by Anton Polouektov
With peak oil occupying the minds of energy experts and the Gulf oil spill acting as a painful reminder of the dangers posed to the environment by our unquenchable thirst for fossil fuels, a rejuvenated interest in alternative energy is sweeping the nation. Electric and hybrid vehicles are currently the most viable alternative to gas-powered engines, and Lithium-Ion batteries are the most viable means of powering them.
Lithium, the lightweight silver-white alkali metal that stores energy in lithium-ion batteries, has been attracting growing attention from automotive and energy companies over the past several years and the mineral’s meteoric rise to global prominence is seemingly set to continue unabated as a new generation of electric cars begins rolling off the assembly line.
“We believe that the use of electricity as the energy source of choice for vehicles will become dominant over the next 20 to 30 years,” said Dr. Jon Hykawy, who specializes in lithium and alternative energy industries at Byron Capital Markets. “The rationale is simple; GM noted that it takes 25 kWh of electrical energy to move their Volt 100 miles down the highway, while a conventional four cylinder gasoline-powered car might consume 75 kWh of equivalent energy from gasoline to do the same thing. Electrical vehicles are more efficient than internal combustion-based vehicles, and with increasing energy costs, we need to do more with less.”
Dr. Elton Cairns, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UC Berkeley, echoes the call for increased efficiency.“Oil will be used for the foreseeable future as a major source of energy, but we need to rely also on other sources such as wind and solar energy. We can help the energy situation greatly by using it more efficiently in our vehicles and our buildings.”
Electric cars’ efficiency could help wean the American economy from its dependence on foreign oil. “We could certainly see a meaningful fraction of the traffic within urban cores draw its energy from batteries,” maintains Dr. Hykawy. “That would do a great deal to improve the strength of the US dollar, increase US energy security, stimulate the US economy and increase the quality of life in cities by both cleaning the air and reducing noise levels. By relying on batteries for transport instead of oil, the US can curtail its current $300 billion annual habit for foreign oil.”
An additional benefit of using electric and hybrid vehicles could be their lessened environmental impact – while it is true that lithium-ion batteries have a limited lifespan, experts generally agree that proper recycling techniques can help minimize their pollution footprint, resulting in a more environmentally-friendly transportation network and increased efficiency of resource allocation. “Lithium is not consumed, it simply carries the energy between the anode and cathode in a lithium-ion battery,” says lithium energy expert R. Keith Evans. “There is a strong possibility that much of the lithium will be recycled after the battery reaches the end of its first life, thus reducing the demand for virgin lithium.”
“I expect that most lithium batteries will be recycled at minimal environmental impact,” said Dr. Cairns. “There isn’t a technology out there that has no ecological footprint, no matter what anyone wishes to say.” Dr. Hykway agrees that lithium products will have a very minimal affect on waste. “Lithium production impacts the ecology on remote and fragile dry salt lakes in South America. The batteries may have to be recycled, although my belief is that batteries with only half their storage capacity may find a use in the home, storing cheap electricity purchased at night and allow the energy to be used during expensive peak periods, saving the owner money and balancing load for the local utility. Lithium battery disposal may be the least of our worries.”
Not everyone is convinced that integrating lithium-ion batteries as the primary energy capacitor is a positive move however. Critics of Lithium-based energy solutions argue that although Lithium is one of the most common metals in the Earth’s crust, the availability of easily accessible reserves of the mineral may be comparatively limited – in his damning report entitled “The Trouble with Lithium,” William Tahil, Research Director at Meridian International Research, asserts that readily available reserves of Lithium are not nearly abundant enough to sustain a drastic increase in demand.
“If we say in very round figures that global production of lithium carbonate is now 100,000 tons per year, that is realistically sufficient, if it was available, to produce 2 to 3 million GM Volt batteries.” said Tahil, “Since all of that lithium carbonate output is already spoken for, production needs to be doubled just to produce 2 to 3 million GM Volt-type Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles per year, compared to global car production of 50 to 60 million, while existing demand from electronic and portable devices is growing at 25% CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate). I note the new Bombardier C Series aircraft which is seen as a major threat to the Boeing 737 and A320 is the first commercial aircraft to use an aluminium-lithium fuselage. Lithium is also planned to be used in future fusion reactors.” He concluded that “the range of future demands for lithium is unsustainable.”
