On 10 Nov 2024, at 23:15, o1bigtenor via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

>>> In this mad scramble to ram EVs down every throat there is absolutely no mention
>>> as to the actual scarcity of Lithium.
>>
>> Possibly because there is no scarcity.
>> Lithium is actually quite plentiful. The only scarcity is down to economics - as demand increases and/or existing extraction/processing streams "dry up" then prices rise and it becomes economic to start extracting a different resource.
>> A goid read on this is The No Breakfast Fallacy written by Tim Worstall https://www.adamsmith.org/research/the-no-breakfast-fallacy
>
> Tried reading your item but can't get it to load - - - - it may be
> far too festooned with 3rd party links.

Yes, seems to be broken, try this instead https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151ac92/t/56f71b64746fb9cb26770c9f/1459034981724/The-No-Breakfast-Fallacy-ONLINE2.pdf


> You might be quite surprised as not only is the lithium tough to
> source …

“Tough to source” is relative.
Much of what we take for granted these days was once “tough to source”, other things are getting tougher to source but the market is such that the effort is worth it along with engineering/scientific advancement having made it practical.


Now, if you understand the no breakfast fallacy, then you’ll also understand that the hand wringing over supplies of things like lithium (and “rare earths” that are the other commonly cited problem) is overdoing it.
Doing a quick search, I find https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawater-give-us-lithium-to-meet-our-battery-needs/99/i36 and https://samcotech.com/is-it-possible-to-extract-lithium-from-seawater/#:~:text=By%20contrast%2C%20seawater%20contains%20less,using%20normal%20lithium%20extraction%20technologies.

Key takeaway. It is possible to extract lithium from seawater, but at present it isn’t financially viable. But there is a massive amount of lithium in the oceans.
So if you apply the logic explained in the no breakfast fallacy, you’ll realise that there isn’t that much of a problem - if supplies look like running low, prices will rise (or at least, the expectation of prices rising in the future will be there*), other resources will become financially viable for conversion to reserves and then to actual supplies.

I mentioned “rare earths”. The “problem” with these is that China has been quite astute over the years. By keeping prices low, they’ve caused extraction and refining of the various materials to get shut down elsewhere - giving them a significant dominance in the supply side. If they did cut back on exports, then those supply options from elsewhere in the world would become viable again. The main problem is that China could cut supplies drastically and quickly - which would cause major disruption as those other supplies couldn’t be ramped up quickly.

And there’s prior art to demonstrate the process. I can recall that when I was at school, there was doom and gloom that oil would run out in perhaps 30 years. That 30 years passed <cough> years ago and we find - we didn’t run out of oil. What’s happened is that as things have changed, other resources have become viable to extract, and so that 30 years keeps pushing out and out and … Ask anyone 40 years ago if they could get oil out of a well a couple of miles deep under a mile of ocean and they’d have suggested it would be “tough to source” - yet these days we do it.

So as I said, lithium is not at all scarce. Lithium in forms and places that are financially viable to extract, using today’s technology and at today’s prices, sure there’s not all that much. Raise the prices a bit and that changes, develop the science and engineering a bit and it changes, so in the medium/long term there really isn’t a problem.


* What matters is not so much today’s prices, but what investors think the prices will be in the timescale it will take them to get a new extraction/refinement/supply capability online.


Simon