I am wondering what would happen if lithium supply followed a path similar to the recent boom in natural gas supplies. The price of natural gas has behaved like this.
It is tough to get a good answer to what the price of lithium is. This source claims it is about $9.50 per 100g ‘in bulk’. If vast lithium deposits were discovered and the price were to fall to, say, $2 or less per 100g, would that by itself be enough to revolutionize the electric vehicle industry? Or, even acknowledging the fact that batteries make up the bulk of the cost of an electric car, would other barriers to electric vehicle technology make themselves glaringly apparent if the raw materials for batteries suddenly became very cheap?
I do not know for sure, but I very much doubt it. I do not really think there is all that much lithium in a battery, and it does not get used up as the battery charges or discharges. It is not fuel. Most of the cost, as far as the battery goes, is in manufacture, not raw materials.
If there is 100g of lithium in a car battery (and my guess is that there less rather than more), then, according to your figures you will save $7.50. That is not going to make a huge difference, whoever gets the benefit of the reduced price.
What would really change the game would be cheap electricity, such as fusion power, maybe.
There doesn’t seem to be a shortage oflithium deposits. The problem is that it’s found in low concentrations and requires a processing to extract it from the various ores. So huge deposits with a much higher concentration of lithium might lower the price of the metal. But the price of lithium batteries for cars is currently based on relatively low demand, and just lowering the price of the lithium wouldn’t have the much effect.
The quoted price is ridiculous; no manufacturer uses pure lithium. The standard stock for batteries is lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide, which is more along the lines of $6,000 to $7,000 per tonne. An electric car requires about 2-3 kg of lithium carbonate, so the total cost of the lithium contributes about $15 - $20 to the price of the car.
TriPolar: Your link goes to this page. Is that on purpose?
I studied one example, the Tesla model S battery. One version uses ~7000 “18650 cells”, which have ~.75g of lithium apiece. So you are correct, there isn’t a terribly large amount of lithium in a battery.
OTOH, a lot of hybrids seem to use nickel or even lead batteries. Why they would go for less energy-dense materials unless the reason was cost? Even if the manufacturing costs more with lithium, IMHO the results are worth it. With super-cheap lithium, suddenly hybrid plug-ins could have greater electric range at today’s cost.
Also, who knows, perhaps there are batteries with higher concentrations of lithium with even higher energy densities that just aren’t economical at today’s prices?
Maybe fusion will catch up some day, but in the medium term it looks like solar is going to win.
I’d bet a small amount of good money that capacitors will replace batteries for cars before the price of lithium makes much difference. They’ll cost less, weigh less, might even last longer. Cars are used frequently and discharge losses won’t matter as much as it does for other battery usage. I’ll only bet a small amount because there are all sorts of possible alternatives that could work out better than lithium batteries.
Older designs, from when Li batteries were smaller, more expensive, and didn’t work.
Li batteries have a more complex charging regime. With Pb batteries, you can just measure the battery voltage. With Ni, you just measure the time. With Li, it’s not that simple. At the moment, I think this is holding back Li deployment even more than cost.
Li batteries are replacing Ni batteries. They often come with a charge controller actually in the battery back, to handle the complex charging requirements.
Li batteries are replacing Pb more slowly. You have to design a battery for a particular use, you can’t just use any battery for everything, so basically you can’t replace a Pb car starting battery until you’ve got an LI car starting battery. The step change doesn’t happen until the Cost, and the Chemistry and the Market line up for long enough to support the capital development cost.
Designing a battery means getting the chemistry right for the application, and also getting the physical design right, the number of plates, the plate area and seperation, the electrolyte physical properties etc.
Still, there is this consideration, from** Nametag**'s 1st cite:
That’s from 2010. Today we would be talking about a full-range ev with a capacity approaching 100 KWH. So, ~250 kg, let’s say 500 pounds of lithium per car, scaled up to the number of vehicles produced in a year: 60 million. So we’d need 15 million tons per year of lithium available to achieve the potential to replace the passenger car ICE on Earth. Of course that number goes down as the energy density in batteries increases, a few % per year.
TriPolar’s cite suggests a relatively vast source of lithium may have been discovered:
But only a little over a year at my estimated global demand limit level.
And that’s not even counting the grid applications that would want to accompany such an increase in electricity demand:
So, about 80 tons of lithium in one of those suckers. That company went bankrupt of course, but I bet they might have done better if they could have produced 1000 instead of a handful of utility-scale lithium batteries.
Point is, as a theoretical percentage of the Earth’s mass, yeah I suppose the passenger ICE engine and infrastructure theoretically could be replaced with a lot of lithium based evs and infrastructure, but in reality the deposits would have to be vast indeed to realize it.
People haven’t really cared for vast deposits of lithium until recently though. What are the chances that such amounts are just sitting there, undiscovered, under our feet?
And, sorry for the WOT, but if anyone knows a good electrochemistry textbook, well maybe I ought to read that next.
Second? Try thirty-third. The most abundant are oxygen, silicon, aluminum, and iron, in that order. Lithium is down below several of the things referred to as “rare earths”.
