Ann: Application to Scale up Piloting Plant Stage of HMW Project, page-37

Thanks for posting Tubediasters. I agree with the general sentiment but be very wary taking at face value statements like this ;

"there's about 70 years' worth of lithium until the identified global reserves are themselves depleted" . What academics do is look at the current world reserves which is tracked by the US Geological Survey ( which itself runs a couple of years behind actual commercial discoveries)and then they extrapolate that forward. These sort of estimates often ignore completely or only assume a very basic rate of exploration discovery of new lithium resources . This in itself ignores the effect that big price rises in a commodity do to encouraging that baseline of exploration work to go way upwards as is currently happening now.

It was this sort of silly approach in the petroleum industry that basically from about the 1970's onwards caused "experts" to say the world is going to run out of Oil. Reality is even now, 50 years on there is still oil for another few hundred years, whether the climate activists will let the Earth use the oil is a totally different question but their is plenty of oil there for a long time yet if man chooses to use it.

The point of my critique of that statement is since 1800 we have had over and over again plenty of "Malthusian" experts harping on the world is going to run out of this or that resource from food to oil Every time without fail these experts have been wrong, largely because they never factor in how resource extraction activities often can scale up to price signals. Actually in a nutshell you have right there why capitalism beats socialist systems hands down over and over again because capitalism lets price signals and the allocation of work and effort happen naturally. Socialists systems have either none of that or very diluted price signals , so these societies always tend to run out of everything the society actually wants because no one is directed by prices where to put their energies. It will be the same for Lithium. There will be a shortage now and possibly the next 10 odd years but I bet in 2070 the world will be doing just fine.

Also very hard to square this comment with Elon's oft stated comment the world is full of lithium. Lithium pegmatites are somewhat harder to find than Elon thinks but equally, they are not as rare as something like Gold deposits. In fact there has been a lot of likely lithium deposits that have been discovered and then simply ignored over the years as lithium wasn't worth a lot of money until recently. Greenbushes is a classic example of this. That resource was discovered in the mid to late 1800's but no one had any interest in the lithium but they did have a huge interest in its associated path finder element Tin, so there was a Tin mine originally built there but not until the 1980's did anyone say , hey that lithium there now is probably worth mining. Thats why I wont be that surprised if we find Lithium peg on our nearby area because no one has seriously drilled that area until very recently for lithium because the price signals to do the work simply were not there.