See http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/, which provides a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much lithium will be needed for current applications:
If all other lithium industries [other than lithium-ion electric vehicles] suddenly evaporated, we could imagine using the entire world lithium production to make nothing but Nissan Leafs. At 2 × 10^7 kg of lithium per year, we can make 8.3 million of them. Using all 9.9 × 10^9 kg of the world's lithium reserves, we can make 4.1 billion Leafs; using all the identified lithium resources (2.55 × 10^10 kg), we can make 10.6 billion Leafs. If we would like to have a North American standard of living for everyone in the world – say, 1 car for every 2 people – then we would need about 3.4 billion Nissan Leafs. This would use 32% of the identified resources (all known lithium in the world), or 82% of the reserves (all lithium that is currently economic to produce). Even with widespread recycling, that seems like an unsustainable prospect. So it seems that the current trend in the use of lithium in batteries, e.g., for cars, will become increasingly difficult to scale out to larger groups of consumers. If lithium in one or both of its stable isotopes turns out to be important for LENR, competing economic pressures will come into play. Perhaps industry will take a second look at hydrogen for energy storage. The numbers in the article refer to the capacity of lithium ion batteries to *store* energy. If lithium is also a source of energy in LENR, presumably the energy densities will be much higher than those seen in batteries, and in this case there will be no need to put energy into the charge as in the case of batteries. Eric
