Lithium-ion cells have been slowly, steadily improving by a few percent a year for a long time now. A few percent is not a lot, but if these incremental improvements keep happening then that adds up to some pretty good progress. Cost is also decreasing quite rapidly as economies of scale continue to ramp up.
It's not as flashy as some magical new tech that comes along and doubles battery capacities overnight, but on the flip side li-ion is already good enough for most applications. We'll need some pretty big improvements before we can have electric passenger jets, but other than that we're already in pretty good shape.
Heck, I'd say I see an article about new battery developments multiple times a year.
I wonder if the delay has as much or more to do with economics than actual research and development. It might not be in the best interest of a lot of players, whether that's battery manufacturers, or device manufacturers, to produce something that has improved longevity if that means fewer sales due to batteries wearing out.
Its economics in the manor that its non-trivial and time consuming to produce a physical good. A existing factory can take 6+ months to retool, especially if you don't want to interrupt its existing output much.
Also a bunch of the developments don't pan out for various reasons, like not being able to get the yield high enough to be worth while, requires large amounts of unobtainium, have very restrictive operating requirements not mentioned in press release (such as a 140F auto-ignition temperature), etc.
The comment about protecting commercial interests isn't wrong, but there is indeed a threshold coming where that won't be a valid reason to hold the technology back.
Sodium ion might be a good option in the future. Energy density will probably never be as good as lithium ion, but cost is significantly lower, and it has the great advantage of being similar enough to lithium ion that it can be built with only small modifications to existing lithium ion manufacturing equipment.
Lithium is pretty darn awesome battery tech, honestly! It is continuously improving faster than nearly anything else in the energy industry. Solar is obviously getting cheaper faster, and wind is getting cheaper with bigger turbines, but not much else changes in energy it seems.
Chains of hydrocarbons are a better storage form for compactness, but creating that chain and deconstructing that chain are hugely inefficient processes. We've only used them up until now because the planet had saved a huge amount of its previous solar energy in that form.
There are some interesting lithium flow batteries coming out that decouple the power of the battery from the amount of storage, so that should be fairly interesting to see.
Other flow batteries will also be quite interesting for stationary uses.
We'll need lots and lots of storage for both stationary and mobile applications. For mobile applications, I can't see anything beating lithium ion without a major breakthrough. That type of breakthrough is not what those seeming breakthroughs "every 5 years" are; those are university press releases. It's rare that the real breakthrough will get the press, because the disconnect between what's happening in the field and what's actually important is enormous (this goes for most forms of science, not just energy).
If you take the last 10-15 years of incremental improvements in storage density and decreases in price, it sort of looks like a whole different generation of batteries.
Coupled with more efficient electronics and what is cheap hardware today would have been difficult/impossible to even build in 2002.
My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress?
I think it comes in slow increments and noticing a 5% year on year increase in battery life is lost in the noise of devices that can consume half or double the amount of energy.
As for how easy it is to lose the battery gains in noise. Many stock cell phones can have their battery life extended by half again by removing all the vendor bloatware.
> My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress?
Why do you think your cell phone consumes more power now? I remember my iPhone 3G getting really physically hot while web browsing.
We measure battery tech progress in energy density, not how long your device will last (since a ton of other tech goes into your device using less power, like transistor shrinking for example. Or a javascript jit).
Well, ones mans history is another mens present.
Returned from climbing to find that my android phone in the locker was hot like a brick from the furnace, every little bit of energy spend communicating through the em-cage that is the locker with the gyms- wifi-spot - for a upgrade.
Also most prog-tech goes into not doing anything at all, if we can not avoid it. Send it to the server, sleep over it, reuse allready constructed objects of the same type- there is a whole world dancing to this tune.
No, not like oil/gas. World production of lithium is about a hundred tons per day, says Wikipedia, and that's roughly the same as Purto Rico's production of oil.
Finding another hundred tons is a 100% increase in one case and about 0.0% in the other, because the other case has already gone through a lot of scaling-up.
tl;dr: its hard because lithium cells are complex materials mixed at a very fine scale (coatings and doping). It has to be chemically separated; smelting won't do it.
