What lithium shortages?

We have a warning that lithium will be in short supply and so therefore…..

Now, as it happens, the resident energy geek here (me) thinks that hydrogen and fuel cells will turn out to be a major part of the solution to all this climate change stuff. As also will synthetic fuels, meaning that batteries aren’t going to be as much of the mix as many seem to think. But that is just opinion.

And yet this claim is, in our opinion, still wildly wrong:

The government-backed agency helping to fund the motor industry towards a zero-emission future has warned that with likely shortages of lithium for electric battery production, Britain must lead a transition to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

The first issue is as we put it in this report. There simply is no shortage of any of the metals that we might want to use. The amount of whatever out there in the crust of the Earth is simply so vast that we’re not going to use it all for millions upon millions of years - in many cases before the expansion of The Sun to a Red Giant. Sure, there’re shortages of plant able to extract and deliver right here right now but that’s a relatively trivial problem - the very point about plants being that we can build more.

The second is that people just aren’t grasping what happens in a market society when a mineral becomes more expensive. Vast armies of people rush off to test this and that and t’other potential source.

Historically the world has depended upon lithium from either brines or as a byproduct of spodumene. Recent years have shown that ionic clays, geothermal brines are also viable sources, varied micas are getting a look in. There’s even one - a bit hopeful perhaps - who thinks the Red Sea is a viable resource (which brings to mind the closing of this Goon Show).

People just aren’t getting how large the world is, how much of everything there is out there. Change demand, that changes the price, vast mountains of a mineral or element thereby become viable sources.

We can well imagine - indeed believe it to be true - that fuel cells are the answer to part of the puzzle, more than folk currently seem to think. That batteries are going to be a much smaller part of any solution than current plans seem to indicate. But there’s not going to be a shortage of lithium so that’s not going to be the cause of those, nor the hold up in that battery driven world.

Better technologies might cause all sorts of things, mineral shortages just aren’t going to happen.