I did a research paper breakdown on EV batteries early last year.  I focused more on the actual known reserves and mining capacity of the three materials discussed here, rather than on how dirty they are.  You see, even if a material is common in the Earth's crust it does not mean there is that quantity available for mining.  There has to be a high density of the material in a given location to make it financially feasible to mine there.  When you see "World Reserves" they are talking about material that is able to be mined efficiently enough to be financially feasible.<br><br>Lithium World Reserves are roughly 165 years at the 2021 mining rate.  To meet the expected requirements for EVs in the amounts governments are pushing for the rate of use will increase by an order of magnitude over the next decade.  That increase is only accounting for EV batteries, with all other uses going to zero (so no laptops or phones among other things included in the demand).  With that increase sometime between 2040 and 2050 all known financially feasible deposits of lithium will be used up.  However analyst have predicted that there will be a "deficit by 2027".  If this happens it will cause a sharp raise in the cost and could potentially crash the market.<br><br>Cobalt World Reserves are less than 45 years at the 2021 mining rate.  With no increase in demand, that is only enough to last until 2066.  While the demand is not expected to increase as much as lithium thanks to ongoing research efforts to decrease the amount of cobalt used in batteries, reducing the ratio to half as much cobalt as currently needed in batteries means the current World Reserves will expire around 2045.  Cobalt is even more susceptible to production deficits than lithium.<br><br>Nickel World Reserves are under 38 years at the 2020 mining rate.  Again with no increase in demand, that is only enough to last until 2059.  While nickel has by far the highest total World Reserves at 94 million tons (verse 14 million tons of lithium and 7.6 million tons of cobalt), it is used at a far higher rate due to is many industrial applications.  So while EV batteries will have the least effect on the known reserves of the three materials, it will be accelerating the demise of the one with both the shortest time until all known reserves are consumed and with the highest industrial use rate.<br><br>Of the three, lithium is likely the most critical.  Massive amounts of research are being done on new battery designs that reduce or eliminate the cobalt and nickel requirements.  While there is a great deal of research into batteries that do not use lithium, there is a common critical problem.  All of the designs are larger and heavier, making them poor for mobile applications (EVs, phones, laptops, tools, etc).<br><br>Things are not completely hopeless for lithium.  Seawater contains over a thousand times as much as the current world reserves.  Figuring out how to extract it in an economically feasible manner is the subject of much current ongoing research.  Such research bearing fruit before the market enters a sharp deficit or even crashes is highly unlikely but possible.,(reply>), For those who haven't seen it yet, UE just dropped a new video where he discusses Lithium covering my points.,(reply>), @Troy McDaniel Wow, there's a lot here.  Thanks!  I do wish there was some way for me to access the actual paper, though.  If there's some way for you to print a copy of the paper itself, that would be excellent.,(reply>), It amazes me how nobody cares about running out of these metals within 40 years but we've been spazzing over oil running out for the last 60 years.,(reply>), QI,(reply>), @HobNob Abooga You have obviously not read the thread, then tried to give the same false argument that has been done several times already.<br><br>World Reserves are not all of a resource found.  They are only the portion that is economically feasible to mine.  <br><br>There have always been huge quantities of oil found that were not economically feasible to mine with current technology for the current price.  Oil mining was also historically inefficient at extracting all of the oil in a location, meaning that there were huge amounts left.  Technology has made many previously unusable locations viable and allowed a much higher percentage of the oil at a given location to be extracted.  This has come over a century.<br><br>New oil mines are extremely quick to build, with new land based ones taking a couple of months and underwater ones (oil rigs) taking a couple of years.<br><br>Finding new sources of lithium will not solve the problem.  The newest studies put the time for a lithium mine to be productive at an average of 16.5 years after ground is first broken on construction.  A new mine today will most likely not start shipping until nearly 2040.  The timeline has been getting longer.<br><br>The issue is the timeline is too compressed.  There is insufficient time for the supply to raise fast enough to keep up with the demand.  The lithium supply is already entering a deficit, which has caused prices to raise over 400% in the last year.  Demand will continue raising rapidly.  This will result in a crisis currently expected to hit between 2025 and 2028.<br><br>The only solution is to delay the spike in demand by decades to allow supply to raise to sufficient levels.  This is unavoidable.  You ether willingly slow down the increased use or are forced to when the market crashes.<br><br>There is also no replacement for lithium with a chance of going into production fast enough to prevent this.  Someone tried to argue Solid State batteries would, totally missing that those are all made with lithium (and the ones expected to come to market over the next few years also using nickel and cobalt).