So maybe it's easy to extract mountains of Lithium. Not really my point. You state that what is lacking out there is imagination, and I completely disagree. I think the opposite is the case: I see nothing but imagination, or what I call Fantasy. I'm totally in favor of whatever works. But when I can't get any gasoline to put in my car - and if things go the way I think they will in the ME then that should be this year, maybe even this spring - it won't help my situation at all to know that there's plenty of Lithium in the oceans.
Anyway, batteries are just a storage medium. Still have to generate that electricity somehow...

How energy-intensive is the extraction process? That is the question that needs to be asked in order to make imagination connect with reality.

Let's compare the two sides of the story:
1) "Let us not do it because we will run out of this or that resource"
2) "Let's do it because we'll find ways to better extract the resources, find their substitutes and/or use them more efficiently"

At first glance it looks that the first claim is the more responsible one. Hell it's so tempting to just sit around and do nothing while the world around you is going to the waste bin. But if you just applied that same principle to all decisions made by humans throughout their history we would be back to the caves, or even to the trees. None of the things we humans did has ever been indefinately "renewable" or "sustainable". Even the bow and arrows are limited to the amount of wood you can cut to master them. And wind turbines or solar panels do not magically appear off the ground by themselves.

It all comes down to trial and errors and evolution of one technology to another. As long as lithium batteries are the best way to reduce fossil fuels usage available, I will support them until they are proven to fail in practice. Predictions by some fake prophets of doom, persuading us to not even try are hardly of any interest.

Titanium uses lots of electricity at every stage of processing. Biggest user of Ti is still paint - it's titanium dioxide that makes it white. Good paint has about 3# titanium dioxide to the gallon. Lots of processing to get from ore to white.

Well, maybe I'm just being pig-headed but the key ingredient in picking the fruit that is out of our reach still seems to be energy. The Inca of South America apparently built great palaces of stone without the benefits of oxen or the wheel. I can only imagine that meant that huge numbers of low-wage workers toiled long and hard to place those huge stones.

As concerns these more diffuse resource deposits, I see their exploitation as being contingent upon one of two scenarios:

"That wasn't LevinK's intent. He's very PO aware."

In which case I am apologizing for having had that thought.

I don't know how many people realize that PO is an almost unique scenario (Peak Helium, of course, is closely related, albeit with a serious recycling factor except for the party balloon industry and so is Peak Uranium) that does not fundamentally apply to non-radioactive chemical elements. If we rapidly lose elements of low abundance to thermodynamically very hard to reverse dilution, it is because of our own fault ways of handling them. They could all be recycled in close to perfect closed industrial systems. The emphasize is probably on "could", in practice we are wasting a lot of hard to replace elements, too (especially the catalysts of the platinum group).

One thing he is right about, though, by pointing out the alternatives in the article, is that lithium battery technology is only one out of a number of alternatives. It might or might not become the technology of choice for the electric car of the second generation, although it will probably play an important role for the first.

It is also not clear to me why the second or third generation of hybrids could not revisit flywheel technology or, in case of busses, use hydraulic/pneumatic energy storage or use next generation ultracapacitors for short power bursts. Neither system has significant disadvantages over batteries for that particular application. It will be interesting to see which technologies can penetrate the market.

"How much energy does it cost to recycle the lithium from a battery?"

Based on basic chemistry, I would say that the lower physical limit for that energy is a single charge of the battery, roughly the same amount of energy it takes to make the lithium from its natural salts in the first place. The difference is that it might be done in an electrolysis cell rather than the battery itself. But it might not even be necessary to remove all of the lithium in its metalic state. Here is how I imagine a realistic recycling plant might operate (keep in mind, I am making this up, I did not even take the time to read up on this!):

Most likely the battery recycler will start by discharging the battery, cutting them open and then flushing the electrolyte out with a solvent. The liquid can be filtered and chemically treated to produce the new electrolyte for a new battery without ever going through a metalic state. They will also dissasemble the electrodes and probably grind them up to dissolve the remaining lithium in them. The remaining materials, stainless steel housings, organic/graphite/ceramic electrodes and other materials are then being treated one by one. I would think that the steel can go directly into the usual recycling cycle for ferrous metals and the rest might be discarded (graphite and organics can be burnt, but ceramics are relatively useless, unless they contain other rare elements).

"And in relation to the capacity of the battery?"

It does not matter much because a vehicle battery gets charged/discharged thousands of times. So even if it takes 10 times as much energy to recycle the lithium (or to produce it from salt) as is contained in a single charge, the battery will store hundreds, if not thousands of times more energy over its lifetime than what went into its production. If a single charge/discharge cycle saves only 10% of its total energy in a hybrid in comparison to a non-hybrid (a more realistic estimate might be 50%), the "EROEI" of the battery is still on the order of 100:1.

Please keep in mind that these are storage devices, not energy sources. They have a huge cylce number advantage.

This whole site is mostly nonsense, since we know where there is well over three trillion barrels of oil; one trillion [or thereabouts] that hasn't been extracted yet in the normal fashion, and two trillion that is leftover from the extraction in the normal fashion [assuming 33% extraction effectiveness]. So all we have to do is extract it! Oh gee, it's hard. Well since no one has tried yet, how do we know it's that hard?
Levink says that it's easy to extract Li from the ocean. Really? Well, maybe it's easy to extract anything from the ocean [I don't know] but the real question is what is the energy cost of extracting useful amounts. Personally, I would bet on mining the remnants from oil wells as more useful than extracting large amount of anything from the ocean, and that includes hydrocarbons.

And what hard information has he supplied?