The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

As the saying goes, ask people what they want and they'll ask for a faster horse.

It isn't obvious to me people are asking for vehicles to last a million miles, people aren't clamouring for current vehicles that have done a million miles or are old enough to have done. That million mile car is also going to be a 20+ year old car, with 20 year old safety features, and 20 year old phone integration, and its also going to take 20 years for Tesla to establish that reputation.

That's not to say you're wrong, but it will take a fundamental change in peoples understanding of car ownership closer to how they own houses, that will take time, longer than Tesla has.

Something incredible just happened.

After a half century of jaw-boning about the need for renewable "green" energy, we now have a repeatable scalable tech template similar to the [oil well + refinery + piston engine] or [coal mine + pulverizer + furnace + turbine] tech templates that scaled fossil fuel energy. It is: [wind turbines and/or solar PV panels + lithium ion cells].

By repeatable and scalable tech template I mean something that no longer requires non-incremental forms of R&D. We no longer have to think that deeply about it. It's now in the realm of "see that stuff? Build more stuff like that."

The solar/wind+li-ion template can, if scaled, power almost all current human industrial activity with the exception of long-haul heavy vehicles (land, sea, or air) and rockets. Those are important things but they're collectively less than a quarter of all fossil fuel use.

The key is "if scaled." We are going to need more lithium. Good news is that it's not really all that rare. Bad news is that until quite recently there hasn't been serious investment in getting it. Look at what we invest in getting oil vs. lithium.

That's because until quite recently there hasn't been the demand to justify that investment. Now there is. Lithium prices have exploded, signaling the need for more. The price signals are working. Good.

It's normal during this kind of scaling to have periods where it looks like investment is outpacing demand and vice versa. Demand and supply don't scale at the same rate so you get price spikes in both directions. This doesn't change the underlying reality now in effect.

> The major factor to road wear and tear is and has always been trucks and other heavy vehicles.

What about electric trucks and other heavy vehicles? Or is there little difference since these vehicles would probably have been diesel with a lot of potential torque anyways?

Goodenough didn't invent li-ion, he invented the cobalt oxide cathode that dominated the industry until nickel and iron cathodes came along.

Goodenough is 97 years old and while he is still apparently sharp, he is not leading the lab that gets publicity under his name. From what I've seen he's more of a mentor. I, and many others[1], are extremely skeptical of the claims coming from that group. At best, they have been putting out very misleading papers that gloss over key factors or lie by omission to make their research look like they're making massive breakthroughs. At worst, many of their claims break basic rules of conservation of energy.

Either way they haven't given much evidence they have a better battery. One of the ways they produce these claims is by creating several cells, each optimized for maximum performance in one area while totally sacrificing every other metric. Then they put every good metric in the abstract and conclusion, while if the battery was balanced for lifespan, power, and capacity it would perform poorly in all ways. Beyond that they also make some absurdly high ion mobility claims in mundane materials, and nonsensical energy balances. Honestly, it has a lot of signs of bunk science... but it does seem mixed in with good (but routine) work, so it's kind of perplexing.

[1]: http://lacey.se/2018/07/05/glass-battery-part-2/

That is a seriously high bar, and extremely unlikely (there are lots and lots of things on a car that break that have nothing to do with the drivetrain). I think a better first goal is to get the reliability up on par with the other domestic manufacturers, and get the repair time down to something comparable as well.

I got pretty close a few weeks ago to picking up a Model 3P but the maintenance stories spooked me. I am just not enough of an EV/Tesla enthusiast to deal with that on my commuter car.