The "Peak Lithium" theory is typical for the most common fallacy of all peak theories - lack of imagination.
Oceans alone contain billions tons of lithium - the concentration is around 0.18 grams/tonne - this multiplied by 1,340 mln.km3 equals to practically indefinite supply of lithium. Whether we will start recovering it from the oceans is just a question of how much we want to, but one day we will certainly do that if neccessary.
The bridge between imagination and reality has to be built on sound science. We can all easily imagine spaceships zipping around the galaxy at many times the speed of light, but it will never happen.
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...
But sorting out "scientific imagination" from "science fiction imagination" is the whole purpose of our discussions here. In this case I knew there are feasible methods to extract Li from seawater which I had accepted with a good degree of certainty will be working for us.
The lack of imagination I find in the way the picture was described by the article. It basically assumed we will continue extracting and using Li the way we used to and did not allow for innovation at all. In contrast I am allowing innovation, being more or less agnostic on it - it may or may not work. But this is not the point - the point is that this is not the time to tell whether potential innovations will work or not. This is what the article was leading us to the end - kill all Li batteries, because you see Li is will run out.
That's a major problem with many of the Faithful of the godz of Technology and Science.
They usually have the same tendency as the CERA crowd to overestimate the positives "on paper" but neglect the "above ground" limitations such as geopolitical and physical constraints (such as infrastructure buildout etc), international competition and current technical limits to their proposed solution.
Many if not all of the techno solutions may come into play but it may be long after we've suffered through much of the growing pains of the Transition away from Fossil Fuels.
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.
1. A car with a 200 mile range minimum.
2. Electricity
3. Heat
4. Food
When Lithium batteries can provide some of that I'll be interested. Go, try it, show me something useful! I want it and I'll take it - if, of course, I can afford it...
If you are a rural large animal veterinarian I can understand the "need".
Odd that you do not NEED "#5. Shelter", although perhaps that is covered in #1. Or "#6. Human Contact and Society" with medical care included in #6 or a #7.
Best Hopes for NOT needing cars with 200 mile range.
Well, my current reality is that I live 45 miles from work, so I need a car. I know, move closer to work. But I live in a small town that might fare better post-crash. And I work in a high-tech industry that consumes mucho electricity. So moving closer to a job that will likely go away soon seems like a bad idea.
Sure, I need those other things too. It wasn't meant to be a complete list, just my major energy needs.
Certainly if there was alternate transportation available I would consider it. At least my (purchased used) Corolla gets 36 MPG. But I'm not holding my breath for light rail between Weare NH and Tyngsboro Mass. I'm all for it, though!
You are right, it is absurd. People like myself and Sunspot say that every morning as we roll out of bed. The problem is that a quick solution to the problem would mean that I lose a good bit of what I have invested in my rural home -- bought, I should add before I was fully aware of the consequences of buying such a property.
The problem is compounded by the fact that where I live, there is no broadband service so that precludes "telecommuting" (don't even say the word "dial-up." I'm lucky to get a stable 21k connection).
But I hear you. I know I'm only contributing to our current mess. I think about it every hour of the day.
Try a satellite modem.
Also if you have some tech savvy friends and hills around you can set up some
nice line of site communications using readily available equipment.
I'd suggest you get very friendly with local employees of the phone and cable companies
also.
Generally if your tech savvy you can cobble together linux boxes to roll
your own network.
Laser links are cool and not that hard just they suffer from rain.
Finally high speed wireless from mobile providers is becoming common.
Last but not least check into buying a T1 or other fixed connection from your local provider or consider multiple pots lines with a linux load balancer.
A lot of times you can buy a 10 line business plan pretty cheap and get aggregate bandwidth thats not bad.
And of course get you lines checked and isolate the noise thats killing your connection.
Thanks, memmel. I periodically re-evaluate what I ought to do. I was very close to signing on with a regional provider of satellite internet service when I discovered that they were no longer taking customers (they promised a return to enrollment in the near future, but I haven't taken the time to check back).
