The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[OakesCS]

neither. All a matter of cost and what people can or are willing to pay. Lithium is not scarce. Obviously, oil isn’t either. I believe that the Australian lithium resources are primarily pegmatite - the lithium is bound in silicate minerals. Fairly easy to separate out the lithium minerals but very expensive to separate the lithium from the host minerals. A very large chunk of that expense is the energy cost. Thermodynamics is a bitch.