These mineral riches

These mineral riches
and increasing demand have already set off confrontations between Western corporations that want to mine the precious mineral, and Bolivia's Socialist president, Evo Morales, who prefers nationalized Digital Camera Battery companies. However, that's just the beginning of the problems. The Foreign Policy article also warns that while lithium replacing oil as the main fuel source will help the environment, there's no evidence that changing the place and resource will reduce the conflict between those who have the power, and those who want it.

This might be great news for the Bolivians, but let's remember that lithium is a non-renewable natural resource - the Saudi Arabia analogy is very apt. Some scientists are estimating that there are around 13.5 million tons of it on earth, but with our current Casio Digital Camera Battery technology, only about half of that can actually be extracted and used (according to William Tahil and the Meridian International Research - check out. I know it's not the most impartial research group out there, but )

The Chevy Volt's battery setup weighs about 375 lbs., and there were more than 70 million motor vehicles produced in 2008 (I'm not sure how that figure has changed since, given all the economic ups and downs we've been having).

If hybrids like the Volt get anywhere near as popular as internal-combustion cars - and if our culture gets as dependent on them, and on lithium as a power source for them - then those reserves are going to start running out eventually, and we'll be right back where we started: searching anxiously for some new energy source/storage medium, as he world's lithium reserves slowly run dry - starting with those of the USA, whose reserves are only an estimated 38,000 tons.

If you google St. Andrews nikon EN-EL4 battery (abbreviated STAIR), and browse other air battery technologies, you'll see there is good reason to believe we may soon be able to make batteries that have far greater energy density, meaning we'll need far less of anything such as lithium to make a battery with much greater range, and that is much less expensive.

The concept of air batteries has been around for several years now. The idea is to replace the cathode of the battery with atmospheric air, which is practically limitless. If we can do this, we may be able to have nikon EN-EL2 battery with 10 times the storage capacity of those we have today.

Tesla EVs average about 244 miles between charges; recently, an Aussie drove one a distance of 313 miles on a single charge, a world record for EVs. Using that as a yardstick, we can assume that using air battery technology and a battery of the same weight, it would be possible to drive from coast to coast in the USA without recharging. Impressive.

If we did have such a great increase in storage capacity, of course, what would be far more practical would be to make cars with much smaller nikon EN-EL1 battery -- say, 100 lbs. or so-- that would have a much smaller range, but they would be much cheaper, much lighter and nimbler, much quicker in acceleration, and would conserve resources much better.

Other technologies are also capable of increasing a Panasonic Digital Camera Battery's energy density dramatically, and if used in conjunction with air battery technology we could conceivably have batteries weighing only 20 lbs. or so, and still giving us a very satisfying range between charges. Coating the anode with carbon nanotubes, for instance, has been claimed to also give a potential tenfold increase in energy storage-- imagine a Tesla with a battery using both technologies-- air battery and carbon nanotubes on the cathode-- that theoretically could increase range by a factor of 100, possibly giving a Tesla a theoretical driving range of 31,300 miles! The earth's circumference is about 24,800 miles, meaning that we could theoretically drive completely around the equator of the earth on a single charge!

What would be much more practical, of course, is to make the Panasonic CGA-S002 battery only as big as we really need it to drive a comfortable distance... say, 200 miles or so... meaning the car could be extremely light with great acceleration. If the battery could be reduced in weight that much, so could all the rest of the drive train-- the electric motor, the electronic controller, drive shaft, axles, etc. A very powerful, inexpensive, lightweight, practical EV could still have a very good range.

Realistically, Panasonic CGA-S001E battery may never achieve such spectacular performance, but without doubt they'll get better, cheaper and smaller, and EVs will be able to fully replace ICE-powered cars even if lithium becomes a strategic material. Before we do, though, we need to install an aggressive material recycling program to recover as much as possible of the lithium and other rare elements we'll be using, so it is not squandered. laptop battery details