'A remarkably hopeful and useful book...The climate crisis leaves us no choice but to build a new world and as Sanderson makes clear, we are capable of making it a better one than the dirty and dangerous planet we’ve come to take for granted.' Bill McKibben, Observer book of the week We depend on a handful of metals and rare earths to power our phones and computers. Increasingly, we rely on them to power our cars and our homes. Whoever controls these finite commodities will become rich beyond imagining. Sanderson journeys to meet the characters, companies, and nations scrambling for the new resources, linking remote mines in the Congo and Chile’s Atacama Desert to giant Chinese battery factories, shadowy commodity traders, secretive billionaires, a new generation of scientists attempting to solve the dilemma of a ‘greener’ world.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 In late September 2020, Elon Musk announced that Tesla had acquired the rights to a 10,000-acre plot in Nevada where it planned to extract lithium, a metal that was the key ingredient for every electric vehicle battery, using simple table salt. #2 In late September 2020, Elon Musk announced that Tesla had acquired the rights to a 10,000-acre plot in Nevada where it planned to extract lithium, a metal that was the key ingredient for every electric vehicle battery.

A blistering collection of stories from an exhilarating new voice One man kills another after neither will move his pickup truck from the road. A female sheriff in a flooded town attempts to cover up a murder. When a farmer harvesting a field accidentally runs over his son, his grief sets him off walking, mile after mile. A band of teens bent on destruction runs amok in a deserted town at night. As these men and women lash out at the inscrutable churn of the world around them, they find a grim measure of peace in their solitude. Throughout Volt, Alan Heathcock's stark realism is leavened by a lyric energy that matches the brutality of the surface. And as you move through the wind-lashed landscape of these stories, faint signs of hope appear underfoot. In Volt, the work of a writer who's hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock's tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation.

This book is the first to fully explore the short- and long-term impact of the global electric car rollout on the supply of raw materials. The world has gone from zero to almost 1.5 billion fossil fuel cars in circulation today, contributing significantly to the global climate crisis and necessitating a total transition to electric vehicles in the coming decades. This book responds to key questions surrounding the increase of electric car usage, such as will there be sufficient resources available to permanently supply a future world population of ten billion with electric cars? What is the risk that the supply of essential raw materials will be hampered by geopolitical problems, or that mining capacity cannot be quickly scaled up? How does the switch from fossil fuel vehicles to electric cars impact the recycling of scrap cars? It contains detailed information about the material composition of electric and fossil fuel cars in relation to stocks and relative scarcity of corresponding materials in the earth’s crust and estimates the ultimate annual consumption of metals based on predicted population growth. This book is an important tool for decision- makers in national ministries and international bodies, highlighting how to adopt a global long-term raw materials policy to protect the interests of future generations and global fairness. It provides necessary forecasting insight to industry leaders and specialists, policymakers, and researchers.

Long Hard Road: The Lithium-Ion Battery and the Electric Car provides an inside look at the birth of the lithium-ion battery, from its origins in academic labs around the world to its transition to its new role as the future of automotive power. It chronicles the piece-by-piece development of the battery, from its early years when it was met by indifference from industry to its later emergence in Japan where it served in camcorders, laptops, and cell phones. The book is the first to provide a glimpse inside the Japanese corporate culture that turned the lithium-ion chemistry into a commercial product. It shows the intense race between two companies, Asahi Chemical and Sony Corporation, to develop a suitable anode. It also explains, for the first time, why one Japanese manufacturer had to build its first preproduction cells in a converted truck garage in Boston, Massachusetts. Building on that history, Long Hard Road then takes readers inside the auto industry to show how lithium-ion solved the problems of earlier battery chemistries and transformed the electric car into a viable competitor. Starting with the Henry Ford and Thomas Edison electric car of 1914, it chronicles a long list of automotive failures, then shows how a small California car converter called AC Propulsion laid the foundation for a revolution by packing its car with thousands of tiny lithium-ion cells. The book then takes readers inside the corporate board rooms of Detroit to show how mainstream automakers finally decided to adopt lithium-ion. Long Hard Road is unique in its telling of the lithium-ion tale, revealing that the battery chemistry was not the product of a single inventor, nor the dream of just three Nobel Prize winners, but rather was the culmination of dozens of scientific breakthroughs from many inventors whose work was united to create a product that ultimately changed the world.

Lithium batteries may hold the key to an environmentally sustainable, oil-independent future. From electric cars to a "smart" power grid that can actually store electricity, letting us harness the powers of the sun and the wind and use them when we need them, lithium—a metal half as dense as water, found primarily in some of the most uninhabitable places on earth—has the potential to set us on a path toward a low-carbon energy economy. In Bottled Lightning, the science reporter Seth Fletcher takes us on a fascinating journey, from the salt flats of Bolivia to the labs of MIT and Stanford, from the turmoil at GM to cutting-edge lithium-ion battery start-ups, introducing us to the key players and ideas in an industry with the power to reshape the world. Lithium is the thread that ties together many key stories of our time: the environmental movement; the American auto industry, staking its revival on the electrification of cars and trucks; the struggle between first-world countries in need of natural resources and the impoverished countries where those resources are found; and the overwhelming popularity of the portable, Internet-connected gadgets that are changing the way we communicate. With nearly limitless possibilities, the promise of lithium offers new hope to a foundering American economy desperately searching for a green-tech boom to revive it.