This is the sort of service I get from the phone company (won't say the name but it begins with a "V" and rhymes with "horizon"): This past fall, our phone line had become so static-y that it was unusable even for local calls, so I called the phone co. and asked them to come out and have a look. I wasn't there when they came to do the repair but the tech told my wife that "the cups on the pole are installed upside down and they fill up with water when you get an extended period of rain." I assumed that he had corrected this, but the next time we had a hard rain, the static returned. We're the last house on a dead-end road, so there's nothing in it for the phone company to fix the problem. I'm sure our neck of the woods was without phone and electric for much of the twentieth century and I expect to be one of the first to be cut off when things get tight. Like oldhippie said, "Choices."
Thanks for you suggestions though. I'm going to write them down.
I am not a strong believer in telecommuting. But the broadband situation could most likely be fixed with a little bit of wireless equipment. My parents live in a village close to the middle of nowhere in Europe and they don't even have landlines for phones. The local telecom was dragging their feet about offering anything but cell-phone service and a few kbits/s for internet. A year and a half ago a small but rapidly growing company moved in, put a few antennas on a nearby tower and since then my parents have boradband for less than what I am paying for DSL. We use an IP phone application for free and have even a webcam going for less than what I would be paying for phone cards from the US to Europe.
If you have a line of sight to a nearby place with DSL, you should be able to get broadband. It wouldn't work in the middle of the forest, though...
That sucks... technologically speaking... since you seem to have a landline, in theory one can operate ADSL with line repeaters/loop extenders (bidirectional amplifiers) in the middle of the line over longer distances but I know that the phone companies are not keen on putting those in for customers. Not sure if there is any way of actually making them do it. Probably not... monopolists hardly ever move unless they are being forced by the government.
For what it's worth, if you haven't seen this, yet, here is what such a device looks like:
I know your problem with DSL, cable etc. in rural hilly land To get around "dialup" with its peak speed of 18k for me, I went satelite. Which isn't as good as its cracked up to be. #1 is price-you have to pay for a new modem and a dish, plus installation. Some firms wave part of it. But often a big chunk-300 to 500 depending. Next is spotty transmission-forget it when it rains, or is foggy, or snowing. Then there's price again-monthly charges 3x dialup, for basic service, charges upped quickly if you use more bandwidth than min. Plus they want a credit card, and I liked my old local ISP-pay each month by mail or stopping in.
Still looking? I found Radioshack to be a satelite carrier/jobber for me.
Can you get ISDN service? I know its 'obsolete' technology, but 3x faster than a dial-up is not all that bad. It was all I had for a year in my rural location until DSL came available much sooner than I had anticipated. Want to buy an ISDN modem - cheap?
LevinK, I agree with most of what you said here. I did not mean to imply this is not an area to be explored - lithium batteries for storage could be a very valuable and technically realistic part of one of the solutions.
My point is that in general, when it comes to the various alternatives to fossil fuels, so many of the proposed technical solutions do not take into account the various real-world factors that might limit their usefulness. And in some cases pursuit of unrealistic technical solutions will be a drain on efforts to mitigate the effects of peak oil, or may even make the symptoms of peak oil worse (e.g. food vs fuel).
I would love to see advances in robust, reliable and affordable storage systems like lithium batteries.
There's a lot of uranium in the oceans as well, but we will never even attempt to get it out, because it's crystal clear that would use way more energy than it delivers. There's a fortune in gold too, same story, but now in money. Why would lithium be different?
Because it's concentrations is hundreds and thousand times higher than both U and Au, making lithium extraction much easier. And I suggest you better never say never.
Sure there's an almost inexhaustable supply of lithium in the ocean, just like there's probably enough gold in the ocean to make everyone in the US a millionaire. But how would you do that: pump the the entire volume of the world's oceans through some mega ion exchange column the size of Delaware?
Total global abundance of a particular resource, in and of itself, is a practically meaningless number. For example, titanium is one of the more abundance elements in the earth's crust, yet it is a very expensive metal simply because it is very difficult and expensive to separate metallic titanium from the TiO2 ore. The technology of resource extraction cannot be view separately from the economics of resource extraction. The two have been and always will be inextricably intertwined.
