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Lithium is cheap because the externalities of the environmental damage it causes is not accounted for in the pricing. It's a highly exploitative resource which has destructive impacts on local bacterial ecosystems, human communities, and water availability.

Some articles, if you are interested:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09626... https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/fac...

It's not even comparable to sodium, which is abundant practically everywhere.



> Lithium is cheap because the externalities of the environmental damage it causes is not accounted for in the pricing.

Like every other raw resource we use.


Let's not flatten it. Different materials have different externalities. And are available in different places with different levels of human rights and environmental protections


Sodium is better than lithium in that respect. But both are MUCH better than hydrocarbons.

The amount you need for driving a car for 3 years is several kg vs tonnes. And you can recycle the battery but you can't recycle the oil you burned.

That's why I'm not particularly harsh on lithium externalities. Let's get the low-hanging fruits first before we focus on nuances.


Lithium and sodium are both easily mined from sea water.


Seawater contains less than 1ppm of lithium (compared to 300-7k ppm in brine). There are zero commercial facilities to produce lithium from sea salt. It's not even a notable byproduct from other seawater-based processing facilities


Now compare to fossil fuels.




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