The price of a given commodity rises due to demand increases -> people look for more of it -> people find it -> the commodity is eventually mined or otherwise exploited -> prices moderate.
It happened with oil and now it's happening with lithium.
Those companies will usually explain that those are pilot plants. They don’t have enough volume to really scale to economical production, yet. They’ll need for a lot more EVs to be on the road long enough for batteries to be damaged or fail and need to be recycled. Until recently, the number of new EVs was very low, just single digit percentage of car sales. Now that they are getting into double digits, the potential supply of batteries is starting to grow. It will just take time, now.
> I think the difference is that lithium is being created into a reusable product while oil is mostly made into a consumable, used once.
Sourcing lithium is something we've been thinking a lot about, whereas we haven't reached peak fossil fuels or scarcity. There are plenty of places to continue drilling: the US, Greenland, the Arctic Circle, Antarctica ...
The problem with fossil fuels is the carbon entering the atmosphere.
Typically we reached peak of some type of energy because the world switched to something else. Granted whales were in danger of being hunted to extinction when the world switched to oil lamps, but it isn't clear that was the reason the world switched.
It's hard to extrapolate a trend though - there was a dip caused by COVID, and global oil use has been growing since then, but it's still not back to where it was 4 years ago.
Also a lot of people think peak oil means that we suddenly won't have any gas available. No. Peak oil means all the easily extractable oil is gone, and so all future projects need to use more capital-intensive, technologically-advanced extraction techniques that cost more, and so the price of oil goes up, and then we use less of it while it's replaced by other technologies. Which is exactly what's been happening for the past ~5-15 years. U.S. is back to being the world's top oil producer, but all of it is in shale oil fields that aren't economically viable below ~$50/barrel, and so gas will never go back down to the $1/gallon it was in the 90s.
There are many different definition of 'Peak oil' but anybody that thinks this is all because of technology is just wrong.
The OPEC countries could produce far more oil far cheaper, but they don't want to. There are plenty of oil fields left. Not to mention fighting economic war against Iran and Russia, two huge producers.
The way I see it, we bootstrapped our existing tech off high energy density oil.
If it were gone, we would find it extremely difficult to repeat it all.
Now that we have built all this up, it is also our opportunity to bootstrap something far more sustainable, or we do risk a serious regression and a lot of people die.
Longer term, we use oil for far too much.
Getting off of it preserves a resource we may well find need of again.
Technology generally speaking only moves forward. Some technologies will be lost in a civilizational collapse, but the most important ones generally survive.
If another collapse happens, and without oil, people could believably bootstrap straight from electricity + batteries. There'll be endless amounts of quality scrap material and manuals. A lot of critical small scale appliances can be powered by hand-cranked motors.
It does not work that way. What you don't understand is the energy density multiplied by massive availability is what made the difference. There is chemistry in all of that too. We make so damn many things with fossil fuels it's hard to comprehend.
If we were to collapse, we would be left with some remnants that we would be unable to reproduce!
The tech needed for that runs on fuels we would find ourselves unable to procure.
It is especially maddening that our fossil inheritance, dipped into with wisdom and in moderation, could have been a profound and lasting gift for all future life on earth, instead of threatening its very existence. The dose makes the poison
The resource really isn’t the carbon itself but it’s stored chemical energy. Without new energy input, the carbon in CO2 will never become a hydrocarbon again.
Photosynthesis turns carbon and energy into plants immediately.
Longer term the same processes that turned algae and other life forms into oil are still happening and try as we might we aren't going to stop them, but they proceed at what is likely a pace that will take long after humans are extinct to replenish what we have used.
> Longer term the same processes that turned algae and other life forms into oil are still happening
This is unfortunately not true.
The vast majority of our fossil fuels are formed from carbon that was sequestered into cellulose in plants, before anything had evolved the ability to digest cellulose. It piled up, and eventually compressed into coal. Look up the ʾCarboniferous Period" for more details.
These reserves are no longer being formed because we have fungi that break down these materials and return the CO2 to the air.
Planet Earth will never again have oil and coal reserves of the size it did 200 years ago.
While this is true for coal, algae can still form oil. Oil is primarily formed by organic material dumped out by river deltas that are sealed by their sea drying up. That is why places like the Gulf of Mexico are so oil rich. Seabeds are pretty much organic sludge which can be sealed in by salt, and then compressed and heated into oil.
Ah I see. I didn't think either of the parent comments were talking about plastics. Is most oil turned into recycled plastics? I assumed that most oil is turned into combustible fuel, but maybe that's not true.
Seems like 8-12% is turned into plastics. Though it’s usually natural gas that is used, not oil directly. Natural gas is also used to produce fertilizer and explosives in large quantities.
Most oil is not recycled. We know how to do it for all uses, but that doesn't mean we can. The energy costs make is not useful. If we had an infinite source of free energy we know how to recycle CO2 and h2o back into hydrocarbons.
Multiply the number of MTBF cycles times the battery capacity. Every battery is consumable, every time you draw current from it, they're not tanks full of liquid, they're chemistry.
That being said they're astronomically more efficient than even an ideal carnot engine.
A completely used up battery contains the same amount of lithium, cobalt, etc it took to manufacture it. The only question is the economics around mining vs recycling.
An easier to recycle battery that had very slightly fewer charge cycles could be a net win. For scale this depot has enough lithium for ~10 billion of EV’s using Tesla’s battery chemistry and pack size as a benchmark. How expensive it is to extract is however unknown.
The materials a battery is composed of almost completly can be recycled into a new battery. So creating a new battery requires some work and energy, but not new components.
Editing for clarity is encouraged here, generally.
That was not what I was trying to say.
The math is something like:
MTBF cycles * capacity of battery = usable "life" of the battery
usage of lithium by mass in the battery * best recycling technology recovery rate = recoverable lithium per battery
((mass of lithium in battery - recoverable lithium per battery) / usable "life" of the battery) = lithium effectively used up per joule of energy used from that battery
It may be that that number is zero grams, or a few picograms, so it doesn't matter. But I don't think with current recovery rates on battery recycling that's true. So, while a failed battery has the same mass of lithium as a new battery, effectively every charge-discharge cycle "uses up" some lithium, which ultimately ends up wasted as recycling byproducts or unusable salts.
It has happened with all resources. I won’t assume your intent but you invoked oil so I do want to point out the difference.
In a battery lithium is not consumed completely after every use like oil. The lithium in a battery is used hundreds or thousands of times. When the pack is dead it can still be downcycled and eventually the individual cells recycled. With the lithium being recovered and reused.
Yes, there is or will be a “lithium rush”. But it will look a lot more like gold or aluminum than oil.
And in a lot of cases it's countries that aren't exactly stable which have the resources. A lot of currently known lithium deposits (thankfully) come from nations at least allied with the West, but there are also places like Afghanistan [1] that just reek of a repeat of the failure in managing oil countries.
It happened with oil and now it's happening with lithium.