Peak Lithium Won’t Happen Anytime Soon

First it was peak oil—back in the 1970s, no less.  Then it was peak oil again and again.  Now we have moved up a rung and are worrying about peak lithium as a myriad of electric vehicle production and sales forecasts prepare us for a spike in lithium demand.  This worry, however, is just as pointless as the worry about peak oil.

First, it’s not new:  back in 2015 people were worrying that the lithium available on Earth will not be enough to support a booming EV industry sporting 100 megafactories around the world by 2040.  While acknowledged as wild speculation, this scenario was posited as a possible one.

Of course, anything is possible, but what fans of peak whatever theories seem to ignore is the fact that both extraction and production technologies evolve.  This is why reserves of metals and fossil fuels tend to increase over time:  because as extraction technology improves, resources—theoretically extractable at some point in the future—become reserves, which can be extracted with presently available technology.  Just think about the Permian, which recently got a reserve upgrade thanks to improving fracking technology.

The case against peak lithium was recently made very eloquently by energy analyst Michael Lynch in a story for Forbes.  In it, Lynch noted the fact that lithium resource estimates were increasing and also the fact that reserve estimates have been on the rise but—this is the potentially worrying part—slowly.

In fact, Lynch says, there is nothing to worry about.  The reason lithium reserve estimates have not been growing more rapidly is that there is abundant supply of cheaply extractable reserves in the Lithium Triangle, so there is no need to explore for more yet.  Besides, addressing some people’s concern that a lot of the world’s lithium is concentrated in the Triangle, Lynch pointed out that “The concentration of production in the Andes doesn’t represent a lack of global resources, as some fear, but the economically rational decision to exploit the cheapest resource first, turning to other, more difficult (and expensive) resources later.”

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