By Haley Zaremba - Jan 31, 2023, 4:00 PM CST
- U.S. geological survey the world is getting better at mining battery metals including lithium.
- As of 2021, it was estimated that the world had 88 million tonnes of lithium resources.
- The battery metal supply chain faces a new set of geopolitical risks
Demand for battery metals is already growing fast, but it’s just getting started. Like it or not, clean technologies like EVs and energy storage, and renewable energies like solar and wind, rely on finite natural resources. As demand for mineral-intensive items like lithium-ion batteries for energy storage and electric vehicles heats up along with the global clean energy transition, the production of these resources is going to need to grow along with it. But can it?
Many leading experts have worried about whether the world has enough of these non-renewable resources to make the ‘great reset’ possible without depleting these minerals and driving prices prohibitively high. In short, the worry is no longer peak oil; it’s now peak lithium. One major problem is that no one knows for sure exactly how much lithium we have. As of 2021, it was estimated that the world had 88 million tonnes of lithium resources. One-quarter of that – 22 million tonnes – is feasibly extractable. This issue is that this figure is changing all the time as we explore for more lithium and find more advanced ways to extract it.
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While there has been much hand wringing about running out, some experts think that it’s far too soon to panic. In fact, the U.S. geological survey says that these kinds of resources are “relatively abundant.” And as Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at Oxford University, explained early this year: “We keep discovering more lithium, and we get better at mining it.” Basically, she argues, worrying over lithium supply is a malthusian fallacy. Those who claim that we are running out aren’t taking technological advancement into account. If we count the lithium present in seawater, for example, we’ll have more than we could ever need – we just need the technology to extract it. And necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
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