They have a lot in Afghanistan. Why are we there?
Boy, if there were ever a country that needed lithium . . .
Not really telling the whole story. As the wiki article even states, ‘peak uranium’ is about a decline of production, not availability, mainly due to the industry as a whole being unpopular, and the glut of fissionables on the market from retired nuclear weapons keeping the extraction industry from growing to fit the actual demand.
Uranium itself is, while not unlimited, effectively so, if one were to bring breeder reactors into the equation, and the fact that fuel is such a minor part of the price of nuclear that a tenfold increase in raw uranium cost would result in only doubling the price of electricity supplied by a reactor. At that pricepoint, it even becomes very viable to mine the oceans for their estimated 4.5 billion tons of uranium. It isn’t coal cheap, but its cheap enough that some tightening of the belts and efficiency improvements would make it quite livable.
Also, there are reactor designs that utilize thorium(3x more abundant than uranium).
We’re not running out of fissionables anytime soon. Hundreds of thousands or millions of years worth.
Peak oil/coal/natural gas, on the other hand, will happen eventually(as well as a variety of other rare resources). I suspect seawater and garbage dump mining to be big businesses in the future.
That argument was mentioned in the Wiki article, but it seems to be the most optimistic among several conflicting views on the topic.
I wouldn’t worry about that.
Judging by the same model we’re using for oil, the lithium industry is practically in its infancy. Sure, we have known that lithium exists, and some obvious places to get it. Some specialized applications have been pretty cool. But this is comparable to the kerosene lamp stage of the oil industry.
Have the discovery of reserves of lithium peaked yet? Again, using the same model, that will give us a clue.
And anyway, lithium isn’t crucial to the EV movement. Nickel batteries can do the trick, and if there is one resource we won’t run out of it is nickel. Or in the more-advanced direction, combustion batteries are hyped to have 10x the storage capacity of today’s Li-On battery. I’m not sure combustion batteries even employ lithium, can’t find the cite just now.
One of the almost but not quite directly linked Drum articles had a semi-scary idea: a “fatal middle” where high oil prices causes economic downturn, which leads to decreased consumption and low oil prices, which leads to no capital being spent on alternates because oil prices are low and there’s not a trillion dollars sitting around to spend on making 500 coal to liquids plants. Repeat a couple of boom and bust cycles later until we’re a banana republic. The problem wouldn’t be $20 a gallon gas, but when it’s $3 and you can’t afford it.
So that would be bad.
Peak lithium? Meet something which could short-circuit biofuels - peak phosphorus.
Excellent cite.
From one of the correspondents at OilDrum.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5969#more
Read it and weep.
Here is a quote from p67 of Kunstler’s The Long Emergency:
I forget the exact price, but the Canadian tar sands are profitable at vastly less.
Thank you. That’s interesting. But I’m not sure I agree with it; I’d probably have to read much of - if not the whole - book to put it into context. My main problem with that cite is that there is a finite limit to the oil. I need to look into it further.
Don’t trust anything Kunstler says about the subject. He is actively looking forward to the end of Western civilization, and has been for years. Peak Oil is just the latest way he thinks the desired end will come.
Before he latched onto Peak Oil, he was a Y2K doomer, and described what he thought would be the inevitable civilization-collapsing result of the Millennium Bug in almost exactly the same terms he now talks about the results of Peak Oil. He even still has his essay on his website, railing against the evils of Western Civilization and praising the coming Y2K-caused wiping away of all that.
Just compare the excerpts from that essay that I
[quoted here]
(http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9746442&postcount=53) with the excerpt from another one of Kunstler’s books about Peak Oil that is
[quoted here]
(http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9733138&postcount=16).
Ah, but then there is the data. It certainly is not being disproven that we have passed peak. It just so happens Kunstler described it in advance, sort of.
So he’s a glass half-empty kind of guy.
Take a deep breath, everyone, and take a look at this.
If this does not make the case for trouble ahead, then pigs will never dance.
No, Kunstler is describing something that can be interpreted to match some graphs of recent crude production. Figuring out whether those graphs truly show the production plateau that Kunstler is describing, or whether there are other factors (like the recession) which are currently affecting production is the question here (and, of course, the resultant question of “if this is a production plateau, what does it mean?”).
The problem is that Kunstler is predisposed to see the worst in this, because he wants Peak Oil to happen and to destroy civilization. He will only report on things that he thinks confirm his ideas that The End Is Nigh, will twist these indications in any way he can to show them in the most apocalyptic light possible, and will only describe the worst possible result of those indications that he sees.
As a result, he’s an untrustworthy source on Peak Oil. It’s best to completely ignore anything he has to say and seek out other sources, because going through and double-checking the veracity of everything he talks about is just too time consuming. Might as well skip the process and just go right to those other sources in the first place.
After all, some of the things he said about Y2K were, indeed, accurate and somewhat predictive, too. But in his zeal to see Western civilization brought low, everything he ever said about the topic ended up being massively, egregiously wrong about Y2K overall, and completely useless as a source of any reliable Y2K information.
He hasn’t given any indication so far that his Peak Oil obsession is any different.
Well, he’s more of a “The glass is a lie! Smash the glass! Go back to drinking straight from streams!” kind of guy.
IMO, we’re probably not quite at the Peak-Oil point, but we’re getting there . . . We’re approaching the peak faster every year . . . And faster and faster . . . Oooh, yeah, baby, just like that! PUMP IT! BURN IT! PUMP IT! BURN IT! OMIGOOOOHHHDDD!
[hunts in vain for lit-cigarette smiley]
Suppose the existing big oil producers (SA, Russia,Nigeria) start to experience steep drops in production? Like we find out that the SA Gharwar oil field has dried up? This would be signalled by huge price increases…perhaps to $200=$300/barrel.
Would this result in all the <30 MPG cars going off the roads?
Rich people would still drive their 8 MPG LandRovers…but middle class people would have to adapt-by buying cars with small engines.
Suppose we developed 25 HP cars that weighed 1000 lbs and delivered 60 MPG-would that be enough to stave of disaster?
ralph: it wouldn’t make terribly much of a difference. We’d still have millions of cars on the road, each sucking down thousands of gallons of gas a year. Slightly reduced demand might result in slightly lower prices for a short time. It’s also worth pointing out that steep drops in production are unlikely, given the number of operational oil fields with different peak dates. It’s not like we’re going to run out of oil. If you graphed it, it won’t look anything like a cliff. It’s just going to get more and more difficult to extract, until it costs more than a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil. The graph will look like a pretty typical normal distribution (AKA ‘bell curve’) with a bumpy top. We’re at the bumpy top right now, which makes it tough to say whether or not global oil production has truly peaked.