[sacred_numbers]

Your estimate is off by an order of magnitude. An 18650 cell with 11 watt hours of capacity would have about 0.9 grams of lithium. A kg of lithium could create around 12 KWh of batteries, which would store 12,000 KWh based on 1,000 cycles.

I don't know for sure, but based on current lithium prices I highly doubt that current lithium extraction processes use less than 50 KWh per kg. That's a really small amount of energy for such a useful material.

[CamperBob2]

Exactly. Even 1000 kWh/kg would still represent a single-digit percentage of the power that will eventually be handled by the product. Pretty neat when you think of it that way.