Tahil also argues that the United States’ Lithium reserves are plagued by too many issues to provide a real guarantee of long-term viability and continued expansion. “There are issues with the lithium deposits in the US,” said Tahil. “Clayton Lake is small and in decline. North Carolina has been shut down. There are major difficulties with the Salton Sea and Smackover Brine resources, particularly water availability. At least the projection from Simbol Mining of 16,000 tons per year of LI2CO3 is not an exaggeration. But that is only enough for 300,000 to 500,000 GM Volt-type vehicles per annum.”
Furthermore, Tahil maintains that due to limited availability of inexpensive brine lithium, the mineral’s extraction will almost certainly have to shift to other sources, such as spodumene – a mineral from which lithium can be extracted by fusing it with acid – to fuel the growing demand for the metal. Because extracting lithium from spodumene is much more costly than mining it from brines, prices are set to rise sharply and the impact on Lithium-dependant ventures may be severe.
Despite the critics’ grim predictions, lithium’s proponents remain cautiously optimistic – “There is not, nor should there ever be, a lithium shortage, said Dr. Hykawy. “Lithium is one of the most abundant elements in the Earth’s crust. Inexpensive lithium is a different story, but batteries use so little lithium it may not matter.At present price points, the battery in the upcoming Nissan Leaf, their new all-electric car, will use about $100 of raw lithium. This is in a battery that costs roughly $18,000 to make, today. Even if lithium were to quadruple in price, driving it to levels that have never even been approached historically, the lithium in a Leaf would amount to $400.”
“Brines are a generally cheaper resource than spodumene pegmatites. “This is not true in all cases and in China virtually all Lithium production is spodumene-based,” said Evans. “I believe that when the major demand actually develops we will need a whole variety of sources and some will be more expensive than others. However, this is not an issue as in a lithium-ion battery wherein the cost of lithium in the unit is between 1 & 3% of the total cost.”
Another problem pointed out by Lithium’s opponents is that serial production of Li-ion batteries requires a great deal of rare elements other than Lithium, such as lanthanum and cobalt. The availability of these elements may be limited and future Lithium-Ion battery production may suffer from a crippling bottleneck as a result.
Experts tend to agree that Lithium-Ion batteries’ heavy reliance on these rare elements may become problematic in the long term, but point to ongoing efforts to replace rare elements used to manufacture batteries with more common ones. “The nickel metal hydride batteries used in the current Toyota Prius, for example, use large amounts of the rare earth element lanthanum,” said Dr. Hykawy. “And the standard lithium battery of today, in your cell phone or laptop computer, uses cobalt along with its lithium. But the automotive companies have been developing better and cheaper lithium batteries that use more common materials. Some of these combine lithium and manganese, or lithium and iron, or the best of the bunch, lithium and vanadium. All of these alternative chemistries use materials that are more common than lanthanum or cobalt, safer and less expensive.”
Dr. Cairns is equally optimistic – “Heavy dependence on cobalt could be a problem, but this is an active research topic, and I expect that it will be solved in the next few years.”
Ultimately, the strongest argument in favor of Lithium may be that it is one of the very few truly viable alternative energy solutions available to us today, even though it would not completely alleviate global dependence on oil and natural gas. “The only other electrical energy storage technology that makes sense to us is the use of ultracapacitors, a solid state electricity storage device made using ceramics,” said Dr. Hykawy. “None of this eliminates our dependence on oil and gas. The best way to generate electricity for baseload demand in electric cars, and believe me we have given due consideration to geothermal, solar and wind, is nuclear energy. But we need safe and cheap nuclear power, such as what could be provided by pebble bed modular reactors.”
Dr. Hykawy wonders whether, since the US has allowed China and other nations to take the lead in this area, if the US should develop a plan to provide the technology and infrastructure behind a gradual switch to electric vehicles. “The main alternatives to oil are solar and wind,” said Dr. Cairns, “Biofuels may be developed to the point that they could help in a minor way. Better batteries can help us to use the electricity generated by solar and wind in our transportation system, leaving oil for heating and aircraft.”
In the end, a switch from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries may be the first step towards finding a real alternative to fossil fuels, but before it is taken, some research still needs to be conducted to determine whether an increase in lithium-ion battery production is sustainable in the long term.
