An Autoblog Green article today had an interesting tidbit of information. The Nissan Leaf has a 24kWh battery, that we knew. But Nissan also said the battery has about 9lbs (4.08kg) of Lithium in it. Presumably this is elemental lithium, and that is equivalent to 21.75 kg of Lithium Carbonate (LCE) which is how Lithium comes out of the ground and how resources are evaluated.
So since 4.08kg of pure (elemental) lithium is equivalent to about 21.75kg of LCE (5.33kg of LCE is 1kg of Lithium). This means that the 24kWh battery contains 21.75kg of LCE, or about 0.9kg of LCE per kWh. This is 50% larger than the 0.6kg I had seen others cite as a figure for LCE per kWh, which would diminish the amount of batteries my in my estimates by 33%. But it seems there still will be plenty of LCE to go around since the numbers before were absurdly high.
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