While they are getting cheaper, lithium is not in infinite quantities, nor are rare earths and other elements within li-ion batteries. Also cobalt is problematic for many reasons. LFP are much better but still depend on lithium at least. So, price helps, but it’s not everything.
Unlike petroleum products (which are also in limited supply and have questionable sources), battery ingredients are eminently recyclable. So while it’s all problematic to get out of the ground, once it’s in a battery it can be used over and over and over again.
Everything is better than fossil fuels :) But yes and no. Batteries are not trivial to recycle plus there is more and more demand. Also a lot of rare earths are concentrated mainly in a single country (i.e. China). LFPs and new technologies to the rescue such as sodium.
We don’t have mass lithium ion battery recycling yet because there hasn’t been enough Li+ batteries to begin recycling. As more massive batteries reach end of life it will develop. You know, since a Li+ battery has lithium concentrations several order of magnitude higher than any lithium ore you will find in any mine.
Spot-on!
Alas, I’ve written my last comment before I read yours.
Do you think it’s easier to
- cob lithium from rocks, dug from the earth or
- extract lithium from a lithium battery
?
Where do you think will be the higher concentration of lithium?
First you make batteries economically viable alternatives to fossil based energy sources.
Then the competition for even more economically viable battery technologies brings the tech to the next level.
Besides, lithium and the used rare earth elements can be recycled. It’s not like they’d evaporate when being used.lithium and the used rare earth elements can be recycled. It’s not like they’d evaporate when being used.
This always amazes me about the anti-EV hysteria.
“But they aren’t 100% renewable, you have to mine metal” as they jump in their combustion car powered by a fuel that has to be mined only to be burnt up in use.
First you make batteries economically viable alternatives to fossil based energy sources.
Friendly reminder batteries are not an energy source they just store energy and stabilize the grid
One could argue that fossil fuels are a kind of chemical battery that store solar energy from aeons ago.
But in a strict sense you’re right and that’s why I’m keen on having more batteries in the wild, because there are (more and more) times, in which wind turbines and solar farms need to be throttled or shut down, because their continued operation endangers the grid by providing too much electric energy.
So more batteries -> more renewable energy can be captured and stored/buffered!
We’ve already seen this over the past decade. I was skeptical of electric vehicles when I first started learning about Teslas because at the time there was something like 2/3s of the lithium available for mining compared to what would be needed to replace every vehicle on Earth with an EV.
But since then new lithium mining techniques have opened up new sources (I think the southeast US has a large amount of these newly accessible sources), increasing the raw amount available. Sodium ion batteries have made strides, and while they aren’t as energy dense stationary batteries can use that while vehicles use lithium, reducing overall lithium demand. And who knows, sodium ion batteries could still reach a point where they are viable for vehicle batteries. And of course lithium batteries have improved as well, making available lithium stretch farther.
Yeah, like let’s complain about lithium having a limited supply (which can be recycled until the cows come home) while burning fossil fuels all the while - which are also limited but gone after having been burned. The cherry on top is burning them pollutes the air and causes climate change.
Aside from new mining techniques and new battery technology there’s still the option to improve the situation by moving people and goods onto rails and operating the trains directly by electricity and not through batteries - a technology already available. It just needs to be implemented at more places.
I’m aware that this is no solution that fits all situations, but I’m damn sure a lot of situations would be improved by having more rails/trains.
Stop assuming we need new metals forever. At some point, recycling contributes to the ecosystem of batteries, like it does with lead acid.
Lithium is not rare, it’s just no one cared to find it until recently.
There are sodium batteries, so even without lithium and rare earth metals there are options
Yes, yes, but they are not really used at the time and they might never be for transportation except for niche cases since the energy density. But who knows, they are certainly a promising technology.
The real world begs to differ: https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/china-puts-a-sodium-ion-battery-into-an-ev-for-the-first-time-it-can-drive-248-miles-on-a-single-charge
In the end it’s a matter of price, reliability, usability, etc.
And while sodium based batteries have a worse energy density (space and weight wise) than lithium based batteries, they seem to have advantages in other areas (eg. no. of charge cycles, price per kWh, no thermal runaway, basically unlimited amounts of cheap sodium available).