There are so many discarded batteries from old electronic devices. Even chemical separation must be more effective than digging it out of the earth, right?
You'd probably assume liability for all of the other stuff that's around that thin lithium lining.
It must be cost, because I can't think of any other reason that we don't have micro-machine dis-assemblers for slowly picking apart our garbage in to neatly binned resources.
The headline is a misquote. The actual quote, from Musk in the article, is "In order to produce half a million cars a year…we would basically need to absorb the entire world’s lithium-ion production."
That is very different that the entire world's lithium production.
Which is just another variation of something he's said since he announced the Gigafactory - "We'll produce more than the entire world's capacity of batteries."
It's fascinating to read some of the other related articles on the Internet. There's a lot investment analysis going into whether the EV market will cause a "Peak Lithium" like "Peak Oil".
It could happen, however given how Tesla has already made moves to create a giga-factory to avoid "Peak Battery" pricing they likely already have a supply solution in mind.
People are trying to talk up existing investments somewhere in the lithium chain, or trying to get investments for somewhere in that chain; or if you like tinfoil hats, fossil fuel interests are trying to inject uncertainty into the growth of electric cars.
I think the last possibility is probably silly because available Lithium resources will likely behave similarly to other extracted commodities such as oil - with the difference that you can likely recycle lithium out of expended batteries.
Indeed; at one point iPod production was consuming over half the world's flash memory. What happened? They built more factories. Prices of flash continued to drop aka "a functioning market".
Lithium doesn't weigh much of anything (even compared to oil), so a ton of Lithium is a LOT of lithium. Since as a commodity it's never traded in metallic form (too hazardous and energy-intensive to get it there, and not much market for straight metal, even as an input to battery production). It tends to be traded as carbonate, so a ton of lithium carbonate still has a very small amount of lithium in it.
The article completely misses the fact that lithium is not the most important metal in a lithium-ion battery. More pounds of cobalt are required than are of lithium (remember, lithium weighs almost nothing).
Lithium traditionally comes from briny lakes and salt deserts like those in Chile, along with other valuable commodities like Iodine and Nitrate.
Lithium occurs throughout the US in ores like Lepidolite, but it's never been considered cost-effective to extract it. I've found a way.
It's worth pointing out that "cost-effective" in a competitive market is actually a pretty high bar. For context, lithium can be reliably extracted from seawater, with more available than humans could dream of using. To do so costs about $30/lb, which certainly isn't breaking the bank if you're using it for a car battery.
Trouble is, the market price for lithium is closer to $5/lb, so good luck selling any.
(Prices in this post are examples, and from memory)
So six times the price is not going to break the bank?
Sure, aganst ten times the value of other msterials per weight of battery, it's not a bank breaker, but what is that price compared to the profit margin? If the margin on a $100 cell is $15, and the value of lithium in the cell is $5, you've broken the bank by costing the entire margin and then some.
So right now lithium is at $5/lb. Let's say you have an incredible breakthrough and reduce it to $1/lb. The cost of that battery now becomes $96 with the same profit margin. I don't think that really falls into the category of "changing the world", at least in the sense of it revolutionizing the battery industry.
I'm not real worried about resource availability limiting production of batteries, but the lead comparison doesn't seem to provide much information about how much lithium can be produced over short to medium terms.
I know next to nothing about geology, but a little browsing suggests that it is easy to find galena and that it is a much more productive ore than the typical lithium ores.
I am really only approaching this as an investor so take this in that context.
My point was, it's not really a question of how much can be produced, but at what price you can produce it. Right now the market is paying ~6,000$ per tonne which has been fairly steady if slowly growing over time. With battery's making up about ~1/3 of the market. At say ~12,000$ per tonne production could double in well under 5 years.
So, as long as Tesla is happy to pay 12k/tonne they can get more or less as much lithium as they could ever want. More importantly the price need not spike anywhere near that much as long as demand is predictable. In 5 years the price for most commodities is often more or less a function of the delta between expected demand and actual demand.
