Faced with the peak oil and the imperative to arrest global warming, we’re counting on electric or hybrid cars to keep our “happy motoring” way of life rolling. After all, electric cars don’t pollute (if you ignore the coal burnt to generate the electricity) and electrons are relatively cheap. American politicians and consumers alike believe we can still have it all.

Lithium is the miracle metal key to future plans for hybrid and electric vehicles. Where is all that lithium to come from? The world’s current production of lithium — approximately 20,000 tons — is woefully short of what’s needed if electric car production really takes off.

There may be problems with how much lithium the Earth holds and how quickly it can be mined.  The production of hybrid and electric cars could soon tax the world’s production of lithium carbonate. Part of the problem is how economical and easy the mining of lithium will prove to be in the future. Even the most optimistic estimates of lithium reserves assume the price of lithium rising in order to make increased mining cost-effective. But the new high-tech batteries already cost as much as $10,000.

Argentina, Australia and Chile account for more than 50% of the world’s lithium production; Russia also produces significant amounts. Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni salt desert has about 40% of the world’s lithium, so far untapped.

Lithium isn’t the only metal that may prove to be a constraint on our plans to continue business as usual. As André Diederen warns in a post at The Oil Drum: Europe, if we keep following the ruling paradigm of sustained global economic growth we will soon run out of cheap and plentiful metal minerals of most types.

In case of unlimited energy supply, metal minerals extraction would only be limited by the total amount of mineral resources. However, due to the growing scarcity of energy, the extraction of most types of metal minerals will require ever-increasing amounts of energy as the highest grade ores are exploited first.  As the quality of ores fall, rates of extraction will inevitably cease to keep up with demand.

Mining and extraction (concentration) consume huge amounts of energy. The energy required for extraction grows exponentially with lower ore grades, as illustrated below for iron ore and aluminum ore.

The highest ore grades have already been depleted or are already being mined. Because of energy constraints, the largest parts of mineral deposits are out of reach for economically viable exploitation.

Diederen concludes:

On a trajectory of ‘business as usual’, we will have much less than 50 years left of cheap and abundant access to metal minerals. The production rate of metal minerals will start to decline well in advance of the depletion of reserves as it will take exponentially more energy input and metal minerals input to grow or even sustain the current extraction rate of metal minerals. To sustain and increase current production rates, resources have to be extracted at ever more distant locations (including deep mining and ocean floor mining) and at ever lower ore grades which require exponentially more energy to extract. In this sense it could even be stated that metal minerals scarcity aggravates energy scarcity.

It may be that we’re bumping into the second law of thermodynamics.

Peter Pogany explains in an article at The Energy Bulletin:

Some structure is always lost beyond redemption. All technological processes, whether the production of energy or material goods, reduce the ratio of economically accessible (“free”) energy to total energy (“free” plus “latent” energy) enclosed in matter. The consequences of irrevocable degradation (i.e., the transformation of low entropy structures into high entropy ones) remain with us forever.