Mainly in comparison to the distribution of oil which I understand is a lot more established. Will there come a point whereby batteries can’t be economically produced?
Do we have any idea where these minerals are likely to be?
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We know where they are – they’re fairly widespread in terms of reserves ([source](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/rare-earth-elements-where-in-the-world-are-they/)), but there’s significant disparity in terms of actual mining, refining and production. A big reason production diverges from reserves is each country’s willingness/ability to withstand the environmental impacts of mining and production. But the reserves are still there, even if they’re not currently being mined.
Hard to know if and when we’ll reach a point where it’s not economically feasible to mine REE, but we’re nowhere near that threshold now and extraction and refining tech will improve over time, likely reducing both cost and environmental impacts.
It depends on the type of battery. In lithium-ion batteries, ~2% is composed of rare earth minerals like lanthanum, cerium, or neodymium.
They’re relatively scarce on a global scale and exploration/extraction of rare earth minerals is costly and time-consuming, *but* new sources are continually being discovered, and recycling/reprocessing of rare earth minerals from e-waste allows for more effective reuse. It’s believed that rare earth mineral resources can support the growing demand for battery production for the foreseeable future.
Lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, iron, and aluminum can potentially replace rare earth minerals in batteries, but these elements typically have lower energy densities than rare earth minerals, so they wouldn’t have the same performance and capacity.
If we look at a chemistry like Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO or LFP) which is increasingly popular (e.g. used in some Tesla/BYD electric cars), there’s little to no dependence on rare earth metals or blood minerals.
The ingredients for those cells are all super common, and apart from Lithium are already mined and processed in huge quantities.
There are plentiful deposits of lithium all over the world, but demand and prices have been low until recently so there’s been little reason to open new mines. Given the potential environmental impacts of large mining operations, it takes a while for new mines to open.
Edit: to answer your question about cartels/future energy markets, I do not think we’ll see similar things like OPEC in the renewable/battery space.
Oil is energy itself, cut off the supply and economies immediately shrink and quality of life drops. Cut off the supply of parts for batteries/solar/nuclear/etc and you hinder economy growing, but it’s a much slower and more long term impact that gives countries time to work around it.
Edit 2: forgot to add, LFP is the current front runner here but there are clear candidates to replace it. CATL, who make a *lot* of EV batteries, plan to mass produce sodium ion batteries this year. Sodium is incredibly plentiful all over the world. Energy density is lower, but at least for stationary storage and low end EVs I can see sodium becoming the world leader – and manufacturable all over the world without input constraints
My dad (geophysicist, works in the geological imaging industry) explained it to me like like this. there are minerals everywhere, were just digging at the rare places where the concentration is dumbly higher than everywhere else, someday, we will have to start digging in places where it’s a little bit less dumbly high of a concentration.
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