Bolivia may hold the keys to lithium battery cars
Martin Alipaz / epa / Corbis - TIME
For several years now, electric vehicle advocates have been pushing lithium ion batteries as the solution to the issues of global warming and fossil fuel use. Unfortunately, just as petroleum is a finite resource with the most abundant supplies being restricted to certain geographic areas, the same is true of lithium. A substantial proportion of the world's known supplies of lithium carbonate are located in the central Andean region of South America, with the largest deposits in Bolivia and, to a lesser degree, Chile. For an impoverished country like Bolivia, this has the potential to bring the same kind of bounty that Saudi Arabia got in the second half of the last century.
Unfortunately, for the rest of the world that's hoping to use all that lithium, having a dominant player means that the cost of lithium batteries is unlikely to drop significantly any time soon even if production is ramped up. Bolivia's leftist president Evo Morales wants a state-dominated lithium industry in order to ensure that the profits benefit the people of his country. As a result, some automakers are attempting to go directly to the Bolivian government to ensure adequate supplies. That would explain why most of the major automakers are tying up with battery makers in order to keep the technology in house rather than rely on suppliers. Regardless of who controls the supply of lithium, there remain concerns that demand could outstrip supply within a decade. if that happens, we'll have to continue the search for other alternatives anyway.
[Source: TIME]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
bjd 10:02AM (1/28/2009)
Sam,
Long-time reader of your articles. Keep it up. Hey, didn't the Lithium Market and Supply 2009 conference just wrap up in Chile yesterday? Seeing as this was the "meeting of the minds" and involved every major lithium production company and industry researchers, don't you think there was a wealth of information flowing out of this symposium? Did you send anybody down there to report on this? I expect this conference to be just as important as the major auto, alt. vehicle, and EVS shows.
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LaughingTooHard 10:07AM (1/28/2009)
The real question is not will this resource will be tapped but at what cost?
Last time I checked, Bolvians had to resort to violent protests to just keep their own water supply from being taken over by the WTO...
http://www.flowthefilm.com/trailer
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0896087034/ref=cm_cr_asin_lnk
Sounds like in 2009, being impoverished means having to fight to keep everything that is rightly yours.
Stay tuned and diligent to protect the people of Bolivia and this important resource.
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gorr 10:15AM (1/28/2009)
Quote from the article ''lithium ion batteries as the solution to the issues of global warming and fossil fuel use. ""
Ridiculous, lithim ion batteries cannot even work good for regular cars, lawn mowers, bycicles, motorcycles. So imagine trucks, airplanes, ships, electrical generation, trains.
It's easy to see that these batteries are just a way to keep petrol use and trading and pollution of land, air, water in use.
The only way of having more energy is to discover and use new energy source and stay away of inneficient petrol. So hydrogen is a new way and green algae fuel too.
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Tim 10:20AM (1/28/2009)
Real estate including improvements is private and should be owned by individuals and corporations. Gov’t should NOT own real estate and it should NOT be taxed but the natural resources mined from that real estate should be shared by all equally.
Natural resources belong to everyone in the nation and profits from their sale or use should be shared equally via being used to pay for public services such as police, fire, roads, energy etc.
HOWEVER each person's labor is their own and should NOT be taxed or redistributed to those who refuse to work. Taking part of a person’s labor is slavery.
Corporations are formed as a creature of gov't to protect their owners from personal liability therefore corporate profits should be taxed to help pay for gov't infrastructure.
Of course, corporations, oil companies, mining companies and the Statist (Socialists/NeoCon/Democratic/Fascists/communists/Progressive) politicians they own will disagree.
Corporations wish to steal the natural resources from the populace while placing their public responsibility onto to the workers.
Statists know that the tax on income is an excellent way for top-down gov’t to control the population through intimidation while maintaining a “master-slave” Statist relationship.
If the NATURAL resources were shared and corporations paid their fair share in return for owner-officer corporate veil protection, there would be no need for personal income tax and there would be no need for fiat currency.
There would be PLENTY of money for infrastructure and the population would be free from the yoke of a runaway central gov’t.
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Rafa 10:23AM (1/28/2009)
http://www.prlog.org/10062026-world-lithium-reserves-found-to-be-abundant-in-new-report.html
http://gas2.org/2008/10/13/lithium-counterpoint-no-shortage-for-electric-cars/
According to these sites there's nothing to worry about. I just hope that they are accurate... :p
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Chris M 11:07PM (1/28/2009)
Not to mention an article posted here later this day:
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2009/01/28/got-lithium-lots
DasBoese 10:37AM (1/28/2009)
What the article doesn't mention is that when you burn petroleum, it's gone.
Lithium batteries can be recycled.
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Rob 2:08PM (1/28/2009)
I just have one question. Since Bolivia's lithium is obtained from salt deposits, could it be possible to use salt or existing desalination facilities to obtain lithium?
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Chris M 11:10PM (1/28/2009)
Yes. Bolivia is the leading source simply because its salt flats have the highest concentration of lithium, but there are lots of potential sources of lithium. Any nation with access to the sea could, if they needed to, get all the lithium they wanted from the ocean.
Tony Belding 2:11PM (1/28/2009)
DadBoese is right, lithium can be recycled, it doesn't get "burned up" and require you to keep going back for more the way petroleum does.
