NY Times Buries the Lead on Lithium Supply Problems

(2/2/2009) - The NY Times just published an article on the worldwide lithium supply.  As is the case with too many articles, the author Simon Romero took the "Silly Socialist Country Treatens To Keep Western Companies From Stealing Its Natural Resources" take on the situation.  The more important question from my view is what world-wide lithium supplies mean for the future of proposed electric cars that use lithium-ion batteries.

Barring a huge advancment in battery technology, lithium-ion batteries will be essential to making an electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle that can compete with gas-powered cars.  And as I've written before, its unclear whether or not the world has enough lithium to make these plans come to life. 

According to the USGS, the world has a lithium resource base of 11 million (metric) tons of lithium.  That is to say, this is how much they believe will be technically possible to mine.  However, if you consider what is presently economical to mine, the total drops to 4.1 million tons - a total which excludes Bolivia, probably because the USGS just doesn't have the data to know how easy it will be to mine lithium there.  If we assume Bolivia has a reserve to resource base ratio equal to the rest of the world, world wide reserves rise to about 8 million tons.

For now, lets consider the best case scenario, that we can mine all 11 million tons of lithium.  Chris over at Energy Balance does the math:

"The [Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle] is rated at 9 kwh and so each car would need 18 kg of lithium. Hence, 500 million PHEV's would require:

18 kg x 500 x 10*6 = 9 x 10*9 kg = 9 million tons of lithium.

The entire world reserve of lithium (accounted in the form of lithium oxide, Li2O) is 10.74 million tons, which contains (worked at an abundance of 92.5% lithium-7 and the rest lithium-6):

2 x [(7 x .925) + (6 x .075)] x 10.74 x 10*6/2 x [(7 x .925) + (6 x .075)] + 16 = 4.98 x 10*6 tons; call it 5 million tons of lithium.

Obviously there is not enough!"

Wikipedia says that the Chevy Volt, one of the most hyped plug-in hybrids out there, uses a 16kWh battery pack, which means we'd need 16 millione tons of lithium.  Fully electric vehicles like the Tesla Roadster have 53kWh battery packs (though most electric vehicles wouldn't need one quite that large). 

NY Times, THIS is the story.

Finally, its also important to note that while there might be upwards of 11 million tons of lithium in the ground, worldwide production is less than 30,000 tons a year.  That's going to get used up awfully quickly if EVs or PHEVs begin to take off.

(Photo by Alicia Nijdam and used under a Creative Commons license)