If indeed there's 0.18 g of lithium per tonne of sea water, you'd need to process 5,500 tons of sea water for every kg of lithium recovered. To me this doesn't sound like a terribly promising way of producing lithium.
I think a process based on a enzyme like concept may work. We can create a protein or protein like complex with a high affinity for lithium.
This can be attached to a net or web like structure and simply dragged through the ocean or placed in a region with a reasonable current. Periodically it can be raise and passed through a bath that has conditions which cause the complex to release its lithium.
Rinse and repeat. So its basically a ion specific exchange membrane.
With this type of technology we would be able to extract any ion we wish from sea water at minimal cost.
Another similar approach but a bit more sophisticated is to use membrane based ion channels that do active exchange based with selection based on ion channel size.
We could build this today. Mother nature makes plenty of sea shells with similar technology.
Further out we could even farm plankton that were bio engineered to concentrate certain metal salts in their shells. I'd be uneasy releasing something like this in the wild though.
We do use plants now to extract and concentrate heavy metals.
The problem with it is that even once you have the raw metal (titanium sponge), it is a dog to work with. You need vacuum melting and high temperature machining processes because the cold metal is not ductile enough and wears out expensive tools in no time. It's use outside of high tech equipment like planes and bikes is limited by economic concerns.
"If indeed there's 0.18 g of lithium per tonne of sea water, you'd need to process 5,500 tons of sea water for every kg of lithium recovered. To me this doesn't sound like a terribly promising way of producing lithium."
A ton of sea water contains some 35kg of salt. The lithium is in there. Usually the first step to concentrate the salt is done using solar energy in salt ponds. It might be possible to go from the saturated brine to a concentrated lithium solution more easily than from seawater itself.
But, of course, you are correct. The solar energy needed to concentrate the brine solution in the first place is probably worth more than the lithium itself...
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.
"Titanium uses lots of electricity at every stage of processing."
Same for aluminum and ferrous metals where electric ovens are being used. But even electricity can be made in enormous quantities from the sun. We just haven't gotten started, yet. But I don't believe that car manufacturing will profit that greatly from using titanium. It seems more to me that the titanium industry is looking for a new market.
LevinK, let me ask you about this because I hear this sort of response a lot when someone proposes that we are approaching some resource limit. Isn't this more a question of economics or of the cost of the energy required to extract the mineral (Li in this case, but it could just as well apply to any other geologic deposit) than it is a "failure of imagination?"
When I read the Li-ion battery article, I get the impression that the playa deposits in South America are considered as the likely future source and I can only assume that this is because these deposits are the most economical from which to recover Li. I don't doubt that huge quantities of the element are present in seawater, but it isn't like you could strain seawater through a piece of cheese cloth and pull the Li out of it.
When I was an undergraduate, studing agriculture, I learned that "modern" agricultural systems are highly dependent upon fossil phosphorus deposits that occur in relatively few places on the planet. Intrigued by this, I decided to write a paper on the subject and it was while researching the topic that I came across a paper by a mining engineer -- his last name was Emigh, as I recall -- who proposed that this was of no concern because background levels of P in the earth's crust could always be mined if we really needed the stuff. As I recall, this would require mining a mere cubic kilometer or two of the earth's crust every year -- a virtually unlimited supply in the author's view.
What you are missing is that historically we have picked fossil deposits and scaled them up, because they were much easier to exploit - the low hanging fruit. With time we became so efficient in exploiting only such stuff that we never thought of using phosphate rocks to do the same thing. And I expect this will continue long after it has become more practical to mine rocks... and this is the whole problem indeed - we have a huge embedded inertia in the system, in the form of lack of experience with new technologies, vested interests in the old technology etc.
IMHO, in the case of fossil fuels the inertia is such that it has the potential to smack us full-speed into the wall, but I don't think that such is the case with many of the alternatives - including lithium batterries, nuclear etc. The impact on such technologies (whatever they say) is so minimal that we'll be able to develop them for centuries if needed.
