With India also discovering a very large amount of lithium reserves very recently, lithium might end up being abundant and accelerate the EV transition even faster.
If I had a nickel mine for every time I've pointed out to someone that the "proven reserves" of lithium on a USGS two page PDF are completely uncorrelated to the amount of lithium that will soon be discovered, I'd be extremely wealthy with cobalt. (Cobalt is a common byproduct of nickel mining.)
Even looking at the year-after-year increases in known lithium resources over the past decade shows massive increases.
Lithium will not be a scarce material. The only difficulty in a speedy transition is planning: deploying capital at the right places so that there's not too much mining nor too little. Making enough battery production capacity, but not too little.
There is a ton of money to be made in batteries, but there's a lot of risk due to uncertainty of size of market and timing.
Exactly. Lithium scarcity is a similar mindset to what peak oil was in the 90s. It seems like an issue given our current understanding, but there's a huge economic incentive to discover new deposits and make their extraction economically viable.
Some of the the largest oil fields currently known were only discovered in the past decade or two. I wouldn't be surprised if battery materials follow a similar discovery curve.
Peak oil was both right and wrong at the same time. Higher prices slowed demand growth, and made tight-oil financially feasible at the same. This combination made the peak much closer to a plateau.
I also believe (but could be wrong), that a not insignificant amount of the success of oil alternatives today (which helps to slow demand growth) is due to a flurry of research that started with the price shocks of the 70s that were definitely not due solely to supply-demand issues.
I'd say peak oil was 99% wrong. The main argument against it was simply that market forces would find a way to deliver more oil if conventional oil started getting expensive. That's exactly what happened. As it turned out, the main solution the market has come up with is fracking, but if fracking had not been invented, it could have been tar sands, coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, more ultra-deepwater drilling, political accommodation with pariah states, etc etc.
It all depends on whether we define fracked oil to be actually the same energy resource as conventional. Which, in EROEI terms, it isn't - it gets a compatible result at a higher cost.
In that framing, peak oil happened - we just proceeded to reframe reality around a substitute and choked down a decade of stagnation in the energy economy.
IMO that was another problem with the peak oil theory -- the obsession with EROEI. They would say that Saudi oil was, say, 30 EROEI and shale was 5. If you flip that upside down though 30 EROEI = 97% efficiency, and 5 EROEI is 80% efficiency. Of course you'd rather have 97% efficiency, but 80% works fine.
Yeah, I don't buy the EROEI argument either. I do think that non-demand based price shocks spurred research into more expensive (usually lower EROEI) sources of petroleum much sooner than a purely open market would have. 1975-1985 was about as expensive (inflation adjusted) as the early 21st century, and we didn't have a huge shale boom then.
Petroleum reserves are basically tsr sands and fracking which is low EROEI, even with the industry externalizing costs like methane leakage, vast freshwater consumption / pollution.
For example it used to be you burned a barrel of oil to get 20 or 30 out back in the easily accessible light sweet crude days.
EROEI: the metric deployed against solar and wind in the past, that was quickly erased from public discourse once it became apparent that modern fossil fuels did worse on it.
All those people complaining about EROEI no longer seem to have the slightest concern, despite it being a significant hurdle for future fossil fuel use.
I haven't tracked any of the peak oil stats and petroleum stuff since it became apparent that BEVs / Solar / Wind are the strategic winners.
And the EROEIs get even worse if any sane carbon taxation / sequestration costs are applied, if any widespread damage from fracking is charged (as in set-your-tapwater-on-fire stories), or the horrific environmental destruction of tar sands (which use ungodly amounts of freshwater to try to get the oil out of the mined sands).
I guess that claimed EROEI on fracking is 5-10x. No idea what it is like in practice, I assume there should be a distribution that could be analyzed.
Tar sands peak at 5x, and I bet that is only in the best case. Why tar sands is still a thing, does any Canadian know? Is this because oil/gas has penetrated the Canadian government lobby and made it too big to fail?
>Is this because oil/gas has penetrated the Canadian government lobby and made it too big to fail?
You're almost certainly onto something here. Much like why water cooled nuclear reactors are still a thing, despite molten salt reactors having been around for about 60 years (as in, before any of those water cooled reactors melted down with a catastrophic hydrogen explosion, caused by you know, all that water).
We don't have an energy shortage. We have political obstructionism.
The EROEIs give for solar and wind appear to be mostly propaganda. Factoring in infrastructure costs like transmission lines and storage makes it apparent that solar/wind are enormously expensive:
"True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh"
Interesting I see an opposite trend but that's a 7 year window. AFAIK discoveries are slowing and the general trend is for newly discovered fields to have lower returns on energy.
Iirc, lithium is abundant, it just is enough of a pain (and water consuming) to purify and extract that you want to bootstrap with a high purity source.
More than total lithium, I would want to know how pure it starts and what the access to water is like at any given site.
The tensions don't exist because of its oil. They exist because of their natural resources which may or may not include oil. Look all over africa for examples.
Being rich in natural resources is a bit like being a really hot girl around a bunch of abusive predatory men. They'll shower her with gifts and tell her how amazing she is until she says: "no, I don't want to sleep with you" and all hell breaks loose.
Saudi Arabia is hardly a desirable model, though enough money admittedly papers over a lot of human rights abuses. In the above example it's like a hot girl with severe mental health issues.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund is a strategy to escape the resource curse. It's like a hot girl with high self esteem and a handgun in her purse.
Alaska is one state in a country that has other things going for it. It's like a hot girl with a protective older brother.
Less discussed than Alaska, Texas uses it's oil money per its constitution to fund its university which seems pretty shrewd mitigation to the resource curse at a high level. Also no income tax for its citizens.
