Holy Grail of batteries?

I wonder how the IBM battery's stored energy per cubic inch compares to that of diesel fuel - or even to that of gasoline?

Once either of the above is achieved, we're on our way to real electric transportation.

It’s still very expensive to extract drinkable water from seawater.

You can mine just about any mineral from seawater...problem is that it's rarely anywhere close to as efficient as traditional mines.

Lithium is typically mined in large salt flats because it's been concentrated into economically viable quantities.

As profdant said, you can mine gold from seawater but it costs more than an ounce of gold to get an ounce of gold.

It makes sense -- all land-based minerals eventually wind up in the ocean. (Some take a long time to get there, like stuff in the Great Basin with no outlet to the sea.) So if the raw materials are available on land, they are also theoretically available in the ocean.

The problem, of course, is the cost of extraction. The oceans are full of gold, literally. Very dilute gold.