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:
A process is worked out that requires little energy and is not dependent upon other rare resources to exploit the target resource. Under this scenario, it is plausible that exploitation of the resource will have widespread benefits to average people.
No such process is found in which case the resource is available to a privileged few and its exploitation is reliant upon a huge number of low-wage workers who toil long and hard to exploit the resource.
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.
I think the last 150 years of resource extraction would agree with you. Ever since Savary and the Cornwall tin mines we have been using increasing amounts of energy in order to permit extraction of needed resources from lower grade ores.
Seawater may indeed contain a variety of resources but the enegry costs of extraction do not look promising given the anticipated future energy contraints.
"The "Peak Lithium" theory is typical for the most common fallacy of all peak theories - lack of imagination."
I don't want to burst you bubble, but Peak Lithium can't happen, unless we use lithium in future fusion reactors. The simple facts are that lithium in a battery does not get used up at all. It can be chemically recycled. Oil, in contrast, can only be used once. Thus... PO is a reality. To talk about Peak Lithium, at this point, is simply a logical error.
Your argument, while technically correct and economically most likely useless, is not required. We are not facing a lithium crisis. On the other hand, if this was a back handed attack on PO, it failed miserably because you don't even seem to understand the trivial differences between a recyclable material and one that gets burnt to CO2.
"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.
The "Peak Lithium" theory is typical for the most common fallacy of all peak theories - lack of imagination.
Oceans alone contain billions tons of lithium - the concentration is around 0.18 grams/tonne - this multiplied by 1,340 mln.km3 equals to practically indefinite supply of lithium. Whether we will start recovering it from the oceans is just a question of how much we want to, but one day we will certainly do that if neccessary.
The bridge between imagination and reality has to be built on sound science. We can all easily imagine spaceships zipping around the galaxy at many times the speed of light, but it will never happen.
Just google "extracting lithium from seawater". I did not want to go into technical discussions but I am not talking about science fiction here.
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...
But sorting out "scientific imagination" from "science fiction imagination" is the whole purpose of our discussions here. In this case I knew there are feasible methods to extract Li from seawater which I had accepted with a good degree of certainty will be working for us.
The lack of imagination I find in the way the picture was described by the article. It basically assumed we will continue extracting and using Li the way we used to and did not allow for innovation at all. In contrast I am allowing innovation, being more or less agnostic on it - it may or may not work. But this is not the point - the point is that this is not the time to tell whether potential innovations will work or not. This is what the article was leading us to the end - kill all Li batteries, because you see Li is will run out.
How energy-intensive is the extraction process? That is the question that needs to be asked in order to make imagination connect with reality.
That's a major problem with many of the Faithful of the godz of Technology and Science.
They usually have the same tendency as the CERA crowd to overestimate the positives "on paper" but neglect the "above ground" limitations such as geopolitical and physical constraints (such as infrastructure buildout etc), international competition and current technical limits to their proposed solution.
Many if not all of the techno solutions may come into play but it may be long after we've suffered through much of the growing pains of the Transition away from Fossil Fuels.
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.
Here's what I need:
1. A car with a 200 mile range minimum.
2. Electricity
3. Heat
4. Food
When Lithium batteries can provide some of that I'll be interested. Go, try it, show me something useful! I want it and I'll take it - if, of course, I can afford it...
why do you NEED #1 ?
If you are a rural large animal veterinarian I can understand the "need".
Odd that you do not NEED "#5. Shelter", although perhaps that is covered in #1. Or "#6. Human Contact and Society" with medical care included in #6 or a #7.
Best Hopes for NOT needing cars with 200 mile range.
Alan
Well, my current reality is that I live 45 miles from work, so I need a car. I know, move closer to work. But I live in a small town that might fare better post-crash. And I work in a high-tech industry that consumes mucho electricity. So moving closer to a job that will likely go away soon seems like a bad idea.
Sure, I need those other things too. It wasn't meant to be a complete list, just my major energy needs.
