Let’s start with how much gasoline you would use. For a typical yearly driving pattern, here’s how much gas you would use with various types of cars:
Vehicle ………………… Gallons per year
Volt …………………….. 37
50 MPG car …………… 228
40 MPG car …………… 285
30 MPG car …………… 380
22.2 MPG car ………… 513
20 MPG car …………… 570

22.2 MPG is significant because this is the current combined CAFE standard, which includes cars, SUVs, and passenger vans. At 37 gallons per year, the Volt only uses 7% of the current average gas consumption.

By now, most people would agree that hydrogen isn’t worth the effort, but let’s keep going…

Contrary to public opinion, cellulosic ethanol technology is real now. They’re already building plants that will mass produce cellulosic ethanol for $1 per gallon, and GM is investing in this.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9928810-54.html

If EREVs replace the vast majority of gasoline consumption, then ethanol becomes extremely viable to replace the rest. So that completely solves your goal to eliminate the use of gasoline that is made from Middle Eastern oil, and it does so using our existing infrastructure of electrical outlets and liquid filling stations. This is why our national security experts are recommending a combination of plug-ins and bio-fuels to eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
http://www.setamericafree.org/

By the way, if you look at total oil consumption, gasoline is only 44%, so to eliminate oil imports, you’ll have to go after home heating oil, jet fuel, diesel, plastics, petro-chemicals, etc.. In addition, we import more natural gas than we export, so to become energy independent, we’ll have to reduce natural gas consumption as well.

Getting away from oil to lithium? This could be another Middle East. I hope not!! That’s why I think hydrogen power is the long term solution. Look at lithium as a short term solution.
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You need to look at battery technology in the long term, not specifically lithium.

To make calculations easy, lets assume the battery pack for every EV (or vehicle using the technology) is 500 LBS.

Lets throw out there that in the next 5 years, we can expect sales of EV’s to have a mean value of 2 million. 2M*500LBS=1B LBS, or 500,000 tons.

Taking Bolivia’s lithium out of the picture, it’s still estimated that there is over 4 million tons available (8yrs worth).

With all the talk that’s going on about new battery technologies, I’m not worried at this point, as I’m expecting one of those other technologies to rise up within the next few years.

It sure would be beneficial to both Bolivia and the rest of the world if they sold it now, rather than waiting until the technology is outdated.

If you look at it closely, most arguments for hydrogen are based on wishful thinking and future technologies that don’t yet exist. People seem to lose all sense of logic and reason when they start talking about hydrogen. Any serious bang-for-buck analysis using today’s technology shows that hydrogen is nowhere near being viable.

So, as I said before, I think research of new hydrogen technologies is great, but the development of hydrogen cars and fueling stations using the current technology is a total waste of money that could be used for something that’s already viable.