The rise of electric and hybrid cars blocked by limited lithium resources

Despite the enthusiasm the surrounds the newly arrived electric vehicles (EV), such as the Volt or Leaf, on the US market and president Obama’s call for putting 1 million electric cars on the roads in the US by 2015, the future of this technology looks rather bleak. The amount of economically recoverable lithium, an ingredient essential for making the batteries that power the emerging wave of electric and hybrid vehicles, is too minuscule to sustain a switch of any significance to electric-powered cars. More specifically, according to the Meridian Research Report, by 2015 there will be only about 200,000 tons of high grade lithium carbonate available on the world market, of which about 170,000 tons will be needed for laptop, camera, and other small electronics batteries. The remaining 30,000 tons will be barely enough for making 1.5 million Volt-like electric cars. This can only satisfy a tiny fraction of the worldwide car demand. Annually, United States car dealers sell about 11 million cars. Worldwide are produced over 50 million cars annually.

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