Assault for a Battery

Dependence on “foreign oil” has been a political hot button for years, even though oil doesn’t carry a passport, and petroleum is a generally fungible product that is priced based on global factors, hardly within the control of any one country. Picture a Texas oil billionaire offering his commodity to his fellow Americans for far less than the global rate out of a notion of patriotic zeal. Yeah, since that’s not happening, it might be more useful to imagine all of the world’s oil being pumped into a vast blended global bathtub, from which all oil is purchased. Increased demand anywhere in the world pushes the global price upwards. This bathtub metaphor is possible because oil reserves are so dispersed, from Texas to Brazil, from Canada to the Middle East, from Russia to the North Sea.

But there is another commodity is that not so widely dispersed, one whose qualities of relative compact efficiency will, unless or until we find an alternative solution soon, create some new “commodity dictators” because supplies are so concentrated in one particular region. As the need to store electricity rises – from solar panels on a roof to hybrid and direct electrical cars – it is clear that those who control lithium have power to abuse. But before we explore some serious issues in connection with this increasingly precious metal, it is worthwhile looking at the other common batteries available and why lithium ion batteries are such an improvement.

Nickel metal-hydride (NiMH) and nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries have been around for a long time. Most of the batteries you buy at the store for your portable electronics fall into this category. Since cadmium is pretty toxic, that type of battery is not particularly good for the environment, and most battery providers no longer use that metal in their products. Lead-acid batteries (the kind most folks have in their cars) are way too large and heavy for most larger storage issues. NiMH batteries are cheap, and for one-off uses like powering a flashlight, they work well. When they are used in bulk, as in a hybrid car, they are sensitive to over-charging (but a computer can control that), can develop battery “memory” that reduces their storage power much more rapidly than their lithium ion counterparts and simply are larger and weigh more (a huge disadvantage in cars). In short, lithium ion is just that much better.

But unlike oil reserves, which are spread all over the earth, so far, the production of lithium is concentrated in a very small area. Back in December of 2006, a researcher at Meridian International Researcher, William Tahil, wrote a paper (The Trouble with Lithium), raising an alarm: “There simply isn’t enough cheap lithium to go around, he argued, and 80% of the world’s accessible reserves are located in the so-called ‘Lithium Triangle’ of the Chilean, Argentine, and Bolivian Andes (pictured above). ‘If the world was to exchange oil for Li-ion based battery propulsion,’ Tahil wrote, ‘South America would become the new Middle East. Bolivia would become far more of a focus of world attention than Saudi Arabia ever was.’ Even then, we would run out of lithium long before we’d finished electrifying our cars.” FastCompany.com, June 30^th.

Is this an extreme and unlikely scenario? After all, Chile and Argentina are fairly open societies and really have no material barriers to trade, whether with the U.S. or otherwise. True enough, except that the bulk of the lithium sits in the Bolivian Andes, and “Bolivia’s president Evo Morales [pictured above] is no friend of the U.S., however; he pals around with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He once expelled the U.S. ambassador and likes to end speeches with the rallying cry, ‘Death to the Yankees!’” FastCompany.com.

There are some alternative sources (China, Afghanistan and Kazakhstan) that may grow more important in time… and may explain our lingering efforts in Afghanistan a bit more: “Afghanistan may also be rich in lithium if reports of a trillion dollars in mineral wealth are accurate. But America’s relationship with president Hamid Karzai is complicated, to say the least… [And] Kazakhstan is a virtual autocracy ruled for 20 years by the opposition-less President Nursultan Nazarbayev.” FastCompany. Hmmm… doesn’t look particularly warm and fuzzy for the United States, and since China hangs on to its precious mineral resources and the other two central Asian countries noted are hardly models of stability, the coming years could prove particularly politically (and militarily?) interesting. Maybe science will reduce our dependence on foreign lithium.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I agree with that philosopher/SNL character, Rosanna Rosanna-Danna... "It's always something... If it's not one thing, it's another."