The Caller from Canada

My new car has Sirius satellite radio which comes with around 140 channels of niche channels, including one channel called POTUS which is mostly politics talk.

There's a show on POTUS called "Standup with Pete Dominick", where a former comedian talks politics with random callers from all over. When I was driving back to SF from Google on Thursday around 10 pm he couldn't fill his hour-long slot, so he offered any caller 30 seconds to talk about whatever they wanted to say. (Note that there is a 7-second delay to the show to bleep out coarse language.)

One of the callers was from Canada and his advice for Americans was to have more confidence in investing in the future of their nation. Dominick put him on the spot, and asked what specifically Americans should invest in. The caller fumbled a little bit - "there's really a bunch of stuff" - and before his time was up, the only example he could come up with was "running shoes".

Running shoes are clearly not the prime example of what America needs to invest in[*], but as the clock hit 10 pm, I found myself turning off the radio and thinking about what the right answer should be.

It's clear that the US needs better infrastructure - fix the roads, improve road safety, and build faster, better trains. We need more solar panels on roofs so we can burn less coal, and more wind farms that feed into the grid. We need better education and better educators so that kids no longer drop out of high school, but prepares them for the jobs of the century ahead. Better and cheaper health care, better medical records, the list of big-ticket items goes on and on ...

One problem is that the US is a country that's in love with the quick fix, and the things we need to do are long-term investments that need years and decades. And that requires confidence. The caller from Canada, while wrong on the running shoes, was right.

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[*] To the caller's credit, he got cut off before he could launch into an argument. Maybe he was going to propose a scheme to give everyone running shoes to decrease obesity and thus long-term health care costs.

President Obama on Comprehensive Immigration Reform

"Of course, the tensions around immigration are not new. On the one hand, we’ve always defined ourselves as a nation of immigrants -- a nation that welcomes those willing to embrace America’s precepts. Indeed, it is this constant flow of immigrants that helped to make America what it is. The scientific breakthroughs of Albert Einstein, the inventions of Nikola Tesla, the great ventures of Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel and Sergey Brin’s Google, Inc. -– all this was possible because of immigrants.

[...]

So this steady stream of hardworking and talented people has made America the engine of the global economy and a beacon of hope around the world. And it’s allowed us to adapt and thrive in the face of technological and societal change. To this day, America reaps incredible economic rewards because we remain a magnet for the best and brightest from across the globe. Folks travel here in the hopes of being a part of a culture of entrepreneurship and ingenuity, and by doing so they strengthen and enrich that culture. Immigration also means we have a younger workforce -– and a faster-growing economy -- than many of our competitors. And in an increasingly interconnected world, the diversity of our country is a powerful advantage in global competition."

-- from the Remarks by the President on Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Is there enough Lithium on earth to make all cars run on batteries?

I've now heard this from several people: "While electric cars like the Tesla are a great idea, there's not enough lithium on earth to replace all gasoline driven cars with electric ones."

Not Quite Enough
I spent some time investigating this and found this paper: "The Trouble with Lithium". It argues that while there is enough lithium in the earth's crust to make all cars run on lithium ion batteries, not enough of it is extractable:

• The world automotive fleet is 1 billion vehicles worldwide.
• A battery electric vehicle needs at least a 30 kWh battery to be usable (30 kWh will go for 120 miles or around 190 kilometers).
• A lithium-ion battery requires between 1.4 and 1.5kg of lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) per kWh of capacity. That's between 42 or 45 kg of lithium carbonate per car.
• To equip all cars in the world with lithium batteries, we will need (conservatively) 42 billion kg of lithium carbonate. That's 42 megatons ("MT") of Li2CO3.
• The paper estimates the global reserve base - the total amount of known lithium in the earth's crust - of lithium carbonate to be 58 MT, which would cover it. 
• Of these 58 MT of Li2CO3, we currently know how to extract about 27 MT. That's not enough to turn all cars into all-electric vehicles.

Afghanistan

However, keep in mind that all these numbers stem from a time before the discovery of vast mineral riches in Afghanistan. But I couldn't dig up numbers about how much lithium was discovered. This USGS report from 2007 lists out detailed megaton estimates for most metals that were discovered, but provides no estimate for lithium.

Geopolitics

Leaving aside Afghanistan, South American countries hold about 80% of the world's lithium reserve base. If the world was to switch from oil to lithium-ion batteries, it's possible that South America could turn into the next Middle East. Bolivia, the country with the most reserves, is one of the poorest and least developed countries in South America, and not a close ally of the US. Since China has plenty of lithium deposits in Tibet, "the USA would again become dependent on external sources of supply of a strategic mineral while China would have a certain degree of self sufficiency."

Alternatives

Lithium ion batteries are light and have high energy densities. But they're not the only alternative. For example, zinc-air batteries are relatively light but hard to recharge. You need 39 MT of zinc to equip the world's cars with a 30 kWh battery. Contrast those 39 MT with the global reserve base of zinc, which clocks in at 1.4 BT - there's plenty of to go around. However, zinc-air batteries are a little harder than lithium-ion batteries to recharge, and only allow for 500 recharges. Yet they're much cheaper to manufacture, which may be their ultimate reason to succeed.

Thus, while we may not be able to mine enough lithium to make all cars run on lithium-ion batteries, it's entirely conceivable to replace all the world's gasoline-guzzling cars with vehicles powered by batteries of some kind.