The price of Lithium Batteries
From John McElroy at
Autoblog:
The down side to Lithium Batteries
Uh-oh. In the pell-mell race to develop lithium-ion batteries for plug-ins, EV's and hybrids, has any automaker taken a hard look at where all that lithium is going to come from? Guess what? Not only are global lithium supplies pretty tight, prices are about to skyrocket.
Today, the United States imports almost all of its lithium. We get most of it from Chile, then Argentina, and a little bit from Canada and Zimbabwe. The only producer in America is actually a German company, Metallgesellschaft, which has a mine in Nevada. Yet, even though we import most of our lithium, the United States is the world's largest processor of the material.
But a lot of others want to get in on the game. China, no surprise, is emerging as a major player. It's buying all the lithium it can from Australia. China does have some lithium sources of its own, but they're mainly in Tibet. (Say! Do you think that's another reason why they're so hard-core about keeping Tibet within the People's Republic?)
And recycling doesn't really work so far:
You'd think that such a valuable material would get recycled a lot, but that's not the case. Today, only 3% to 4% is recycled, and while that will probably increase, it won't increase a lot. Recycling lithium takes a lot of energy, so much so that recycled lithium costs five to six times more than getting it from virgin material.
There are some other technologies coming into play but nothing as (relatively) cheap as LiIon is these days.
Another perfect example of BOHICA -- Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.
Posted by DaveH at August 25, 2008 9:03 PM