Lithium Batteries make their mark in interesting ways
The element Lithium was first isolated sometime in the 1840s and this alkali metal was thought to be astonishingly rare. Or at least it was until the pioneering chemist Robert Bunsen discovered it in tobacco ash a decade or so later. It was then found to be not merely abundant but amazingly common. It was just that nobody had any idea what, if anything it could be used for. Indeed, the only practical application until the late 20th century ought to be a lesson for us all. It found its only metier in fireworks, where it glowed a splendid red.
Since then, of course, the world has found a use for it in lithium-ion batteries in the ultimate answer to a capitalist’s dream. Back in 2018, the market for these batteries was worth around $39.3 billion. At the end of 2024, it was apparently worth $82.7 billion and the growth rate seemed to be accelerating. The wise thinkers at Fortune believe that this could more than triple by the end of the decade. The lithium-ion battery lies at the heart of modern telecommunications, not to mention electric cars and seems likely to be at the centre of global power grids as the wavering nature of wind and solar power becomes clearer.
Equally, having finally found a use for it, the world and his wife have been very busy looking for it. There is now estimated to be around 98 ‘megatons’ of the metal on the planet, although it could be as high as 120 megatons. Quite why estimates of the size of this resource are measured in megatons on the net is a mystery. Maybe it is because it makes it sound bigger than the million tons it actually represents.
Indeed, the megaton used to have only one rather specific use, which is perhaps a warning to us all. It was the explosive force of a nuclear bomb equivalent to one million tons of TNT and thus nothing to do with weight at all. In fact, nobody really knows what the power of a million tons of TNT would actually be like. The largest ever conventional single explosion was of a mere 7,400 tons of the stuff in 1947, when the British blew up all the surplus ammunition they could find left over from the war. The blast took a sizeable chunk out of Heligoland, an island in the German Bight. Ironically it was on this island where Werner Heisenberg first started to lay out the basis of quantum physics way back in 1924. This revolutionised thinking about electrons and energy generally and made additional sense out of Einstein’s famous equation that E=mc2.
Be that as it may, so far, we are only using about 250,000 tonnes of lithium a year, while the IEA now apparently believes that come 2050, we are going to need around 1.5 million to keep the show on the road. This, needless to say, has produced great excitement amongst commodity traders based on the assumption of scarcity. Yet there appears to be plenty around. Indeed, Chile alone has 9.3 million tonnes of reserves with Australia coming in second with 6.2 million. The US only has a mere million tonnes, while China, the only country that is actually using substantial amount of the stuff making batteries, has at least two. Thus, the fact that lithium is seen as somehow scarce has more to do with the fact that few people know much about it even though its actual position is number three on the periodic table; a fact reflected in its previous lack of any obvious use. What is perhaps more concerning for the rapidly accelerating use of lithium-ion batteries is the supply of cobalt for them, which mostly comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
As for its price, this ignorance has been amusingly reflected in its position on the commodity markets. Lithium carbonate was $24,000 per ton in 2017 and then crashed to $12,000 by the end of 2018. It then started to rise again, tripling in 2021 and reaching $37,000 in 2023, before falling again during 2024. Spot prices have gone over $67,000 a ton. In effect, the market price tends to be dictated by sudden announcements of gigantic finds in obscure places, announcing enormous quantities of the metal.
Such as the one found in the McDermitt Caldera on the Oregon/Nevada border and given permission for development by President Trump in one of the last acts of his first presidential period in office. Owned by the Lithium America Corporation, this is believed to contain at least 13.7 million tons of lithium carbonate and be capable of producing around 66,000 tons a year. Listed as potentially containing as much as 120 megatons, first excited press reports suggested that it may be “holding more lithium than is currently known to exist”. This mine alone should be “capable of providing batteries for over a million electric cars.”
However, the environmental purity of the whole exercise is just a little dented by the fact that the lithium slurry will have to be mixed with sulphuric acid to extract the metal, with the acid made on site from molten sulphur extracted from crude and imported from the nearest oil refineries. Sad to relate, no matter how good the intentions, those wretched hydrocarbons seem to pop up somewhere in the process. Indeed, what lies at the real heart of the lithium scarcity issue is finding a sensible way of getting it out of the ground without using truly enormous amounts of water.
