Lithium’s Striking Connection To Modern Tech

Saturday, 27 May 2023, 3:18 pm
Article: Hugh Grant

Elements are vital to the functioning of countless modern technologies. It’s amazing what has been made to work with the use of such specific materials. Lithium represents one of the most prominent and important in recent years. This silver to white material is highly reactive, hard to store, and extremely useful. Historically lithium has seen a lot of use in industry. It is great for greases and glass, it has even been used for medication. Yet the modern use of lithium is undeniably in tech.

First and foremost lithium sees its use in batteries. Lithium ion batteries are the most important and most effective battery currently on the market. These batteries provide more constant voltage, hold more energy, and discharge slower. Yet these batteries also need battery management and cooling/heating systems to be fully effective. This establishes lithium batteries as effective for a specific niche.

In recent years, this niche has been characterized by smart devices. The phones and tablets of today are powered by lithium batteries. Even electric tools are powered by lithium ion batteries in many cases. Yet there are some less obvious uses that are becoming increasingly more popular. To start there are energy storage systems, effectively storing energy is more important now than ever. By far the most important use of lithium ion batteries though is going to be in electric cars.

Electric cars use eight kilograms of lithium each. This is a sizable amount, but here are some statistics to put it into perspective. There are currently 22 million tons of usable lithium reserves worldwide. This means there is just enough lithium to produce 2.5 billion batteries. Clearly, that’s a lot of batteries. Yet the amount of batteries to produce the electric cars needed to hit net zero car emissions is two billion. Looking at it from that perspective, 2.5 billion batteries suddenly isn’t so much.

This is the challenge of lithium and its connection to modern technology- it’s limited. There is only so much lithium on the planet and once it's gone, it isn’t coming back. Now this isn’t to say that lithium isn’t recyclable. Batteries, even when fully dead, can still have 80% of the remaining lithium retrieved. This is predicted to account for 6% of the total lithium supply by 2030. Also, in terms of non batteries lithium is actually highly retrievable.

Most notably in the science industry lithium is highly reusable. There are a lot of small processes that use lithium in science. Processes like ion exchanges, solvent extractions, and membrane separations. These processes are extremely important and luckily extremely efficient. For membrane separation the lithium used can almost be 100% retrieved, with a rate of well over 99%. And even for the less efficient processes like ion exchanges, the rates range from 80-99.9%.

So while lithium is certainly limited, it’s not at an immediate risk of running out. Regardless, lithium has steadily been rising in both price and demand. By 2030 lithium demand is predicted to increase 22 times over. This material is suddenly becoming one of the most valuable on the planet. Interestingly the current market around lithium is heavily skewed. Two countries, Chile and Australia, together account for 66% of the supply chain. Chile having one of the biggest reserves and Australia being one of the biggest producers.

As demand rises this will be great for these two nations. Yet for nations like the U.S, who control under 4% of the supply chain, it could be a problem. Any country that has a need for modern tech will need to have a steady supply of lithium. What’s left to see now is how the market changes as the demand increases. Electric cars are driving lithium usage through the roof. How the world will react to that will simply have to be seen.

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