[russdill]

We are currently mining about 600,000 tones of lithium per year. That's enough for 60 million powerpacks per year. I really don't think that it's one powerpack per person, these are utility scale installations. If it's 1 powerpack per 10 people, it'd only take 10 years are current lithium extraction rates to build enough for 6 billion people.

There is an estimated 2.55 × 10^10 kg potentially economically extractable lithium available on the Earth. At current extraction rates that's "gone" in 42 years. Fortunately, lithium is recyclable.

But Earth itself, no, your figures are way off. There is 2.3 * 10^14 kg in seawater alone.

[russdill]

My bad, I think the 600,000 tonnes figure is the total amount of lithium mined ever. Actual yearly production is closer to 35,000 tonnes.

Here's an excellent discussion with sourced facts and figures http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/

[allan_]

Thanks, interesting article. Just read it briefly yet, but it looks like it's author summs up with that there is not even enough Li for building batteries for some billion cars.

[JoeAltmaier]

I don't think its recyclable in any efficient way - smelting wont do it, it has to be complex chemistry. More complex than mining was originally. So we're not going to do that until mining quits working.

[allan_]

Where did you find these numbers? There are 14,000,000 tonnes of mineable Li on earth (http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/).

[sgt]

This is misleading.

There are 14,000,000 tonnes of identified reserves. There may be more, we just haven't identified them yet.

Estimates for the Earth's crustal content range between 20 ppm and 70 ppm. Using 20 ppm and the mass of the Earth's crust being more than 2 * 10^19 tonnes, it would be (20/10^6) * (2*10^19) = 400,000,000,000,000 tonnes of Li.

So although we'll only ever be able to mine a small fraction of that, I still think it's safe to assume that we are not capped at 14 million tonnes.