God I'm so sick of this nonsense. No, lithium is not 'black gold'. Lithium is absurdly common and availability of lithium is borderline meaningless.

Extract and refining lithium is a tiny business and even with many more years of growth its still a pretty tiny business. It will never be even close to oil in any meaningful metric.

Its not an energy source is a 3% of a storage medium for energy. And on the is common. And can be recycled.

It's not an energy source, but if worldwide demand for lithium-based batteries goes up exponentially with electrification of transport modes and use for grid storage systems, then the value of lithium will also go up greatly.