If these non-lithium battery chemistries had any chance, it would be in grid storage. As time goes on LFPs keep getting cheaper and better, and there will be little market left for alt-chemistries.
Lithium is rare enough to always be a cost barrier vs. something like Al/Cl chemistries that are literally made of dirt and brine. It's true that grid storage looks like the biggest market, but there's a lot of space in non-mobile/less-mobile energy storage that would like cheap batteries.
The cost difference (which is only 4x vs aluminum, apparently) is due to a combination of increased demand (not enough production capacity) and probably the amount of energy/environmental impact of the two processes (you have to go through a lot less ore/brine to get the aluminum).
Also, aluminum benefits from a robust recycling infrastructure that hasn’t come online for lithium yet.
Aluminum's recycling infrastructure is based entirely on reusing essentially raw aluminum, and only exists because bauxite is so expensive to smelt without access to dedicated hydroelectric dams.
Recycling lithium in the form of extracting from batteries produces a significant amount of chemical waste, meaning that the cost savings of recycling is significantly less when compared with the difference between smelting and recycling aluminum.
Lithium is enriched in the upper crust of the Earth about 10 times over its average abundance, which makes it appear more abundant.
Even so, despite the enrichment it remains about 500 times less abundant than aluminum (in atom numbers, which matter for batteries; in weight the lighter lithium would appear even less abundant).
Moreover, the lower concentration of lithium in typical lithium ores means that for mining equal amounts of lithium and aluminum the environmental effects of mining lithium would be much worse, because more rocks are disturbed and more waste is produced.
So there is no doubt that replacing lithium with aluminum for large-scale energy storage is a more sustainable option.
I am giving a direct comparison between the same commodity at two points in time. Whatever people thought was true about the preciousness of lithium between 2021-2023 when the price rose 8x obviously needs reconsideration in 2025 after the price went right back down to where it had been.
This seems to ignore the entire supply/demand context of both metals. Demand for Al is basically flat, and the supply/demand relationship has reached an equilibrium.
Electric cars (by far the biggest consumer of lithium) have been experiencing a an average compounded growth of something like 50% per year for the past 10 years. Li production is still catching up. The earth has plenty of Li deposits but there is a lead time to purchase the heavy machines needed to turn those deposits into productive mines.
Once electric car growth hits the inflection point on the adoption curve, and growth becomes sub-exponential, we'll start to see major downward pressure on Li prices.
If we're just racing to the cheapest available reactants, iron flow batteries are going to win that race. And, unlike these others, there are already iron flow batteries on the grid.
You made a statement (that it is neither rare nor expensive) that is about the absolute price of the commodity, not its price relative to another point in time. Lithium is not expensive compared to, say, gold, but it is expensive compared to, say, copper, never mind aluminum or iron.
