. It sits between Cobalt and Scandium on the list of abundance in Earth's crust. And the vast majority comes from one place in South America. They are always revising estimates up and down a bit. But Li demand just keeps rising and rising. And a single grid scale battery takes 10 years of current Li-ion battery production worldwide to build. So do we have enough Li at current rates, sure. We don't have anywhere near enough to do anything like replacing even a fraction of FFs with renewables. I guess that's the real headline here. That's why people are experimenting with Na-ion. Putting it in a production car today, that seems...what's the word...homicidal. Making a grid stabilization battery (not for backup) with large amounts of space between cabinets to see what happens, that seems more wise.
  - kgc 8mo ago
    That 10yr per grid scale battery estimate seems high since we have built many grid scale batteries as well as millions of EVs in recent history.
    - hunterpayne 8mo ago
      We have many grid stabilization batteries. There are 0 grid scale backup systems. 1 year of worldwide Li-ion battery production could backup just California for about 90 minutes.
      - vablings 8mo ago
        There are virtually zero singular grid scale power systems these days. It is a mix of CCGT, Solar, Wind and Nuclear.
Qwertious 8mo ago
Draining lithium reserves isn't that important - batteries don't use up the lithium, once the battery dies you can just suck out all the lithium and re-use it (and battery electrolytes are ~100% lithium, compared to lithium ore/brine being anywhere from 0.1% to 15% lithium - an order of magnitude difference). And since modern batteries are more efficient than old batteries with the same amount of lithium, we effectively increase the circulating lithium capacity over time. In 75 years we won't need to extract more lithium - except the fraction needed to replace permanently-lost batteries. Incidentally, you should be very careful when talking about "<resource> reserves", because the definition of a reserve is usually "<resource> that is profitable to extract" - and when we "run out", prices will go up and thus currently-unprofitable sources will become profitable, and POOF! Our <resource> reserves have increased, purely through the power of semantics. Also, over the decades resource extraction becomes cheaper and thus more sources become profitable. Personally though, I don't think any of that will matter -IMO the future is proton batteries, AKA Hydrogen batteries (which use an electrolyte of "ionic hydrogen", H+, which has 1 proton and 0 electrons - people claim lithium is the lightest metal, but it has 3x the protons of hydrogen). I think that the recent TABQ batteries, or something like it, will become commercially viable within 75 years (although who even knows what batteries will look like in the year 2101).
- hunterpayne 8mo ago
  Nobody has ever recycled Lithium, just reused the cells that lasted longer than average. We have no idea how to actually recycle Li. We don't even understand the physical mechanism that causes it to exhaust. We think if we just let it sit around for a few decades, it might just come back on it own. We don't know though. As for reserves, while you understand the economics you are missing the physics. For example, there is Li (and U) in the ocean. We don't extract Uranium from the ocean not only because it isn't economical, it isn't even energy efficient. This is because moving a billion tonnes of water takes more energy than the 3 tonnes of Uranium you would harvest from doing that. For Li, its takes just as much energy (and money) as its just as rare. In other words, there is a floor on that economic extraction argument specified by a positive EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).
  - 8mo ago