Lithium and the Future
Several news stories about an essential element for the energy transition should give us cause to be cautiously hopeful
"salt flats Bolivia" by psyberartist is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
News junkies will probably have been closely following the tight election in the US; simmering hostilities between Israel and Iran; and a Ukrainian decision to take the fight to Russia. All of these are obviously important, but there is a chance you might have missed a series of news stories about lithium - a material that is vitally important to the future of the human species.
To set the scene, the United Nations (UN) recently warned that the world is on track to hit between 2.6 and 3.1 degrees Celsius in terms of global warming. This is potentially catastrophic: the risks increase exponentially as temperatures rise. We saw an example recently with the terrible flooding in Southern and Eastern Spain.
Around 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from transport, a sector that is still largely based on burning fossil fuels. Luckily, we also saw some good news on this front. Pragmatic plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions hinge on getting as many people to use electric vehicles (EVs) as we can as quickly as possible. In turn, plans for wide deployment of EVs depend on the availability of lithium batteries. Luckily, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs have been making amazing progress when it comes to developing this technology recently.
One major recent news story involved the US Geological Survey (USGS), which found massive lithium deposits deep underneath southwestern Arkansas. There could be up to 19m tons of the material - enough to cover the projected world demand for lithium in 2030 by around 9x. In related news, a demonstration plant for producing lithium is due to open in Cornwall in the UK. If successful, it could produce 10,000 tonnes of lithium a year by 2027. Meanwhile, Serbia is also ramping up lithium mining, despite a strong local protest movement.
In another major news story, Japanese carmaker Nissan announced the development of the first-ever 100% lithium-ion engine. This development could transform the EV industry, which up to now has been dominated by China. In other news, the EU is beginning to impose tariffs on Chinese-made EVs in protest at state subsidies. However, both sides are engaged in talks to find alternatives.
What, exactly, is lithium? Our guide is Ed Conway, a business journalist, who has published an excellent book called Material World. He says it was one of the three primordial elements created in the Big Bang, alongside hydrogen and helium. It is one of the oldest elements in the known universe. It is better than every other material we know at storing energy due to its combination of being light and conductive while holding electrochemical power.
Although scientists lack all the details, they think that water can pick up microscopic amounts of lithium in certain unusual geographical conditions, such as those found in the Andes in South America. Over millions of years, the water tends to evaporate, leaving lithium deposits beneath a crust of salt. The process is much too slow to be observed by creatures as short-lived as human beings.
Lithium is mined by pumping water from beneath salt crusts using ancient techniques for mining salt. This water slowly evaporates, leaving a solution that contains lithium chloride.
The element has been used as a medicine since the 19th century, with treatments for mental illness since 1870. Inventor Thomas Edison was the first person to use it in batteries after running experiments all over the periodic table. Lithium-based battery tech was perfected by a physicist called John B. Goodenough in Oxford in the 1970s and 1980s; and then developed further by a researcher in Japan called Akira Yoshino. Sony was first to market in the 1990s; and the tech has been getting better ever since.
The idea that human ingenuity would improve access to finite materials like lithium was famously promoted by an economist called Julian Simon. In 1980, he made a ten-year bet with apocalyptic environmentalist Paul Ehrlich about the prices of five key metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten. Simon thought that a growing population would yield more brains working on resource problems, while Ehrlich took the cruder but more intuitive view that we would gradually lose access to finite resources as the population grows.
As a result of their contrasting worldviews, Simon thought prices of finite materials would tend to fall, while Ehrlich thought they would tend to rise. Although the world population went from 4.5bn to 5.3bn (up 17%) between 1980 and 1990, the price of every metal the two men agreed to track went down. Simon won his bet, although that might not have been the case if they had picked the same bet in other years.
In this case, as in many others, our intuition lets us down. Brainpower might well be the ultimate resource! Declining world populations might not be as urgent a problem as climate change, but it will remain an issue throughout this century. Africa’s comparatively youthful population is likely to be a huge theme for humanity as average ages in the rest of the world drift higher.
Although we began this week’s essay with a warning that the world might miss climate goals, the take-home lesson should be one of cautious optimism. The search for new uses of lithium and better batteries could prove unstoppable.
Having said that, there are certainly risks to cynical or misguided politicians opting for conspiratorial anti-environmentalism as a way of engaging with the emotions of an angry electorate in closely fought elections in an anti-incumbent climate. The recent election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency is bad news for environmental policy and will hurt top-down goal setting.
However, the bottoms-up energy transition picture (based as it is on the brainpower of individuals, particularly scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs) looks much healthier, no matter how bad our elected officials happen to be at any particular point in time. The comments are open. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Exponential risks and our intuitions (part one and part two)
Pragmatic environmentalism (part one and part two)
Further Reading
Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann
Youthquake: Why African Demography Should Matter to the World by Edward Plaice
Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional - and What that Means for Life in the Universe by David Waltham
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