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The Lithium Supplement 2010: Electric vehicles

July 27, 2010 - 00:00 GMT

KEYWORDS: Lithium supplement , Li , electric cars , batteries

Seth Fletcher makes a case that, while much could still go wrong, in political, economical and technological terms the world appears ready for the electric vehicles that will transform lithium from obscurity to a commodity

Triple-digit oil prices have gone away, for now, but they are a recent memory and will be back. The failure of Copenhagen and the US Senate aside, carbon dioxide regulation of some kind is inevitable, and in the meantime, in the USA new corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards of 35.5 mpg by 2016 have clearly signalled to automakers that times are changing.

The BP Deepwater Horizon spill, which between 22 April and 19 July gushed some 100m. gallons of oil into sea, is one of the most visceral reminders in history of what damage petroleum can inflict on the planet.

We have come far enough that the mini EV boom of the 1990s is no longer a fully valid point of comparison. That flurry of activity, which ended with the unceremonious crushing of General Motors’s EV1 electric car, was precipitated by air-pollution legislation in one US state, not...

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