this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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Ok it needs to be said. The smart play is to have governments to subsidize this process and build up the raw inventory for lithium. That way, ie (US) could have tons and tons of raw lithium without having to mine it.
That's great and all, but not all batteries need lithium. When another battery technology gets mature enough to surpass lithium based batteries, then we'll still be stuck on old tech cause the government is subsiding it.
This also reduces the incentive for making more lithium efficient batteries.
Subsidies can help, but they need to be more generalized so they don't create issues moving past current tech. Heck, look at how much trouble we're having getting past oil, that's a perfect example.
Under modern physics, Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of. Anything else that might be better won't be a chemical battery, and it's not like there's any reason to suspect some new magic thing will be created like a pocket-size fusion reactor that will make chemical batteries totally obsolete any time soon. Decades more of lithium batteries being relevant are as close to guaranteed as can be.
Depends on how you define "best". Likely the highest possible short-term energy density, yes, but that isn't the only thing we might want out of a battery. "Doesn't catch fire" is one of the areas where the highest-energy lithium battery chemistries are far from the best, for instance.
Lithium's energy density is largely the cause of its flammability - if you accept density and capacity comparable to another battery chemistry, you can get it down to a comparable fire risk, even if there's not much point bothering.