this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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I know there's been lots of headlines in the past like OMG there's not enough lithium! It's never been true.
It's one of the most abundant elements out there, it's everywhere. It was always more about what reserves we knew about, but when what we knew about wasn't going to be enough, people go looking, and it's abundant.
Also the more uses there are for it, the more profitable it is to extract from these methods and the better we get at it, the cheaper it is to extract, which further opens up even more options.
I suppose it's a bit like diamonds, which are actually really abundant, just not always very accessible.
I mean, it's not. Either in the crust or the universe - stellar nucleosynthesis skips straight to carbon.
Your point still stands, though, since abundance is only one of the factors that goes into how easy something is to recover.
It's 31st in the crust, there's more than Lead.
Then it's all over the world in other areas in higher concentrations like in brines (the easiest way for us to get it) or clays, and there's over 200 billion tons of it in the ocean. Granted the ocean stuff would take some figuring out how to get, but it's a ridiculous amount.
Whenever we go looking for it, we keep finding vast reserves of it.
Such as this just this month: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-5-trillion-lithium-deposit-114805186.html?guccounter=1
Edit: for the sea water stuff, capturing it as a side product of desalination or a next step in desalination might be a starting way to begin extracting it without massively increasing costs as some of the costs will already be part of desalination, which could help bring desalination costs down via another revenue stream.
Wow, that's a better abundance than I thought - I guess it really concentrates here - although still not that impressive. The major natural source of it and it's friends beryllium and boron is literally the nature particle accelerators out there in the cosmos, and the collisions they create, for example in our upper atmosphere.
The rest goes under "things other than abundance", which I did mention. Bismuth is a cheap element because it concentrates itself in veins and has limited applications, despite being comparably rare to silver. At the other end titanium is more common than all forms of carbon put together but is an absolute PITA to concentrate into metal and then manufacture into products.
I don't actually remember any articles that claimed there were lithium shortages in that there isn't enough on the planet, but rather that China is the only country with a working supply chain.
Lithium is quite rare. Essentially all the lithium that exists was created at the big bang, and since then the total supply has been diminishing with each generation of stars - they fuse lithium into heavier elements.
There's less lithium all the time
But still lots