THE CAR OF THE FUTURE - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 135

global sales by midcentury, and sales of plug-in hybrids reached nearly
twice that share. 90 h e impact on lithium demand depends on what
you think the new cars would be like; the study assumed they'd be a
mix of long-distance vehicles, city cars, and electric bicycles in parts of
the developing world. On this basis, it concluded that demand would
rise to eight times the current level, and that recycling lithium from
used bat eries could meet half of the need. h e ultimate annual world
demand for new lithium would still be three hundred times smaller
than current world reserves.
In fact the United States is likely even safer than this suggests.
Gaines and Nelson sketch out another scenario where U.S. sales of
electric cars and plug-in hybrids take of powerfully around 2020.
Plug-in hybrids reach just shy of a third of U.S. sales by 2030, while
pure electric vehicles make up around one in twenty sales, and sim-
ple hybrids, such as today's Prius, total a quarter of all cars sold. All
told, by midcentury nine in ten cars and trucks sold in the United
States are at least part electric. As a result, U.S. lithium demand rises
steadily, hit ing twenty-i ve thousand tons a year around 2030 and
continuing to grow at er that. As the stock of electric vehicles rises,
though, more material also becomes available for recycling. Demand
for new lithium tops out at around twenty-i ve thousand tons a year
in 2030 and falls at er that. U.S. lithium resources, by contrast, are
estimated to total more than a thousand times this number. Pressed
to the wall, the United States could rely on its own resources, which
suggests physical availability of lithium supply is unlikely to become
a major U.S. problem.
Nor is cost. h e price of lithium carbonate, the chemical form in
which lithium is typically supplied, has held steady between two and
seven dollars a kilogram over the last twenty years. 91 Because the typical
electric car uses no more than about i t een kilograms of the material,
the cost of the lithium in it comes out to less than a hundred dol-
lars. 92 Even if lithium prices rise tenfold above their highest histori-
cal level, the cost of the lithium in an electric car will still be only a
small fraction of the cost of the vehicle. Contrast that with the typical
contemporary automobile, which uses around i ve thousand gallons of
gasoline in a ten-year period, at a likely cost of well over ten thousand