Well sure, even salt extraction can have an impact. Have you seen the salt extraction facilities at the Dead Sea? Someone could write an exposé about how our demand for salt is a “big problem” illustrated with dramatic pictures. But we need some perspective here, and anecdotes are way too easy to cherry-pick. The amount of lithium needed is minuscule compared to the amount of oil. 5 kilograms of pure lithium for a Model 3 versus like 20000kg of gasoline for an equivalent fossil fuel car. And the lithium can be recycled at end of use. But what’s 3 or 4 orders of magnitude between friends?
There is lots of lithium. But lithium is kind of a tricky, its almost more chemical then a base metal. Qualifying a new lithium extraction technology is tricky, and every brine is different.
Lithium is not tricky to find, its trick to extract and purify and the it takes a while to qualify it with battery companies. Doing all that takes a while and doing it cheap is not easy.
So lithium prices, might still go up because getting high quality supply into the supply chain is not easy.
The have a large number of videos, where many of the upcoming lithium producers present their projects.
The economical ways currently are:
- Spodumene (lithium in hard rock minerals)
- Brine (lithium in a salty water underground pond)
What is being developed for next generations:
- Clay (sedentary deposits)
- Deep Geothermal Brine (like Brine but much deeper down)
What is being worked on is Direct Lithium extraction, that means to get lithium directly from the brine (or leached from the clay) rather then putting it into evaporation ponds.
If you want real detail from an expert on lithium, check out:
