Draining lithium reserves isn't that important - batteries don't use up the lithium, once the battery dies you can just suck out all the lithium and re-use it (and battery electrolytes are ~100% lithium, compared to lithium ore/brine being anywhere from 0.1% to 15% lithium - an order of magnitude difference). And since modern batteries are more efficient than old batteries with the same amount of lithium, we effectively increase the circulating lithium capacity over time.
In 75 years we won't need to extract more lithium - except the fraction needed to replace permanently-lost batteries.
Incidentally, you should be very careful when talking about "<resource> reserves", because the definition of a reserve is usually "<resource> that is profitable to extract" - and when we "run out", prices will go up and thus currently-unprofitable sources will become profitable, and POOF! Our <resource> reserves have increased, purely through the power of semantics.
Also, over the decades resource extraction becomes cheaper and thus more sources become profitable.
Personally though, I don't think any of that will matter -IMO the future is proton batteries, AKA Hydrogen batteries (which use an electrolyte of "ionic hydrogen", H+, which has 1 proton and 0 electrons - people claim lithium is the lightest metal, but it has 3x the protons of hydrogen). I think that the recent TABQ batteries, or something like it, will become commercially viable within 75 years (although who even knows what batteries will look like in the year 2101).
Nobody has ever recycled Lithium, just reused the cells that lasted longer than average. We have no idea how to actually recycle Li. We don't even understand the physical mechanism that causes it to exhaust. We think if we just let it sit around for a few decades, it might just come back on it own. We don't know though.
As for reserves, while you understand the economics you are missing the physics. For example, there is Li (and U) in the ocean. We don't extract Uranium from the ocean not only because it isn't economical, it isn't even energy efficient. This is because moving a billion tonnes of water takes more energy than the 3 tonnes of Uranium you would harvest from doing that. For Li, its takes just as much energy (and money) as its just as rare. In other words, there is a floor on that economic extraction argument specified by a positive EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).
Yes, we have. This is a well understood and fairy simple chemical process, you grind up non-working Lithium battery and split up the FOD from the metals then it's just basic chemical metal refining from here on out? When lithium is mined and extracted it goes through the exact same processes.
If you have any other sources or information on why we can't recycle lithium please let me know. As far is battery failure goes it's a mechanical failure on a chemical level
The Li that comes out of the process you describe wouldn't be recycled. It would still be mostly exhausted. Specifically, something we don't understand about the structure of their electrons causes the batteries made with such material to have a far lower capacity than if you used freshly mined Lithium. My source is a Material Engineering class at MIT.
We understand the structure of electrons very clearly in a lithium battery. That is the core operating principle of how a lithium ion battery works.
The lithium ions are the chemical process that actually store the charge, They move from the anode to cathode in charge and discharge. The loss of these ions is what causes the degradation of the battery which is a function of entropy here. It is simply that the concise arrangement that we required for this electro-chemical to take place falls out of balance.
Entropy problem is easily solved by mashing a battery up and reconstituting it
into a new battery.
To put this all simply this is all fairly basic chemistry, even if there was some kind of structure being created that has a high bond enthrall we can still undo that with enough energy.
If you could maybe share some research or other information to back up your claims other than you went to a class at MIT i would really appreciate it also the company i was saying is called Li Cycle
what about the polymetallic nodules on the ocean floor, don't they contain Li? -- setting aside the environmental question, isn't that a vast untapped source?
Car-centric transportation is not efficient. Not remotely. They have absolutely terrible bandwidth, and they balloon the size of cities apart the more you try to increase the speed to bring them closer together.
If you think Simcity and Cities: Skylines are realistic depictions, then ask yourself why Simcity famously has no visible parking whatsoever (or don't: the devs are on record saying they excluded it because it made the cities look terrible, there's no need to speculate here), or ask yourself why Cities: Skyline added car pokeballs (where drivers get out of the car and put the car in their pocket) or straight-up delete cars when traffic gets too heavy.
AI isn't the only bottleneck - even if the software problem was solved today, a robot arm competitive with human arms simply doesn't exist (and the only ones that have a hope of competing cost $16k each) - it turns out all those degrees of freedom makes the arm super fragile, and the human arm is filled to the brim with sensors (e.g. to figure out the weight of the item you're holding, or to tell when the teatowel is slipping or if you're gripping it tight enough).
(Source: construction-physics, if anyone wants to comment with the link)
I know the Optimus marketing wank is all sci-fi humanoids, but I wonder if the products that actually hit the market will be much simpler, not trying to compete with human arms, as you say. Does that seem likely to you?
Tesla shareholders who fully believe Musk is crazy will either 1) be quietly selling their stocks and don't want to draw attention, or 2) factored in the crazy and bought in anyway. If the craziness started today then that would be a good question, but it's been years.
I mean of course Musk has been crazy for years, but there's 1. “calling the leader of a rescue mission a pedo”-cazy and 2. “Tesla exits the personal car market”-crazy and as much as I can understand that investors could get away with 1., it's unbelievable to me that they accept 2.
The DeLorean was a stupidly-expensive car that had a lot of maintenance problems, decided to use an unpainted stainless steel exterior and had corrosion issues as a result, but is remembered despite all of this engineering mediocrity due to its unusual stylistic choices.
I'm guessing Tesla's cybertruck will be the DeLorean of the 2020s.
If you want to restrict the discussion to just the Cybertruck, it's more like the Edsel - an embarrassing failure from a dominant manufacturer. The Delorean similarities are largely skin-deep.
Also probably 99% of people here are familiar with Deloreans and stainless steel.
In what world is Tesla a dominant manufacturer?
The company's market share peaked at 4.31% in 2023.
That's behind GM, Toyota, Ford, Hyundai, Stellantis (Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep), Honda, and Nissan-Mitsubishi.
Only VW, Subaru, and BMW had a smaller market share.
The article basically says Tesla lost it's lead due to inaction years ago, so what you're saying isn't much different - "it's already dead, they're just pulling the plug" VS "they're committing suicide, which started several years ago".
More examples, please! Reusable rockets is the load-bearing example, I don't think that argument works without it. You could maybe squeeze in "he kickstarted the EV market".
maybe? Tesla is the biggest reason there are any electric vehicles on the road today, I haven't heard of anyone (knowledgeable) who has even hinted otherwise. I can understand not liking Elon, but trashing the companies he's formed and the marvels they've created is just proof you don't value a truthful understanding of the world.
I agree with you, but I find it interesting that BYD got started around the same time as Tesla. They took quite different paths to international distribution.
I guess that may be technically correct, but that's really just a anti-elon reddit type comment you're parroting. There were like four people and him "buying it" was just investing way more money in than anyone else wanted to.
Starlink was also ridiculed. "Some upstart beating industry veteran at crewed spaceflight" was also treated as a ridiculous idea (see extra funding Boeing was able to extract from congress).
>Losing a Microsoft email is an inconvenience in comparison.
Losing access to data is potentially worse than losing access to your bank account. I doubt Microsoft will let you grab a copy of all your emails after they block/ban you.
China is fine with dependence on other nations, it just can't rely on sea-based imports when the US could easily block them by blockading the strait of Malacca. That's why China has invested so heavily into their Belt And Road initiative (which is notably a giant land-based shipping route).
Actually, it seems China has given up on the feasibility of BRI because they don't control all the variables in their partner countries. Which is why Xi has been super focused on creating an autarkic economy dependent on domestic demand and encouraging production for the native population, as a back up. Failures in helping industrialize countries such as Pakistan and those in Africa due to systemic and unavoidable issues have soured on the Chinese. That autarkic vision hinges strongly on a solid renewables energy production base.
In 75 years we won't need to extract more lithium - except the fraction needed to replace permanently-lost batteries.
Incidentally, you should be very careful when talking about "<resource> reserves", because the definition of a reserve is usually "<resource> that is profitable to extract" - and when we "run out", prices will go up and thus currently-unprofitable sources will become profitable, and POOF! Our <resource> reserves have increased, purely through the power of semantics.
Also, over the decades resource extraction becomes cheaper and thus more sources become profitable.
Personally though, I don't think any of that will matter -IMO the future is proton batteries, AKA Hydrogen batteries (which use an electrolyte of "ionic hydrogen", H+, which has 1 proton and 0 electrons - people claim lithium is the lightest metal, but it has 3x the protons of hydrogen). I think that the recent TABQ batteries, or something like it, will become commercially viable within 75 years (although who even knows what batteries will look like in the year 2101).
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