If you can get into production at say 4k/ tonne it's no question the market is growing so at the price is unlikely to crash any time soon. At ~6k/tonne cost cutting is going to be really important fairly quickly, but it's a reasonable investment. At 7+k/tonne it's a huge risk which is only worth it IMO if you can line up a long term contract at a fixed and profitable price or if you can tightly control costs and only ramp up in case demand spikes (ex: your mining something else, but you could also exact lithium from your tailing).
Overall abundance of an element in the earth's crust doesn't mean as much as you'd think -- for example the element scandium is even more common than lead in the crust (20 ppm) and is a dream metal both in bulk and as a strengthening additive to aluminum, but due to a lack of readily extractable ores very little of it is produced a year. Lead is only as common and cheap as it is because it forms a variety of easy to get at ores.
Good luck! (Genuine) Hope it makes it to reality and scales well. If lithium can be generated at scale in the US, the cost of electric cars domestically would drop like a rock, while keeping the money in the country. For the US, the benefits would be immense. That would be so great.
(Not that trading abroad is a bad thing, but we need all the "Made in America" we can get these days, where everything is Made in China.)
Assuming 50 kg of lithium carbonate per car (most sources I can find are somewhere in the 500-700g/kWh for lithium carbonate), and a price of $5/kg, you're looking at $250 in lithium per car. Even if you take the high end estimates I found (1.3kg LCE/kWh and $6/kg for LCE), you're still well under $1,000 in lithium costs.
I'm sure a reduction in lithium costs would be welcomed by everyone involved, but it certainly wouldn't cause price to plummet.
Hmm. Nice work doing the math out. My statement was evidently erroneous. Which component makes the battery so expensive, then? Do you know? I am not really familiar with its make-up past the lithium.
One thing to consider, though, is that lithium coming from Chile is going to have a significant mark-up owing to transportation and tariff costs. Do your numbers take that into account, or were you looking at the raw material value?
> Lithium occurs throughout the US in ores like Lepidolite, but it's never been considered cost-effective to extract it. I've found a way.
That's an unusual claim. Lithium is actively being extracted by Albemarle in the US, in Nevada. They essentially have a monopoly on US lithium production via the Silver Peak mine. About 3.4% of the world's Lithium production comes out of that one mine. They're likely going to be able to expand their US production significantly without requiring any big breakthroughs.
To be more accurate, there's not a very small amount of lithium in Lithium Carbonate, but about 1 part Lithium to 5 parts carbonate, so in a tonne of Li2CO3 there's about 170Kg Lithium
I'm a little perplexed by you just dropping the statement: "I've found a way." It seems to me that you should either discuss your findings and intentions, or not mention it until you want a public discussion of it.
I'm surely not alone in a desire to escape the life of sitting behind a desk, and would love to help such a project, in particular to get in early at the prospecting stage. But it is hard to tell from a generic statement like that if you are really working towards something or not.
To make an implied reference explicit: "[Fermat's] famous Last Theorem was first discovered by his son in the margin in his father's copy of an edition of Diophantus, and included the statement that the margin was too small to include the proof."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Fermat
I don't have wsj access to read the article, but for those looking for some help in doing the math Danielle Fong has an interesting collection of notes on calculating lithium ion storage growth (page 19) : http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/refs/DanielleFong-Growth...
79 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadIt's just they don't want to mine it until the price is much higher.
Kind of like oil vs gas prices.
But I am curious to see what the next level beyond lithium is for compact power storage. Lithium can't be the end of the line.
You would have thought it would be a priority for Musk to research next-gen batteries in a really serious way.
It's not as flashy as some magical new tech that comes along and doubles battery capacities overnight, but on the flip side li-ion is already good enough for most applications. We'll need some pretty big improvements before we can have electric passenger jets, but other than that we're already in pretty good shape.
I wonder if the delay has as much or more to do with economics than actual research and development. It might not be in the best interest of a lot of players, whether that's battery manufacturers, or device manufacturers, to produce something that has improved longevity if that means fewer sales due to batteries wearing out.