Certainly if there was alternate transportation available I would consider it. At least my (purchased used) Corolla gets 36 MPG. But I'm not holding my breath for light rail between Weare NH and Tyngsboro Mass. I'm all for it, though!
I need to stop paying taxes to subsidize your absurd lifestyle.
No reason at all to suppose Weare will do well post-crash. Can't employ you now.
You are right, it is absurd. People like myself and Sunspot say that every morning as we roll out of bed. The problem is that a quick solution to the problem would mean that I lose a good bit of what I have invested in my rural home -- bought, I should add before I was fully aware of the consequences of buying such a property.
The problem is compounded by the fact that where I live, there is no broadband service so that precludes "telecommuting" (don't even say the word "dial-up." I'm lucky to get a stable 21k connection).
But I hear you. I know I'm only contributing to our current mess. I think about it every hour of the day.
OK. I'll try to focus on the absurdity and not the person. Still. Choices.
You make a very good point concerning 99.999% of the American public.
By the time they wake up to the crisis they will find themselve trapped in unsustainable living situations with very few alternatives available.
And they will not be as rational and calm as you are now when it happens.
Try a satellite modem.
Also if you have some tech savvy friends and hills around you can set up some
nice line of site communications using readily available equipment.
I'd suggest you get very friendly with local employees of the phone and cable companies
also.
http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/casestudy.aspx?docid=133038
Generally if your tech savvy you can cobble together linux boxes to roll
your own network.
Laser links are cool and not that hard just they suffer from rain.
Finally high speed wireless from mobile providers is becoming common.
Last but not least check into buying a T1 or other fixed connection from your local provider or consider multiple pots lines with a linux load balancer.
A lot of times you can buy a 10 line business plan pretty cheap and get aggregate bandwidth thats not bad.
And of course get you lines checked and isolate the noise thats killing your connection.
Thanks, memmel. I periodically re-evaluate what I ought to do. I was very close to signing on with a regional provider of satellite internet service when I discovered that they were no longer taking customers (they promised a return to enrollment in the near future, but I haven't taken the time to check back).
This is the sort of service I get from the phone company (won't say the name but it begins with a "V" and rhymes with "horizon"): This past fall, our phone line had become so static-y that it was unusable even for local calls, so I called the phone co. and asked them to come out and have a look. I wasn't there when they came to do the repair but the tech told my wife that "the cups on the pole are installed upside down and they fill up with water when you get an extended period of rain." I assumed that he had corrected this, but the next time we had a hard rain, the static returned. We're the last house on a dead-end road, so there's nothing in it for the phone company to fix the problem. I'm sure our neck of the woods was without phone and electric for much of the twentieth century and I expect to be one of the first to be cut off when things get tight. Like oldhippie said, "Choices."
Thanks for you suggestions though. I'm going to write them down.
I am not a strong believer in telecommuting. But the broadband situation could most likely be fixed with a little bit of wireless equipment. My parents live in a village close to the middle of nowhere in Europe and they don't even have landlines for phones. The local telecom was dragging their feet about offering anything but cell-phone service and a few kbits/s for internet. A year and a half ago a small but rapidly growing company moved in, put a few antennas on a nearby tower and since then my parents have boradband for less than what I am paying for DSL. We use an IP phone application for free and have even a webcam going for less than what I would be paying for phone cards from the US to Europe.
If you have a line of sight to a nearby place with DSL, you should be able to get broadband. It wouldn't work in the middle of the forest, though...
Thanks, IP. Problem is I don't. Hilly terrain, no cable, no DSL within 4 miles.
That sucks... technologically speaking... since you seem to have a landline, in theory one can operate ADSL with line repeaters/loop extenders (bidirectional amplifiers) in the middle of the line over longer distances but I know that the phone companies are not keen on putting those in for customers. Not sure if there is any way of actually making them do it. Probably not... monopolists hardly ever move unless they are being forced by the government.
For what it's worth, if you haven't seen this, yet, here is what such a device looks like:
http://www.versatek.com/products/ver170r1.html
4 miles is at the limits of what these things can do, but they are, at least in theory, available.
