this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Not unless they come up with some new kind of battery tech. There's simply not enough lithium for a global mass adoption of personal electric cars.
I wouldn't worry so much about that. I mean, I am sure battery tech will improve because companies will want to sell the car with the longest range, but in terms of lithium supplies, it is not scarce and it is recyclable.
You’re wrong.
There’s about 1.446 billion cars in use on earth and 26 million tons of proven global lithium reserves. Even if we immediately extracted all that and divided it between all the cars that gives each car about 34 pounds of lithium.
A Tesla, relatively small and lightweight for a car, has 138 pounds of lithium in its battery.
So there’s enough lithium in the whole world for a little under one quarter of the cars we have now if they were all tiny little sports coupes.
Nothing for busses, ships, trains, trams, bikes, mobile phones, computers, power tools, appliances, grid storage, home generators, the list goes on.
E: edited to add the word proven. Proven reserves are reserves that we actually got hands on, took a look at and verified the quality of. There is about four times that in total reserves but those numbers are things like estimated average volume in a particular kind of rock and estimated volume of that rock in the earths crust. Those kinds of numbers aren’t very useful because we’re not gonna run a giant mining machine across the whole surface of the earth to get every last bit of lithium out of it. The whole point of this is to live on the fucking planet not shove the whole thing into an aggregate sorter to get some resources.