Fuel the future

The hype—and the usage of that inevitable phrase, “the new oil”—has already begun. The laptops and handheld electronic goods that run off lithium-ion batteries use only minute measures of the metal, yet demand has risen so sharply that the price of lithium carbonate jumped from $2,000 per tonne in 2004 to $5,500 in 2008.

But the real hunger is just beginning. Far larger amounts of recyclable lithium will go into the batteries of clean electric vehicles that car manufacturers are feverishly planning, seduced both by subsidies as well as the chance, for once, to come off as the good guys and save the planet.
Most marketed lithium comes from pools of alkaline brine in Chile and Argentina, extracted through a process that can run for as many as 18 months. One other lithium reserve of significant size is said to lie in Tibet, already a region mired in strife and controversy. More than one-third of the world’s lithium, the biggest prize of all as one Mitsubishi executive told The New York Times recently, is in Bolivia—fiercely statist, unpredictable Bolivia. “If we want to be a force in the next wave of automobiles and the batteries that power them,” he said, “then we must be here.”

If lithium comes to even approximate the value of oil, its erratic distribution seems to invite reprises of the resource curse: more rentier states and rent-seeking politicians, more conflict over resources, more cartelistic moves from the lithium equivalent of Opec. But FMC Lithium and Chemetall, the world’s two largest lithium producers, profess not to worry, particularly about “cartelization”. One executive said, “The resources are controlled by companies, not countries. Companies will always abide by supply and demand,” quite forgetting that, for instance, the oil in Iran was controlled by a company until it was nationalized, in one swift move, by Mohammad Mossadegh in 1951.

But far more than geopolitics, another question seems to animate the lithium community: Is the lithium enough? In 2008, two analysts responded and re-responded to each other’s white papers in an engaging tussle. Keith Evans, a geologist, was confident that the earth would yield enough lithium for many hundreds of years; William Tahil, a research analyst, wrote that lithium could power perhaps a fraction of the world’s electric vehicles for a very limited time.

Tahil’s prediction is alarming, since it would involve a near-seamless transition from peak oil to peak lithium; we would merely be exchanging one short-term energy resource for another. Even when they are most optimistic, proponents of lithium can see only 10-20% of the world’s automobiles running on lithium-ion sources, because of the high costs of producing such batteries. So lithium, as a fount of energy, is neither perennial nor universally adoptable—but it is a viable alternative, to be worked into a larger energy framework.

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