I wish I could live in scientist land XD
Also a bunch of the developments don't pan out for various reasons, like not being able to get the yield high enough to be worth while, requires large amounts of unobtainium, have very restrictive operating requirements not mentioned in press release (such as a 140F auto-ignition temperature), etc.
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/130380-future-batteries-comi...
The comment about protecting commercial interests isn't wrong, but there is indeed a threshold coming where that won't be a valid reason to hold the technology back.
http://www.amjtj.com/en/projekty/vysokokapacitni-li-akumulat...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/a-firs...
Chains of hydrocarbons are a better storage form for compactness, but creating that chain and deconstructing that chain are hugely inefficient processes. We've only used them up until now because the planet had saved a huge amount of its previous solar energy in that form.
There are some interesting lithium flow batteries coming out that decouple the power of the battery from the amount of storage, so that should be fairly interesting to see.
Other flow batteries will also be quite interesting for stationary uses.
We'll need lots and lots of storage for both stationary and mobile applications. For mobile applications, I can't see anything beating lithium ion without a major breakthrough. That type of breakthrough is not what those seeming breakthroughs "every 5 years" are; those are university press releases. It's rare that the real breakthrough will get the press, because the disconnect between what's happening in the field and what's actually important is enormous (this goes for most forms of science, not just energy).
Coupled with more efficient electronics and what is cheap hardware today would have been difficult/impossible to even build in 2002.
My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress?
I think it comes in slow increments and noticing a 5% year on year increase in battery life is lost in the noise of devices that can consume half or double the amount of energy.
As for how easy it is to lose the battery gains in noise. Many stock cell phones can have their battery life extended by half again by removing all the vendor bloatware.
Why do you think your cell phone consumes more power now? I remember my iPhone 3G getting really physically hot while web browsing.
We measure battery tech progress in energy density, not how long your device will last (since a ton of other tech goes into your device using less power, like transistor shrinking for example. Or a javascript jit).
Good question.
The ratings I read before I buy them. At the time of purchase I knew that exact mAh it consumed and compared to previous phones.
I blame the 7 inch screen, 3 different antennas and 3 extra processors that my older phone didn't have.
EDIT - Grammar and wording.
Also most prog-tech goes into not doing anything at all, if we can not avoid it. Send it to the server, sleep over it, reuse allready constructed objects of the same type- there is a whole world dancing to this tune.
https://youtu.be/sTIH6ncIXYc?t=1563
Finding another hundred tons is a 100% increase in one case and about 0.0% in the other, because the other case has already gone through a lot of scaling-up.
Like oil and gas in the sense that if prices are low it stays in the ground.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214993714...
tl;dr: its hard because lithium cells are complex materials mixed at a very fine scale (coatings and doping). It has to be chemically separated; smelting won't do it.
It must be cost, because I can't think of any other reason that we don't have micro-machine dis-assemblers for slowly picking apart our garbage in to neatly binned resources.
That is very different that the entire world's lithium production.
It could happen, however given how Tesla has already made moves to create a giga-factory to avoid "Peak Battery" pricing they likely already have a supply solution in mind.
So a pointless hype bubble?
As long as there's demand and money to back up that demand, we'll find a way to make more of whatever you want.
Lots and lots and lots of companies end up at some point representing 50% of all sales, products, or activity in their market.
Hell, even Starbucks was opening coffee shops so fast they were targeting owning half of all coffee shops on the planet.
If he said he needed to quadruple the world output, I might furrow a brow. If he said he needed 8 times the world supply, I'd think he was nuts.
Double? That's just a really big growth market.
I think the last possibility is probably silly because available Lithium resources will likely behave similarly to other extracted commodities such as oil - with the difference that you can likely recycle lithium out of expended batteries.
The article completely misses the fact that lithium is not the most important metal in a lithium-ion battery. More pounds of cobalt are required than are of lithium (remember, lithium weighs almost nothing).
Lithium traditionally comes from briny lakes and salt deserts like those in Chile, along with other valuable commodities like Iodine and Nitrate.
Lithium occurs throughout the US in ores like Lepidolite, but it's never been considered cost-effective to extract it. I've found a way.
