Lithium Reserves
From Open Source Ecology
- global lithium reserves - Abundance of Common Materials
- At 20 ppm of the earth's crust compared to silicon, they are 1/10 that of carbon(200 ppm by mass). There is plenty of carbon for everyone.
- For silicon - 20 ppm by mass, with crust at 1% mass, earth mass of 6^24 kg - then .000020 of 6^24 is 6^19 kg.
- Lithium in seawater is under 1 ppm, but there are 230 billion tons of it. That means for the suggested peak population of 10B, each person has more than 20 tons of lithium. One car requires only
- About 10% of each bat is lithium. For each car, that is only 500 kg for the lighter packs or 50 kg per car. 20 tons of lithium means that each person can have 400 cars powered by Lithium. This means that even homes can store energy in lithium cells, if homes use 3x the energy of cars (see Energy Statistics)
- BUT - look at global production, only 180,000 tons/year. This means enough for only 4M cars. But - it is not 50 kg per car - it is only 8 kg [1] - at 7% lithium[2]
- Thus current lithium production is sufficient for 22M cars, and about 14.5M electric cars were built in 2023.
- There seems to be plenty of lithium. In PPM, there is more lithium than lead, nickel, zinc, chromium, and nitrogen. Clearly we're not going to run out of nitrogen.
- Lithium from brine - 3 wH/g! Means 3kWhr/kg - no problem. Sounds like absolute abundance.