Indeed, getting away from the oil business in any aspect of the brave new world of hydrocarbon free energy is more difficult than “Just stop oil” campaigners may like to think. Exxon, needless to say has just acquired a 130,000 acre slice of Arkansas for lithium extraction. And who is leading in the environmentally acceptable technology of lithium extraction? Why who else but SLB! And who is SLB? Why it’s Schlumberger, globally famous as an oil technology company! Well, it is to be hoped for their shareholder’s sake that they did not spend a fortune on image consultants on the name change, but you have to hand it to the management that they knew which way the wind was blowing in 2022. Indeed, the temptation would be to laugh, if Schlumberger/SLB wasn’t one of the best engineering companies around.
Anyway, SLB now have a pilot lithium extraction plant in Clayton Valley, Nevada, which is claimed to extract 96% of the lithium from below – “using their subsurface expertise” – using brine and a process named DLB about which they are rather coy. Either way this claims to use far less water than normal forms of brine extraction and does not take nearly as long to extract the lithium using the normal means of evaporation. Either way, the technology of lithium extraction is moving on at speed with reverse osmosis, nano filtration, electrodialysis and mechanical vapor recompression mechanisms all under consideration. The point here is that having finally woken up to the huge potential demand for the metal, the race is on in the west to extract a lot of it in an environmentally acceptable way.
This however does not remove its inherent dangers. In mid-2023, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan said that fires from lithium-ion batteries on e-bikes and scooters was one of the greatest fire risks in London. Back in 2016 there had been only nine electric bike fires in doorways. But in 2023 there were 183, or one every two days. As a result, both the mayor and the fire brigade have been strenuously warning people of the dangers and warning citizens of the use of second-hand or unofficial sources of such batteries, but the process seems to be accelerating in 2024. One of the most spectacular occurred on the 10th floor of a tower block in Plaistow, which seriously damaged the building.
This process is pretty global. Between August 1 and 11th 2024, the global press reported some 14 major fires caused by these batteries. These go much further than concerns about doorway bike fires. The really significant fires are caused by external ignition in accidents. On October 30th, the Missouri town of Fredricksburg had to be partially evacuated, when the nearby battery processing plant caught fire. It took two days to put it out. Both Montreal and Los Angeles ports have been shut down due to lithium-ion fires in 2024. The problem affects ships too. Back in August 2023, the cargo ship Freemantle Highway carrying 498 EVs from Bremerhaven to Egypt caught fire and burnt for three days in the Wadden Sea. One crewman died. Similarly, the Felicity Ace caught fire off the Azores with a lot of EVs on board in 2022. It took 13 days to put the fire out, but it sank anyway.
Meanwhile, fires from batteries are causing considerable concern in the waste disposal business, with regular fires in the back of garbage trucks noted in New York and Australia. The obvious problem here is it is impossible to check the materials in sacks surrounded with lots of other combustible materials.
Not least of the problems is the intensity with which lithium-ion batteries can burn, reaching in some cases as high as 2,700°C. This is easily sufficient to ignite material around them. Worse still, the original ignition tends to be inside the battery core making it difficult to reach, while it gives off toxic fumes, notably hydrogen fluoride. Even more bizarre, the chemical processes involved can make it re-ignite after it appears to have gone out. A Tesla semi-truck fire on an Interstate Highway in California in September, needed 189,000 litres of water to put out, because it constantly re-ignited
One less than amusing factor regarding electric vehicles is that they can actually catch fire when soaked in salty flood water. The fire authorities in Florida recorded some 48 such incidents resulting from Hurricane Helene in October 2024. The salt is believed to corrode the connections rapidly. There were 36 such fires as a result of Hurricane Ian in 2022. Indeed, EVs do have problems with the weather, anyway. As Tesla owners have discovered to their cost, in cold weather, the range of the car is reduce by as much 25%, in a problem that is exacerbated by unexpected queues at recharging stations.
And on planes? According to the US Federal Aviation Administration, fires caused by lithium-ion batteries are now occurring at the rate of two a week in a 388% increase since 2015. As they point out, on a large passenger jet, there are at least 1,000 devices which could catch fire. What is perhaps so scary about this, is that so few people are scared about it. To the obvious concern of airlines, we cheerfully throw our laptops and computers into the luggage bound for the hold, without actually noting that if it does catch fire, it is surrounded by combustible clothing, not to mention everybody else’s luggage. Your little laptop could just be the end, not merely of you but the entire airplane. So, if there is a lesson in this article, have your electronic gadgets on board with you, close to your seat…
*Lyric of a song by Lulu, which won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1969. She was referring to her heart not her phone.