Nov 19 2009

Where Did All the Lithium Go?

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

For years now, critics have warned that the nascent electric car industry could run into a brick wall if world supplies of lithium, the third element in the periodic table, prove inadequate to supply tens of millions of new car batteries.

Lithium is the 33rd most common element, rarer in the earth's crust than yttrium, lanthanum, neodymium, rubidium and cerium. Reserves are concentrated mainly a few countries, most notably Chile, Bolivia and China, compounding concerns over future supplies. 

Scientists haven't cracked the lithium shortage, but at least they know who's to blame for it: we are.

More precisely, the mysterious absence of lithium in the Sun is caused by the fact that it has planets, including our own. A new study of 500 stars shows that sun-like stars with planets burned up their lithium far more completely than those without planets.

Most lithium was created almost 14 billion years ago in the primordial Big Bang, not by fusion reactions within stars. The level of lithium in a star, therefore, is mainly a function of how quickly the star destroys it.

Unfortunately, the international team of scientists who took 10 years to make this discovery were unable to decide why planets make such a difference.

"There are several ways in which a planet can disturb the internal motions of matter in its host star, thereby rearrange the distribution of the various chemical elements and possibly cause the destruction of lithium. It is now up to the theoreticians to figure out which one is the most likely to happen," said Michel Mayor of the Swiss Observatoire de Genève.

Worse yet, the good scientists said nothing about how to make lithium more plentiful. Fortunately, optimists claim that if we just look a little more energetically, there will be plenty of the element available to meet foreseeable needs. 

In fact, one mine under development in Kings Valley, Nevada has the potential to become one of the world's greatest producers of lithium. So our original planetary sin may not be so detrimental after all.

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