It will likely have some (small) impact just due to the scale of its use. However, the process is not too different from sea salt production... You're evaporating a brine, usually. And you're displacing fossil fuel use with a material that can be recycled, so instead of constantly mining for fossil fuels, we can just extract the material once.
Additionally, it can be extracted from seawater at a price that isn't insane, most affordably through desalination discharge brine. So in that sense, it could actually improve water usage by helping offset the cost of desalination.
So a huge net positive compared to our current system and with a pathway to eliminate the negative impact entirely.
> And you're displacing fossil fuel use with a material that can be recycled, so instead of constantly mining for fossil fuels, we can just extract the material once.
I was wondering about the recycling aspects of Lithium.
According to Wikipedia, it's not a thing (yet?), because mining lithium is 5x cheaper than recycling. But they're working on it...
It's a thing, but it's done at a small scale. And prices of lithium have started to climb to the point that it is looking attractive.
And there's a simple solution, here: have companies (including foreign, via tariffs) pay for the fully burdened cost of the environmental damage they're inflicting. That'll end virtually all fossil fuel usage and enable recycling and/or exclusively low-impact mining techniques.
The most constrained components elements in lithium ion batteries are not lithium itself (which is very common in the Earth's crust, though tends not to concentrate in easily minable ores) but the heavy metals like Cobalt used in the cathode. These will be the first focus for recycling.
lithium is common but to get it's hard to extract, highest concentration is 0.14%(https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/battery-m...) which means in 1 cubic feet of brine there are 0.0014 cubic feet of lithium. Imagine how much power it takes to dig it out (definitely monster construction machinery ran on fossil fuels etc) and then add extraction process to that. I would be interested to see if there are any sources digging deeper into it.
Interestingly, lithium ion technology is also transforming "monster" mining equipment to run on pure electricity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UH4XgPN65Q
(and this especially helps with underground mining)
But also, the brine is simply pumped. It's liquid.
It's not cheap to refine, but it's not going to "run out", so relevant to the upthread point the calculus on mine-vs-recycle isn't likely to change much.
I think the implied point is that each of the things you list has a long tail economically to the world, sure it's an improvement but the environment cost of each of those developments is a canned kicked down the road, and we are down the road from a few of those developments now, and we don't have a solution.
- whales - there are less whales now.
- coal mining - green house gasses
- oil drilling - oil spills and green house gasses
- natural gas - release of methane gas from LNG fracking
- lithium - who knows yet. but probably green house gasses and pollution from manufacture.
Given the rise of renewable energy - lithium batteries provide an alternative to fossil fuels.
I have no clue how lithium mining + solar panels, etc vs fossil fuels compare environmentally though. But they are at least lowering fossil fuel usage.
