I studied geology to degree level and have followed the mining industry for some decades; I don't know the detail of every single deposit, but I am aware of the general trends in mining.
So yep - people are not scraping the ocean floors looking for lithium, and your piece by non-geologists/miners (surely you should require the same qualifications of your sources as you do me?!) does not link to evidence of seabed mining of lithium. It links to a USGS piece that states some seabed nodules contain lithium, that's all.
There's some commercial mining offshore on the continental shelf within countries national economic zones, it tends to be niche stuff like
de Beers mining diamonds off Namibia. But the real interest is in metallic nodules in the deep ocean, which are mostly transition metals like manganese and nickel. It's technically difficult as it's so deep, and it's international waters so the regulatory situation is complicated, which has all conspired to make progress slow - there's been test recoveries up to a few 1000t but nothing "commercial" AFAIAA. Yes there's some nodules eg off Peru that have a certain lithium content, but a) lithium is not the focus and b) that's not where people are looking, no permits have been issued for the areas where nodules contain lithium. The main hotspot is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the NE Pacific, but there's also activity in the Indian Ocean and NW Pacific. See the report of the International Seabed Authority :
https://www.isa.org.jm/secretary-general-annual-report-2023/#chapters
But at least in this instance you provided a link so it can be debunked, if you don't provide links and details of the assumptions being made, it's impossible to have a rational debate with you, and people are right to call you out on that even if it feels like confrontation to you.
I've got to dash, but in the meantime, you might want to read this, which goes into more detail about the VW study from a few years ago (it relies on the e-Golf, which hasn't been made for 3 years) which makes several bad assumptions :
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-21-misleading-myths-about-electric-vehicles/
More substantively, the figures behind the VW analysis – shared with Carbon Brief in 2020 – show that the company makes the same key errors identified above. (See: FALSE: ‘An EV has to travel 50,000+ miles to break even’.)
Specifically: VW overestimates the emissions associated with making batteries; VW fails to account for the real-world fuel economy of its diesel Golf; VW underestimates the emissions associated with diesel fuel production; and VW overestimates the emissions in EU electricity.
Correcting for these errors shows that the e-Golf – if it were still being produced – would pay off its carbon debt after closer to 14,000 miles
- insurance companies want to repair your car as cheaply as possible. - I needed 2 resprays following a p1ss poor repair by an insurance approved company. - they were only approved because they were cheap. They sprayed a door pillar black with a wonky line rather than use door pillar black foil the car was fitted with.
