Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
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Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
#2Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
#3The Broken Hill Proprietary Company, BHP, comes from Broken Hill, Australia. It is one of the largest mining companies in the world.
Now what is interesting about Broken Hill is I have it on reasonable authority that the area as a whole has had "20 years of remaining reserves" for the last 60 years, because the explorers only bother to go out and 'discover' new parts of the deposit when they get below 15-20 years of reserves.
This is an interesting anecdote to my main point - the cobalt price seems to have jumped like a salmon about 12 months ago, but bringing a new mine online can take about 5 years. Even assuming we don't make this 10 year time frame, who really knows what deposits might have become profitable to mine with even a doubling of the price.
High prices isn't a signal that we have run out, it is a signal that more mines are needed. It is likely the market will heed the signal.
Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
#4One of the more interesting aspects of modern global warfare is the fact that, should the world decide to stage another world war, pretty much everyone is going to run out of a lot of these strategic resources within a few months to years. This, plus the fact that nuclear warfare is going to be extremely limited due to lack of available weapons, and the virtual impossibility of invading a country you don't share a land border with, puts a very hard limit on the amount of aggression any one nation can muster up. Even the mighty US military is a paper tiger after a few steady months of all-out combat.
Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
#5This is supposing that we want big cars with big batteries, In the cities the mobility is moving toward small personal vehicles, and if you have bigger commuter needs, I hope that in the future the highways can be electrified and the cars would only need the battery to get from the highway to your home.
There are not enough minerals to make batteries to replace all the current cars with their current autonomy, but a change of transport paradigm could be feasible.
Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
#6The headline is made to sound like: "Oh no, we are running out of cobalt!"
Yeah, not really. Just like with "oil reserves", there's a common misconception that we'll "run out" when they are depleted. However, "reserves" are just those resources that can be extracted economically at today's prices. When demand increases, prices rise and reserves "magically" increase.
That's exactly what will happen here. "Rare-earth materials" aren't actually rare in the sense that precious metals are rare. They're just uncommon compared to other minerals. If prices rise, eventually China will decide to increase exports and other countries that aren't literally warzones (like the DRC) will chime in.
So, we have ten years until those batteries will become somewhat more expensive, making research into alternatives more promising. There is no urgency here.
Then of course there's the questionable idea that electric motors will replace combustion engines because we're "running out of oil", which is why we supposedly need all these batteries in the first place. My bet is that synthetic fuels will become profitable far earlier.
Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
#7The Broken Hill Proprietary Company, BHP, comes from Broken Hill, Australia. It is one of the largest mining companies in the world. Now what is interesting about Broken Hill is I have it on reasonable authority that the area as a whole has had "20 years of remaining reserves" for the last 60 years, because the explorers only bother to go out and 'discover' new parts of the deposit when they get below 15-20 years of…
> High prices isn't a signal that we have run out, it is a signal that more mines are needed. It is likely the market will heed the signal.
It is a signal that there is a high demand, and not enough supply (whether naturally or artificially -- e.g. diamonds) to meet that demand. That's it.
Building more mines can only happen if the resources exist to mine. This idea that "the market" is a magic wand to wave at problems really needs to stop. As far as "the market" is concerned, the electric car industry could collapse because it failed to innovate past resource shortages.
Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
#8Oh god, another Erlich/Simons bet is needed: what's low is the level of rare earth exploration and exploitation not absolute supply. Is there a supply chain problem? Yes. Are we approaching a mad-max hell war for the last vestiges of humanities wonder mineral? Alas.. no.
The ten years meme is based in a false premise. The article even says Australian known sources are only utilised at 14% and yet predicts a long term supply problem without asking what other sources might be discovered.
From the article A lithium-ion car battery with a 100 kg cathode requires 6–12 kg of cobalt and 36–48 kg of nickel so work on 10kg without improvements and same article says at current economic models only 10 exp 8 tonnes economically extractable. So 10 exp 10 batteries. (1000 kg per tonne) 10,000,000,000 batteries. One car for everyone alive... And that's before normal levels of production efficiency, scavenging nice cobalt rich sources like old batteries or even the intent of the article: new sources and new technologies.
Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
#9As one of my favorite comedians once put it: „Analysts are people who tell you what the world will look like in 15 years if nothing changes. Now do you REALLY want to know how long your toenails get if you don‘t cut them?!“
Movement here will come from a number of factors:
- Demand increases, which will: - open up more mines (nicely summarized in the long commentary in this thread) - incentivize better extraction technology
- Supply will decrease, which will make Cobalt more expensive, which in turn leads to: - battery chemistry with way less cobalt needed (already happening) - better recycling - technology accessing hidden reserves (oil shale and tar sands anyone?) - research into complete alternatives like pressured air, hydrogen, redux flow batteries etc.
We‘ll be fine and renewables will win in any case by now.
Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?
#10One of the more interesting aspects of modern global warfare is the fact that, should the world decide to stage another world war, pretty much everyone is going to run out of a lot of these strategic resources within a few months to years. This, plus the fact that nuclear warfare is going to be extremely limited due to lack of available weapons, and the virtual impossibility of invading a country you don't share a la…
The USA has plenty of rare elements to mind as long as the military doesn’t mind paying more. The USA is already a resource powerhouse, but China has undercut it severely in refining because they hadn’t been caring much about their environment.
The USA military also really really excels at strategic logistics, I’m pretty sure they have more than just a few months stockpiled.