Concern about lithium is usually framed as scarcity, and on the geological evidence that framing is misleading: identified resources considerably exceed anything the transport transition is projected to require. The constraint is time. A new brine operation takes several years to reach full output and a hard rock mine longer, while the refining step that turns concentrate into battery-grade material is concentrated in a small number of plants that took a decade to build. Demand can rise faster than any of these, and when it does the price rises sharply, which brings forward investment that arrives after the shortage has passed. The industry's difficulty is not that the metal is running out but that its supply cannot accelerate.