from Hacker News

Ask HN: A shift from gas to EV's will cause us to deplete another resource, no?

by 1dundundun on 4/22/16, 1:06 AM with 3 comments

I do understand that we will not consume lithium at the same rates but isn't the transition from oil to lithium going to land us in similar predicaments to the ones we're in now re: our dependence on a quickly depleting natural resource?

  • by f_allwein on 4/22/16, 1:15 AM

    No. First of all, EVs can run on electricity from any source, i.e. it doesn't matter if it comes from coal/ nuclear or renewables. Thus, they are more flexible, since traditional cars mostly run on gas and would be useless if we run out of it.

    Likewise, batteries are made from different materials, so if we did run out of Lithium, I'm sure it would be feasible to use something else.

    But in general, they're not a good solution to our transport needs as long as they're owned by individuals and only used for 1-2 hours a day. And we do live on a planet with finite resources, so we'd need to come up with a way to recycle most of the parts of a car in the longer run.

  • by jseliger on 4/22/16, 1:16 AM

    1. There are enormous lithium reserves already: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=total+lithium+res... and likely much more that we don't know about.

    2. Lithium is recyclable. At the moment processes for doing so aren't that good and the cost of Li isn't high enough to justify recycling, but the first one will almost certainly change and the latter one may.

    3. The big bottleneck right now isn't raw lithium—it's converting the raw lithium into useful batteries.

  • by 1dundundun on 4/22/16, 3:58 AM

    Thanks for the insight.