I have reviewed the Meridian Lithium report before - it's an interesting preliminary study, though it jumps to some conclusions on the USGS study. IIRC, it's evaluation of the Reserve Base makes a bad assumption on how "existing economically viable techniques" are affected by price changes - if price changes, economic viability changes, and he doesn't address that. He notes that li-ion battery prices need to fall, but he doesn't address the fact that lithium cost is only about .25% of battery cost, so increased lithium prices wouldn't be a serious problem. More importantly, the author has done some questionable things in the past, and I'd like a confirmation from another reputable source.

Oil has been the object of intensive exploration for many decades, and OPEC members have an incentive to overstate them. It's easy to assume that other commodities have been explored for in the same way, but that's rarely the case - usually, they receive only the exploration needed to ensure production within the window of time necessary to find new reserves and exploit them. In fact, sometimes commodity reserves are taxed - that's a big incentive to keep them down.

Lithium is a pretty abundant element, and TOD posts have suggested that it has gotten little serious prospecting (perhaps due to very low prices until recently), that it's pretty abundant, and that it's available from many similar salt-flats elsewhere which have received little attention - I'd like to see some good analysis here beyond this one source. At this point I don't think we can say anything stronger than "questions have been raised about the adequacy of lithium supplies".

On lead, I couldn't find the discussion of lead on the Stockhouse site you link to (the link is cut off, and I couldn't find it searching the site). There doesn't seem to be a question of insufficient resources. I don't see any quantitative discussion of the suggestion that production can't be ramped up quickly enough - that seems unlikely to me. Commodity production increases are difficult in time frames of 1-2 years, but in timeframes of 5-10 years production can be increased at high % rates. I think you need to present more information to make your case that limits to lead production are a serious problem.