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SinParadise | 2 years ago

Based on his calculations from a video a year ago. He projects that we would need 940M tons of lithium, while 2022 reported reserves is 95M tons.[0]

Are we going realistically find enough undiscovered lithium reserves that is the same size as our known reserves as of 2022, even assuming that he is off by a factor of 4?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc&t=2604s

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burkaman|2 years ago

95M tons is nickel, he says there's 22M tons of lithium. That's actually the 2021 number, 2022 is 26M tons, which is double the known reserves in 2010: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1253739/lithium-reserves.... Of course this can't go on forever, but there's no reason to think growth will suddenly stop in the next few years. The very recent explosion in demand for lithium incentivizes search for more reserves. If we really can't find any more, then billions or trillions of dollars will be redirected to bring lithium extraction from seawater to commercial scale.

SinParadise|2 years ago

>If we really can't find any more, then billions or trillions of dollars will be redirected to bring lithium extraction from seawater to commercial scale.

And we are probably going to burn fossil fuel to obtain the energy for this?

beefield|2 years ago

I was referring his claims about electrification of glo al car fleet. Now that you mention, he had also some claims about lithium needs for replacing all fossil production with lithium batteries, baut also there the assumptions were not so realistic if I recall correctly. If you want to quote him, I would recommend going through his assumptions very carefully.