Lithium Ion is not sustainable for the long term - we have neither the materials nor the manufacturing to not only keep up what would be required for full scale car and grid uses, but don't forget Lithium Ion batteries have a finite lifespan and need to be replaced. The more you put into service, the more you have to manufacture beyond just the batteries needed for new requirements.
I'm not sure that your predictions will hold here. More lithium is discovered as demand grows, and there have been huge additions to known reserves in just the past few years. Looking at current numbers and saying "that's it" is clearly wrong, and given its overall abundance and lack of demand until now, it's a really strong prediction to say that we won't have enough for at least 500TWh of storage, if not more.
Manufacturing capacity is expected to increase 10x every five years, with roughly 20-30TWh/year production in 2031. I can't think of any fundamental constraints there, could you specify why that can't increase?
Lithium recycling is being planned by nearly all manufacturers and many countries will mandate it. If lithium supplies are short, recycling will be highly profitable. If lithium is super abundant, recycling may be more expensive than recycling, and a program like what we currently use for lead acid batteries might be needed for a circular economy. But the fundamental point is that end of life for the battery does not mean that the lithium is gone, it's not a fuel.
How did you collect this odd set of concerns? Did you think of them or did you find them in the media somewhere?
It's all a question of economics. I think technologies like the one in this article, or the one I think holds the best long term promise - super capacitors - are far more likely to displace lithium ion batteries before all that infrastructure you describe scales out. Recycling a battery pack out of a car like a Tesla is far different than recycling a traditional led acid battery from a car. Recycling the quantity of batteries required to support the grid at scale is even more of a non-trivial problem. And if recycling isn't economically viable because lithium is so abundant what do you do with the spent batteries? Bury them?
Especially for electric cars - without something like a supercapacitor or hydrogen that can charge quickly and doesn't have massive battery pack replacement costs built in to the total cost of ownership equation, electric cars are not going to become mainstream; they will remain fringe oddities.
I don't think Lithium is going away tomorrow - but I think it's crazy to bank on it for all our future needs or pitch it for grid storage. If it was so viable for grid storage then where are the really large deployments at scale? As you point out its mature tech. Someone would have scaled up production and done it already if it was such a no brainer. If Elon thought he could make more money at it than cars or space do you not think he would already be there focusing on it vs. those other ventures? Heck at one point Elon was thinking of doing his own candy but didn't since he didn't find anything really revolutionary enough to separate his potential offering from what was already out there. So it's not like he has a super narrow focus only on what he's already working on, and he already has a ton of in-house knowledge about lithium ion batteries.
That a company with as high knowledge of lithium battery tech like Tesla is only tangentially focused on grid power solutions instead of heavily diving in is, I think, one of the larger tells out there. And do you think Tesla would still be as successful if it didn't have substantial tax incentives? That's a distortion that's often overlooked when talking about overall economic viability.
There is far more than just raw resource availability or basic manufacturing capabilities at play here - and grid scale requirements just amplify those issues. I dunno why so many people are so eager to hand wave the limited lifetime of chemical batteries but it's a significant issue; any tech that doesn't have 100% replacement over a short fixed lifetime is going to beat the pants off of chemical batteries over the long haul. It isn't even remotely close. Utilities think in 50 year lifetimes, not 5. These aren't solutions for cars; this is base infrastructure that's COSTLY. There is probably some maintenance with these compressed air solutions, but I'm pretty confident it's no where near that of being forced to replacing the most expensive part of your entire storage solution every X years.
Just look at the value of a used electric cars vs. new. As people are learning about battery pack replacement costs or especially with Tesla, limited options on repair/partial replacement and probably loosing access to supercharging(one of the biggest reasons to pick Tesla right now), used prices on electric cars have steadily declined (and that's being a bit polite). When you have someone blowing up a used Tesla because they feel it's not economically viable to replace the battery pack, that' an issue that shouldn't just be hand waved away https://carbuzz.com/news/fed-up-tesla-owner-blows-up-his-mod...
All of this is in its infancy, but chemical batteries are already in a pretty deep hole from an economics perspective. Unless there is a breakthrough on preventing dendrite formation that dramatically (dramatically!) increases the lifespan of chemical batteries they are a transitory but not long term solution.
Supercapacitors aren't without their issues. You can fill them up instantly (if you have the means to move that much energy that quickly!) but they can also discharge all their energy instantly - which is a great way to also describe a bomb. So things like that will have to be worked out to make them safe - but I see that as far less of a problem than dealing with the perpetual churn of chemical batteries.
