I only have ten thousand in my bank account and there's no way I could live the rest of my life on that. Unless I went out and looked for a job and secured a steady stream of funds.
Quentin is correct in his final paragraph. My area of expertise is automotive engineering and there is no way that electric vehicles will take over. It's just not going to happen no matter how much people like Ed Milliband want it to.
The earth's crust contains somewhere between (nobody can really be sure) 0.02% and 0.002% lithium, which gives us ~~1 million billion tonnes of the stuff (give or take a factor of 3), so I think your numbers are as accurate as needed for these purposes. But (probably) lots of that is at very low concentrations in sea water or many miles down or otherwise inaccessible (economically, given current tech, anyway). But even 1‰ of that still leaves oodles (technical term) that we can use to make batteries, if we need to.
Personally, I'm far from convinced that many batteries will be needed - they can never meet anywhere near 100% of transport needs, or provide 100% backup for national grids.
I've seen some blokes claiming they can extract Li from seawater (specifically, Red Sea, saltier perhaps?) at 3 ppm. Sorta doubt that, but 50 ppm concentrations is wholly economic these days. Geothermal waters, waste from desalination plants, oil well overflows....
I only have ten thousand in my bank account and there's no way I could live the rest of my life on that. Unless I went out and looked for a job and secured a steady stream of funds.
Quentin is correct in his final paragraph. My area of expertise is automotive engineering and there is no way that electric vehicles will take over. It's just not going to happen no matter how much people like Ed Milliband want it to.
Yet Another Chris
The earth's crust contains somewhere between (nobody can really be sure) 0.02% and 0.002% lithium, which gives us ~~1 million billion tonnes of the stuff (give or take a factor of 3), so I think your numbers are as accurate as needed for these purposes. But (probably) lots of that is at very low concentrations in sea water or many miles down or otherwise inaccessible (economically, given current tech, anyway). But even 1‰ of that still leaves oodles (technical term) that we can use to make batteries, if we need to.
Personally, I'm far from convinced that many batteries will be needed - they can never meet anywhere near 100% of transport needs, or provide 100% backup for national grids.
I've seen some blokes claiming they can extract Li from seawater (specifically, Red Sea, saltier perhaps?) at 3 ppm. Sorta doubt that, but 50 ppm concentrations is wholly economic these days. Geothermal waters, waste from desalination plants, oil well overflows....
I'm sure you're right Tim, but that's only a microscopic fraction of the Li in all the world's oceans.