Have you seen this (you would have to be somewhat desperate)?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2001/pulpit_20010628_000421.html
I know your problem with DSL, cable etc. in rural hilly land To get around "dialup" with its peak speed of 18k for me, I went satelite. Which isn't as good as its cracked up to be. #1 is price-you have to pay for a new modem and a dish, plus installation. Some firms wave part of it. But often a big chunk-300 to 500 depending. Next is spotty transmission-forget it when it rains, or is foggy, or snowing. Then there's price again-monthly charges 3x dialup, for basic service, charges upped quickly if you use more bandwidth than min. Plus they want a credit card, and I liked my old local ISP-pay each month by mail or stopping in.
Still looking? I found Radioshack to be a satelite carrier/jobber for me.
Can you get ISDN service? I know its 'obsolete' technology, but 3x faster than a dial-up is not all that bad. It was all I had for a year in my rural location until DSL came available much sooner than I had anticipated. Want to buy an ISDN modem - cheap?
Withdrawn
I think small towns will fare worse post-crash.
Why? For the obvious reason that they're far from places with money, resources and power, and supplying them is petroleum intensive.
Electricity will not be going away, and in high tech at least there is now significant empahsis on using new technology for electric power efficiency.
High tech typically generates a fair amount of economic value per unit input petroleum.
I would think it's a good idea live in a district with a public utility with a modern nuclear power plant and a high standard of maintenance.
LevinK, I agree with most of what you said here. I did not mean to imply this is not an area to be explored - lithium batteries for storage could be a very valuable and technically realistic part of one of the solutions.
My point is that in general, when it comes to the various alternatives to fossil fuels, so many of the proposed technical solutions do not take into account the various real-world factors that might limit their usefulness. And in some cases pursuit of unrealistic technical solutions will be a drain on efforts to mitigate the effects of peak oil, or may even make the symptoms of peak oil worse (e.g. food vs fuel).
I would love to see advances in robust, reliable and affordable storage systems like lithium batteries.
There's a lot of uranium in the oceans as well, but we will never even attempt to get it out, because it's crystal clear that would use way more energy than it delivers. There's a fortune in gold too, same story, but now in money. Why would lithium be different?
Because it's concentrations is hundreds and thousand times higher than both U and Au, making lithium extraction much easier. And I suggest you better never say never.
Sure there's an almost inexhaustable supply of lithium in the ocean, just like there's probably enough gold in the ocean to make everyone in the US a millionaire. But how would you do that: pump the the entire volume of the world's oceans through some mega ion exchange column the size of Delaware?
Total global abundance of a particular resource, in and of itself, is a practically meaningless number. For example, titanium is one of the more abundance elements in the earth's crust, yet it is a very expensive metal simply because it is very difficult and expensive to separate metallic titanium from the TiO2 ore. The technology of resource extraction cannot be view separately from the economics of resource extraction. The two have been and always will be inextricably intertwined.
If indeed there's 0.18 g of lithium per tonne of sea water, you'd need to process 5,500 tons of sea water for every kg of lithium recovered. To me this doesn't sound like a terribly promising way of producing lithium.
I think a process based on a enzyme like concept may work. We can create a protein or protein like complex with a high affinity for lithium.
This can be attached to a net or web like structure and simply dragged through the ocean or placed in a region with a reasonable current. Periodically it can be raise and passed through a bath that has conditions which cause the complex to release its lithium.
Rinse and repeat. So its basically a ion specific exchange membrane.
With this type of technology we would be able to extract any ion we wish from sea water at minimal cost.
Another similar approach but a bit more sophisticated is to use membrane based ion channels that do active exchange based with selection based on ion channel size.
We could build this today. Mother nature makes plenty of sea shells with similar technology.
Further out we could even farm plankton that were bio engineered to concentrate certain metal salts in their shells. I'd be uneasy releasing something like this in the wild though.
We do use plants now to extract and concentrate heavy metals.
