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What are the chances of battery tech advancing beyond lithium before extraction of these deposit can even begin at scale?
Meaning, it's not like they just found one big 15M tonne solid bar of lithium.
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Yes. Think people have impression we are energy independent and Scot-free because of fracking. Really, fracking was a second chance. A reprieve. We'll just be behind 8-ball again if we don't take this reprieve and grow some other energy source.
I do not really understand why we are obsessed with energy independence. It only matters if we were to ban exports which is an absurd thing to do.
Like Norway did (FTW) and Australia didn't (ruefully).
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Deposits appear sufficiently distributed to not cause geopolitical conflicts [1]. This is not oil. Lithium is relatively abundant, and a mineral to be reused, not energy to be consumed once through. To keep it conflict free, we must continue to discover reserves and drive down the value of the commodity. No one goes to war over say, salt, in the 21st century (at least not yet!). [1] https://lithiumfuture.org/map.html
Can you clarify about reuse? At least as far as batteries go, right now once it's in a battery it gets used up & then ends up in the trash [2]. There's no efficient / cost-effective way to extract lithium from spent batteries for reuse in new batteries. We might in the future but it would require some scientific advances + expensive commercialization to scale up. Even if in the future we do develop a mechanism, it co…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Material-World-Substantial-Story-Fu...
"Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. They built our world, and they will transform our future."
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I think that true global reserves are much higher than what we know now. Before, Lithium was important, but not nearly in the quantities needed for EV's. Now that EV's have picked up, more people will be looking for Lithium, and that will make all the difference.
It’s very likely to go the way of oil. EV demand has slowed down recently (honestly I don’t believe the world is ready for mass adoption and EVs themselves are not ready also), so we’ll keep finding more and more and always beyond the consumption.
However what's actually happening is that demand is going up, but at a rate slower than before. Imagine that in 2022 demand increased by 60% YoY but in 2023 demand only increased by 40% YoY (these are approximate figures). You are measuring the second derivative which is decreasing from a big positive value to a smaller positive value, which is not usually described by the word "slow". Intuitively "slow" means the second derivative has become negative.
Dumb question: how do they measure/know it's "15M tonnes". Meaning, it's not like they just found one big 15M tonne solid bar of lithium.
I did not work in this field explicitly, but worked on Gaussian processes which were first used as a way to aggregate data like this from multiple sources to minimize the number of drillings required to find oil.
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We were heading into an ice age, which would be just as bad for humans. The issue is that we built a bunch of things that depend on the current climate, but the climate has been changing for a long time and will keep changing. We need to adapt to it or find a way to adapt it. The holocene is an incredibly small period compared to the age of the Earth. Nature doesn't gaf, it'll cycle in and out and we'll have to adapt…
Not taking the extreme and unprecedented rate of temperature change into account is either ignorance or disingenuity. https://xkcd.com/1732/ It's probable that very few species will be able to adapt to such an abrupt change.