China owning the vast majority of raw lithium is not the world you want to live in. The world absolutely benefits from a greater spread of lithium sources.
It means we don’t have to go to the Congo or through Russia, China, or others anymore. Which is a pretty big political relief because it means that we have a little bit more resource independence.
Maybe even a way we could compete on the global market if we play our cards right.
If they’re smart, they’ll use it to beef up our power grid for the global warming shock.
Unfortunately, I imagine @poopa_mo is right, and this is just going to beef up someone’s bank account. Or rot in a warehouse.
Most Lithium comes from South America and Australia and has for some time. I do not believe that Lithium has ever had the geopolitical issues that other rare earth metals such as cobalt have had.
Yeah, the difference between lithium and oil is that oil is a consumable. If the price of oil goes up, that has an instant effect on energy/transportation costs. If the price of lithium goes up, it’ll only affect the price of new batteries, and anything that’s already in use is unaffected. It’ll slow down investments in new projects, people might delay the purchase of a new car, etc, but it’s a way smaller economic impact.
There’s no good reason to use lithium for utility-scale power storage. We need it for transportation because it has the best power compared to its weight. Utility storage doesn’t care as much about weight, and there are plenty of better options.
Something else we won’t benefit from. Nice. Uh. Go us.
Just imagine the shareholder value.
China owning the vast majority of raw lithium is not the world you want to live in. The world absolutely benefits from a greater spread of lithium sources.
It could lead to more affordable Li-ion batteries.
It means we don’t have to go to the Congo or through Russia, China, or others anymore. Which is a pretty big political relief because it means that we have a little bit more resource independence.
Maybe even a way we could compete on the global market if we play our cards right.
If they’re smart, they’ll use it to beef up our power grid for the global warming shock.
Unfortunately, I imagine @poopa_mo is right, and this is just going to beef up someone’s bank account. Or rot in a warehouse.
Most Lithium comes from South America and Australia and has for some time. I do not believe that Lithium has ever had the geopolitical issues that other rare earth metals such as cobalt have had.
Yeah, the difference between lithium and oil is that oil is a consumable. If the price of oil goes up, that has an instant effect on energy/transportation costs. If the price of lithium goes up, it’ll only affect the price of new batteries, and anything that’s already in use is unaffected. It’ll slow down investments in new projects, people might delay the purchase of a new car, etc, but it’s a way smaller economic impact.
There’s no good reason to use lithium for utility-scale power storage. We need it for transportation because it has the best power compared to its weight. Utility storage doesn’t care as much about weight, and there are plenty of better options.
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They have to pay higher rent, energy prices etc when everybody else raises their prices…
So this means prices will go down, right? Right?
Li-On batteries have drastically decreased their prices over the last 10+ years.
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