Lithium Supplies Revisited

So I got linked in a Gas2.0 article about my prediction that we have plenty of lithium resources in the US for millions (even billions) of plug-ins, E-REVs and pure EVs. The author brought up the point of other electronic devices and how much lithium they would use. I thought it was pretty ridiculous but I’ll examine the numbers anyways…

Lets look at the annual production numbers and average battery sizes for any number of devices:

Cell Phones – There are about 1.1B cell phones manufactured per year. If we assume that the average battery size is about 3Wh (3.3V at 900mAh), that’s 3,300,000 kWh of lithium ion batteries produced per year. This is the equivalent of about 200,000 Volt battery packs annually.

Laptops – In 2008, about 145M laptops were sold, and this is expected to increase to 177M in 2009. If we assume that the average laptop comes with a 45Wh battery (2.25 hours at 20W), thats 6,525,000 kWh, or a little over 407,000 Volt packs.

iPods and iPhones – Apple sold 55M iPods in 2008, and around 3Wh/device (it varies between iPod classic, nano, shuffle and touch, but Apple doesn’t disclose the sales breakdown between models), that’s 165,000 kWh, or 10,000 Volt packs (the current estimated amount for the first year’s worth of production). Add in iPhones (13.7M in 2008) at 4Wh thats 54,800 kWh or 3,425 Volt packs, for a total of 13,425 Volt packs for iPod and iPhone.

So yes, the Volt will use a lot of lithium ion batteries. The first years production (~12,000 packs in 2011) will have the same amount of capacity as Apple’s iPod+iPhone production. But even the rumors of future years of production (60,000/annually) would still be far less than all the laptop batteries or cell phone batteries manufactured on an annual basis.

The issue that constrains production will be manufacturing the cells, not that we’re running out of lithium to mine.