Need help?
wow. If you're not bullshitting, and your method is scalable,reliable,and cost-effective congratulations on changing the world.
Trouble is, the market price for lithium is closer to $5/lb, so good luck selling any.
(Prices in this post are examples, and from memory)
Sure, aganst ten times the value of other msterials per weight of battery, it's not a bank breaker, but what is that price compared to the profit margin? If the margin on a $100 cell is $15, and the value of lithium in the cell is $5, you've broken the bank by costing the entire margin and then some.
There was also an episode of the Discovery documentary Forgotten Planet which covers it
Current production of lithium is low because demand for lithium is low. Lithium @ 17 ppm is actually more common than Lead @ 10ppm in the earths crust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
PS: 37,000 tonns of Lithium are produced in 2012 vs 5,200,000 of lead.
However, even when adjusting for heaver Lead atoms we produce far more Lead.
I know next to nothing about geology, but a little browsing suggests that it is easy to find galena and that it is a much more productive ore than the typical lithium ores.
My point was, it's not really a question of how much can be produced, but at what price you can produce it. Right now the market is paying ~6,000$ per tonne which has been fairly steady if slowly growing over time. With battery's making up about ~1/3 of the market. At say ~12,000$ per tonne production could double in well under 5 years.
So, as long as Tesla is happy to pay 12k/tonne they can get more or less as much lithium as they could ever want. More importantly the price need not spike anywhere near that much as long as demand is predictable. In 5 years the price for most commodities is often more or less a function of the delta between expected demand and actual demand.
If you can get into production at say 4k/ tonne it's no question the market is growing so at the price is unlikely to crash any time soon. At ~6k/tonne cost cutting is going to be really important fairly quickly, but it's a reasonable investment. At 7+k/tonne it's a huge risk which is only worth it IMO if you can line up a long term contract at a fixed and profitable price or if you can tightly control costs and only ramp up in case demand spikes (ex: your mining something else, but you could also exact lithium from your tailing).
So how you doin'?
Good luck! (Genuine) Hope it makes it to reality and scales well. If lithium can be generated at scale in the US, the cost of electric cars domestically would drop like a rock, while keeping the money in the country. For the US, the benefits would be immense. That would be so great.
(Not that trading abroad is a bad thing, but we need all the "Made in America" we can get these days, where everything is Made in China.)
I'm sure a reduction in lithium costs would be welcomed by everyone involved, but it certainly wouldn't cause price to plummet.
One thing to consider, though, is that lithium coming from Chile is going to have a significant mark-up owing to transportation and tariff costs. Do your numbers take that into account, or were you looking at the raw material value?
That's an unusual claim. Lithium is actively being extracted by Albemarle in the US, in Nevada. They essentially have a monopoly on US lithium production via the Silver Peak mine. About 3.4% of the world's Lithium production comes out of that one mine. They're likely going to be able to expand their US production significantly without requiring any big breakthroughs.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/29/lithium-tesla-mine-nevada/
Further, Tesla has already agreed to purchase lithium supply from another Nevada mining project underway:
http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/tesla-lithium-gigafactory-neva...
As I said, Lithium is extracted from briny lakes and salt deserts, which is what both of those US-based mines you provided links to are going after.
Nobody's going after ore for their Lithium. Almost nobody, anyway.
I'm surely not alone in a desire to escape the life of sitting behind a desk, and would love to help such a project, in particular to get in early at the prospecting stage. But it is hard to tell from a generic statement like that if you are really working towards something or not.
It's a little like being a 17th century French lawyer and writing an allusion to a proof in the margins of a book.
Yes, but then you should also say something about the relative availability of lithium and cobalt.
stop trying to make “fetch” happen
Well the next thing you know Elan's a billionaire.
The kinfolk said "hey move away from there!"
They said Californi' is the place you oughta be
So he loaded up the truck and he moved to Beverly
Gasoline itself was once seen as a useless byproduct of kerosene production.
(found via the energy storage section in http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ )
I'm just worried costs will rise so much, the 35k for the Tesla model 3 will rise as well.
And if it reached a quadruple it would become cost effective to extract it from the ocean?