As car manufacturers shift away from oil and towards electricity to power our future vehicles, a new race is on. The target this time: lithium, basis for the lithium-ion batteries to be found in everything from electric vehicles, to mobile phones, cellphones, laptops, anti-depressives etc.  The place: Chile (for now), Bolivia (next) … The salt lakes near Uyuni in Bolivia are believed to contain an estimated 28 millions tons of lithium, or 90% of the world’s reserve according to experts. The car industry currently runs on 16.000 tons per year. As the production and demand of electric cars ramp up, the demand for lithium is expected to be anywhere between 54.000 and 500.000 tons per year. At such rates, estimates of shortages starting from as early as 2015 are no exception as automobile, pharma, ICT and many other industries will be fishing in the same pond for the same type of fish.

Although lithium is no fuel (it is not consumed through usage) and lithium-ion batteries ‘can be recycled’ (note: they do contain substances harmful to the environment in case they should end up in landfills and pollute water reserves) other worries arise concerning the socio-economic impact of lithium mining activities in the aforementioned countries.

On a more fundamental level – a more philosophical one if you wish – nature and history teach us that monoculture is generally a bad idea (cf. resilience). So whether we like it or not, we need to (re)learn to think in terms of a mix, of diversity once again.

Image courtesy of PeriodicTable.com

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1. from trash to cash
2. a plastics future
3. 2057: the world

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 20:38 and is filed under business, future, science, society, sustainability, technology, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.