Keeping Pace With the Lithium Supply
Think the lithium shortage is about electric cars? You’d be wrong. Dead wrong.
The world is hungry for lithium batteries. News about demand for lithium far exceeding supply has been consistent for several years. Alliterating the narrative with photos of Elon Musk generates clicks but leads to the misconception that this problem is all about electric cars.
Supply of EV’s isn’t the real problem. Anyone who already owns an EV isn’t worried about the supply of their batteries and anyone who is happy with their internal combustion engine isn’t either. And no one cares about stressed-out billionaires. The only people affected it seems are those who are currently in the market for a new electric vehicle.
You might think so. But you would be wrong. Dead Wrong. You see, currently, all implanted medical devices use lithium battery technology as a power source including pacemakers and defibrillators. What would it look like if medical device companies couldn’t get the lithium needed for their batteries?
Most people don’t know it but the world came close to running out of pacemakers in 2017. Here’s how it happened.
Three of the five pacemaker/defibrillator companies in the world account for 90% of pacemaker manufacturing worldwide: Medtronic, Boston Scientific, and Abbott. The other two companies are small.
Medtronic and Boston Scientific have their manufacturing facilities in Puerto Rico. Abbott (which back in 2017 was called St. Jude Medical) has its manufacturing site in Sylmar, California.
In 2017, hurricaine Maria devastated Puerto Rico and forced Medtronic and Boston Scientific to shut down their pacemaker/defibrillator manufacturing facilities for months.
At the same time, wildfires in California threatened to raze St. Jude’s factory in Sylmar. The factory was not destroyed but did have to be closed for weeks.
You may wonder why companies that manufacture such critical medical devices don’t have backup facilities. Well, actually, they do.
In the case of Medtronic and BoSci, the backup factories are in…you guessed it…California…north of LA…near Sylmar. The wildfires shut those factories down too.
St. Jude’s alternative site was a low-capacity site in Minnesota.
Now, these companies also had tertiary backup facilities in Europe (I believe either Medtronic’s or BoSci’s was in Scotland and don’t remember where the others’ are). But these were also low-capacity facilities that were not operational and were not tooled or staffed to make pacemakers. They had to be brought online.
Since no factory workers were employed making pacemakers at these facilities it became a contentious international labor issue to bring US workers with the necessary skills to Europe to work in the factories. Locals wanted the jobs but did not have the training or experience and US workers that did were not authorized to work in the EU.
The end result was that worldwide production of pacemakers fell to 25% of the rate of consumption and the world quickly burned though its inventory. Fortunately, the simul-crises of the natural world eased in time. The primary production sites resumed operations. And we narrowly avoided running out.
For those of us who implant pacemakers and defibrillators and the patients who need or have them them, 2017 was a stressful time.
We cannot let ourselves run out of lithium. There is no other other battery technology we can substitute right now. In a precision instrument like a pacemaker you cannot simply swap out battery types like you can in your TV remote. The entirety of a pacemaker’s circuitry—the circuit boards and semiconductors—is designed around the battery chemistry and precision-tuned to the nuances of how electric charge is pulled off a lithium battery. Their size and shape is ordained by two material properties of their batteries called the volumetric energy density and gravimetric energy density.
Changing to a different battery chemistry would require a ground up redesign of pacemakers and defibrillators. And that means years of testing, regulatory evaluation and approval.
The real image of the lithium supply crisis is not a stressed-out billionaire. It is a stress-out patient.