“There is a supply for every demand.”
Florence Scovel Shinn, Author
Transportation is our biggest source of CO2 emissions – a whopping 28%. The most obvious solution at this moment is to swap gas-burning vehicles for electric. But there are some staunch EV critics out there. One common pushback is the batteries, and some people are wondering: is there enough lithium to supply the electric vehicle transition?
After buying one last year, I wrote about some of the pros and cons of EVs. For us, owning an EV has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. It’s fun to drive, and we haven’t missed the gas station or mechanic one bit.
Since then, I’ve wanted to do a deeper dive into EVs as a climate solution, but it’s a daunting topic. So I decided to break it into bite-sized chunks, and this is the first article of a three-part series. Today’s focus is lithium supply.
White gold
Lithium is a hot commodity, so much so, it is referred to as white gold. As the name suggests, it’s the key metal in lithium-ion batteries. These batteries power EVs, as well as phones, computers, pacemakers, and endless other electronics. There are some promising new battery options on the horizon (like solid state and sodium-ion), but lithium-ion is the technology we have today.
Where does lithium come from, anyway?
Right now, almost all of the world’s lithium comes from Australia, Latin America, and China, but that is about to change. Deposits are found throughout the world, with more being discovered all the time, including here in the US.
One big domestic lithium deposit is in the Great Salt Lake. Another, in California’s Salton Sea, contains enough lithium for over 375 million EVs. But the game-changer may be the one recently discovered along the border of Nevada and Oregon. It could be the largest in the world!
Is there enough?
According to this excellent analysis by Hannah Ritchie, the world has enough white gold to power all the EVs we will need (and this was written before the mammoth discovery in NV/OR). There may be a tight supply in the short-term while some of these newer deposits are coming on-line, but mining is ramping up quickly. And, as history has proven, when there high demand for a product, the market typically responds accordingly.
For reasons like these, the long-term supply of lithium looks good:
- New lithium deposits are being discovered on the regular
- Technological advances are improving battery efficiency, reducing the need for lithium
- New and improved mining techniques (like this and this) are better and faster
- Battery recycling is ramping up
So, it seems the problem is less about scarcity, and more about retrieval. That’s why next week, I will be unheating the topic of lithium mining. See you then!
Let’s do something about climate change. Learn about it. Think about it. Talk about it.