Another point has to be made. . . Bolivia is far from being the only source of lithium. Lithium is a common element in the earth's crust, that can be extracted from many sites around the world, and even from sea water if necessary. What Bolivia has is the richest and easiest-to-access large deposit of lithium, which has been adequate to supply much of the world's demand up to now.
If demand grows a lot and lithium prices climb, at some point it will become economically viable to open up other sources. It's hard to imagine the world running out of lithium, though there could be temporary shortages if demand grows faster than worldwide production can keep pace.
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Sam Abuelsamid 5:47PM (1/28/2009)
On the other hand lithium ion batteries are already prohibitively expensive and climbing lithium prices will only make that problem worse. We will really have to move beyond lithium to make mass market EVs commercially viable
Chris M 6:23PM (1/31/2009)
Currently, the major cost for LiIon batteries is in the manufacturing process, not the raw materials. The price of LiIon batteries has been dropping due to improvements in manufacture, not from any reduction in lithium costs.
So it is possible that Lithium battery prices could go down even with some increases in the price of lithium. The relative abundance of lithium limits how much the price could increase.
Of course, there are alternatives to lithium for batteries, it is just hard to beat the low molecular weight and high electronegativity of lithium.
Phil 2:31PM (1/28/2009)
Another reason why Jeremy Clarkson is right about battery powered cars.
The hurdle of limit range and cost is just too big to leap. The ability to refuel hydrogen cars means that ultimately they will provide the usefulness that people demand, and battery cars will never equal.
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Chris M 11:19PM (1/28/2009)
Ah, but the cost of H2 fuel cells and H2 storage is about 20x more than the cost of an equivalent LiIon battery pack, and H2 fuel cells require materials that are far more expensive and rare than Lithium, such as Platinum.
It doesn't help that H2 fuel costs considerably more than "electric fuel", and always will.
So arguing that LiIon is "too expensive" is NOT an argument in favor of H2 fuels.
Chris M 11:32PM (1/28/2009)
The only remaining advantage for H2 FC cars over battery electrics, fast recharge, disappears with the advent of swappable batteries, or "10 minute" chargers, or "powered highways" - and those have already been demonstrated.
Of course, if battery improvements recently demonstrated in the lab prove to be cost effective, we could see "thousand mile per charge" battery cars that would make H2 fuel cell cars totally obsolete.
Phil 4:15PM (1/29/2009)
You don't need a fuel cell for hydrogen, just burn it in a conventional internal combustion engine, as demonstrated by BMW with their hyrdogen 7 series. OK, you need a bigger displacement to get a decent amount of power, but that doesn't really matter. There's plenty of room under the hood for a 5 litre V12 burning H2.
I don't think battery swapping will ever take off. The battery is an expensive part that is damaged if abused. What stops people thrashing their battery then just swapping for another? One day you pick up a duff battery and can only travel half the distance. It would be like everyone driving a rental car, they all end up abused.
Good point about 1,000 mile batteries though. When the range reaches that level then battery cars are practical. There is a limit to how far you can drive in one day, so recharging over night is not a problem. Maybe even 500 miles is just enough.
Perhaps Jeremy is just a tall oaf from Chipping Norton.
Chris M 6:46PM (1/31/2009)
Phil, one problem with the BMW Hydrogen 7 is that, even with an expensive 30 gallon liquid H2 dewar tank filling the trunk, it still gets a mere 120 miles per tank. Compressed H2 is even worse - a Prius modified to run on compressed H2 gets a mere 80 miles per tank of H2, even with hybrid efficiency, and that conversion costs $80K due to expensive carbon fiber high pressure tanks. But the real coup-de-grace for H2 ICE is that the low efficiency of IC engines and the high cost of H2 fuel make it more expensive to drive than any petroleum fuels, even in high fuel tax Europe.
Scatter 2:39PM (1/28/2009)
Those salt deposits lie in an exceptionally beautiful part of the world which isn't done justice by the photo above:
http://www.flickr.com/search/show/?q=uyuni
I just hope the (much needed) push towards electric vehicles doesn't wreck the place.
Good old Evo for keeping it state controlled. What Bolivia doesn't need is foreign companies coming in and extracting their resources and revenues (which, almost without exception, they always do).
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mister nomer 3:16PM (1/28/2009)
"Bolivia's leftist president Evo Morales wants a state-dominated lithium industry in order to ensure that the profits benefit the people of his country."
Good luck with that.
According to Berlin-based organization Transparency International,
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781359.html
Bolivia is ranked 105th in the Corruption Perceptions Index. Just as an FYI: The U.S. is ranked 20th and much of western Europe is higher than that (at least on this particular list).
So, I don't think it really matters if they go with "market-based-private-ownership" or "state-managed-state-owned" or what have you, because if they don't have the rule of law or even the perception of the rule of law... then whatever the treaties end up being, they certainly won't be binding.
Which I suppose is good news for us and not so good news for Bolivia, because that means that the rest of the world will figure out a way to bribe, er, negotiate an agreement to get what they want (and do what is necessary to maintain it).
Ugh... = (
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jake 3:56PM (1/28/2009)
I'm not entirely convinced we are running out of lithium that soon.
As mentioned, it can be recycled (though not profitably, but you can still do it, if it comes to that point) unlike petroleum, which is a major difference.
There are also other more expensive sources of lithium. It'll bring battery costs up which lowers demand but we still have a supply for it.
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