If Alaska would be a separate state maybe there would be a reason for concern /s
I think 'resource curse' got it a bit backward although effect is straightforward and obvious - it allows a-holes aka bottom of society to rise, gives them extra booster rockets to rise fast (ie capture diamond mine, or oil fields like ISIL and sell via Turkey which was their primary income).
Norway got it right because well its Norway, similar would happen if it was found ie in Switzerland. Some basic human decency ingrained deep in population and thus also in politics and those who set things up for future. If that's not present and society is more everybody-for-themselves, then yes it becomes the curse and more burden than benefit.
This is not the resource curse. It's basic economics actually: when there is a natural resource to be exploited, most investment, human capital and attention goes to that resource. This is because that's where the biggest returns are. Furthermore, the country's currency will get very strong, so it will make exporting anything else very difficult.
Combine these factors and you end up with a country trapped in producing mainly only that one natural resource.
This is also why Saudi Arabia is building seemingly insane megaprojects: to lure in enough production and construction to kick start a on industry unrelated to oil.
Alaska doesn't count because it was part of the US, which was already a developed (for the time) economy.
Saudi Arabia, Norway and a few Gulf min-states (Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain) are the rare counterexamples that kind of prove the rule. There's a great FT article[1] about the Iraqi man who helped lead Norway's oil revolution in the proper direction, and it was really not obvious. Why Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain managed to use their resources successfully (of course to an extent a matter of debate, human rights being a big problem in most of those places) and other dictatorships failed, even in similar scenarios (same religion, royals) is a tough one to answer.
norway is the only example of someone who broke the curse.
Saudi, gulf monarchies and all other examples that you can come up with(except maybe russia, but it's a very big and not that simple to analyze), either already fucked by the curse, or still in the process(which is pleasant enough, so most people think it's ok), the metric is that other parts of the economy have meaningless growth rate compared to resources extraction, at best. Sometimes it's negative. Add growth of corruption and inequality to that as well.
Their economy is pretty much exclusively oil-based, very few other industries.
If you run the numbers their fund will fund current expenses for only a decade or so if oil stopped completely. Which isn't really enough time to start other industries for their citizens to have jobs.
So they're basically completely dependent on oil, with maybe a short runway for afterwards. They did not break the curse.
you argue that the curse is to have majority of your economy oil/resource extraction related businesses.
But my point is that the curse is that there is a stimulus to stop doing any other businesses. And it seems that Norway has largely avoided that by forcing as much oil money as possible out of the economy(oil fund)
Pretty cool examples bro, Saudi Arabia had a bloody history, where the brits helped the current monarchy take over in the 18th century. The US has 5 military bases there btw. One might consider that a (now) peaceful occupation.
I didn't know Alaska was a country.
I don't really know much about Norway's petrolium history, but I can't say I'm surprised that they weren't invaded for their oil, which is in the sea to begin with.
Oil arguably started the tensions (particularly, oil was the impetus for the CIA/MI6 orchestrated 1953 Iranian coup, which arguably set the ball rolling with all that followed.) But I don't think oil is the reason tensions presently continue; if oil suddenly somehow became a total non-issue that interested nobody, I think tensions with Iran would continue because at this point it has become a grudge match between Iran, Israel and America, with America strongly siding with Israel. These grudges would not be automatically resolved if the matter of oil were no longer a concern.
I believe even ocean water is a potential source of Lithium if we ever get constrained on more direct sources. Unfortunately it's not really Lithium holding back EVs, it's Cobalt and a few other rare earth metals. Also not sure how much having Lithium locked up in a heavily sanctioned country will help the big battery manufacturers. Edit: typos
If you were to electrify all the vehicles in the world today (and the developing world hasn't even got lots of cars yet), it would take 1/2 the world's known supply of lithium. and those batteries only last about 8 to 10 years.
Lithium become abundant, no way. Not with the amounts we're using up per capita and the enormous population on this planet. the green revolution is just getting started and there's definitely not enough to go around.
Your numbers prove the exact opposite of your conclusion. If, with the tiny amount of lithium that we have bothered to look for, we can already provide for 2x our current car needs, then we are golden.
Batteries last far longer than 8-10 years, I'm not sure where you are getting that bad number. But even if you were right, our very first attempts at recycling already recover 95% of input metals:
And every year we discover massive new amounts of lithium resources, because until the mid 2010s, nobody really bothered to look for lithium.
FUD about amounts of lithium should be abandoned as a stall tactic; they no longer pass basic sniff tests arms are easily shut down hard. Other stall FUD needs to be invented if the energy interchange is to be stopped.
The total energy cost of producing and using the Tesla Model S Long Range battery pack for example, including battery production, lithium extraction, transportation, the energy cost of building the Gigafactory, battery transportation, battery recycling, diesel fuel required to generate electricity to charge the battery, and the environmental costs of battery disposal and battery fires, is equivalent to about 3,088,431 barrels of oil.
This analysis is off by orders of magnitude. Tesla shipped 1.3 million vehicles in 2022, each of which contained a battery pack [1]. 3 million barrels of oil contains 6.1 * 10^15 joules of primary energy [2]. World primary energy production in 2021 was 5.95 * 10^20 joules [3].
Combining these numbers, Tesla's 1.3 * 10^6 battery packs shipped in 2022 would have taken 7.93 * 10^21 joules to manufacture. This is more than 10 times annual global energy production and is clearly in error.
Another way to spot-check and reject this number is to note that 3 million barrels of oil would cost in the neighborhood of $240 million. Getting that much energy from coal might cost only $75 million per vehicle but it's still a proposition that would see Tesla losing approximately $100 trillion dollars per year on sales of 1.3 million vehicles.
[1] https://innovationorigins.com/en/india-discovers-5-5-of-worl...