Titanium is not really that expensive. See e.g.
http://doc.tms.org/ezMerchant/prodtms.nsf/ProductLookupItemID/JOM-9809-16/$FILE/JOM-9809-16F.pdf?OpenElement
The problem with it is that even once you have the raw metal (titanium sponge), it is a dog to work with. You need vacuum melting and high temperature machining processes because the cold metal is not ductile enough and wears out expensive tools in no time. It's use outside of high tech equipment like planes and bikes is limited by economic concerns.
"If indeed there's 0.18 g of lithium per tonne of sea water, you'd need to process 5,500 tons of sea water for every kg of lithium recovered. To me this doesn't sound like a terribly promising way of producing lithium."
A ton of sea water contains some 35kg of salt. The lithium is in there. Usually the first step to concentrate the salt is done using solar energy in salt ponds. It might be possible to go from the saturated brine to a concentrated lithium solution more easily than from seawater itself.
But, of course, you are correct. The solar energy needed to concentrate the brine solution in the first place is probably worth more than the lithium itself...
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.
"Titanium uses lots of electricity at every stage of processing."
Same for aluminum and ferrous metals where electric ovens are being used. But even electricity can be made in enormous quantities from the sun. We just haven't gotten started, yet. But I don't believe that car manufacturing will profit that greatly from using titanium. It seems more to me that the titanium industry is looking for a new market.
LevinK, let me ask you about this because I hear this sort of response a lot when someone proposes that we are approaching some resource limit. Isn't this more a question of economics or of the cost of the energy required to extract the mineral (Li in this case, but it could just as well apply to any other geologic deposit) than it is a "failure of imagination?"
When I read the Li-ion battery article, I get the impression that the playa deposits in South America are considered as the likely future source and I can only assume that this is because these deposits are the most economical from which to recover Li. I don't doubt that huge quantities of the element are present in seawater, but it isn't like you could strain seawater through a piece of cheese cloth and pull the Li out of it.
When I was an undergraduate, studing agriculture, I learned that "modern" agricultural systems are highly dependent upon fossil phosphorus deposits that occur in relatively few places on the planet. Intrigued by this, I decided to write a paper on the subject and it was while researching the topic that I came across a paper by a mining engineer -- his last name was Emigh, as I recall -- who proposed that this was of no concern because background levels of P in the earth's crust could always be mined if we really needed the stuff. As I recall, this would require mining a mere cubic kilometer or two of the earth's crust every year -- a virtually unlimited supply in the author's view.
What am I not getting?
What you are missing is that historically we have picked fossil deposits and scaled them up, because they were much easier to exploit - the low hanging fruit. With time we became so efficient in exploiting only such stuff that we never thought of using phosphate rocks to do the same thing. And I expect this will continue long after it has become more practical to mine rocks... and this is the whole problem indeed - we have a huge embedded inertia in the system, in the form of lack of experience with new technologies, vested interests in the old technology etc.
IMHO, in the case of fossil fuels the inertia is such that it has the potential to smack us full-speed into the wall, but I don't think that such is the case with many of the alternatives - including lithium batterries, nuclear etc. The impact on such technologies (whatever they say) is so minimal that we'll be able to develop them for centuries if needed.
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:
I think the last 150 years of resource extraction would agree with you. Ever since Savary and the Cornwall tin mines we have been using increasing amounts of energy in order to permit extraction of needed resources from lower grade ores.
Seawater may indeed contain a variety of resources but the enegry costs of extraction do not look promising given the anticipated future energy contraints.
"The "Peak Lithium" theory is typical for the most common fallacy of all peak theories - lack of imagination."
I don't want to burst you bubble, but Peak Lithium can't happen, unless we use lithium in future fusion reactors. The simple facts are that lithium in a battery does not get used up at all. It can be chemically recycled. Oil, in contrast, can only be used once. Thus... PO is a reality. To talk about Peak Lithium, at this point, is simply a logical error.
Your argument, while technically correct and economically most likely useless, is not required. We are not facing a lithium crisis. On the other hand, if this was a back handed attack on PO, it failed miserably because you don't even seem to understand the trivial differences between a recyclable material and one that gets burnt to CO2.
That wasn't LevinK's intent. He's very PO aware.
"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.