Vast deposits of lithium could change the global politics of battery production | Hacker News Reader

Vast deposits of lithium could change the global politics of battery production

smithsonianmag.com

113 pointsMz42 comments

Sadly lithium still isn't scarce enough to make it uneconomic to produce a perfectly good rechargeable battery and sell it as single-use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5korWqCcsHE

I can tell you where you're going to be able to find those vast lithium deposits soon - landfill sites.

I wonder how can this be economically viable...

This is paraphrased from last time it came up so I apologize for any inaccuracy:

They're reject cells from the manufacturing process. In manufacturing you have a specification your products must meet or exceed for you to sell them with a certain rating. Some fraction of the cells a factory produces don't meet that specification, so they're either thrown out or used in unimportant applications like this.

It's 3£, which is $3.88. For a 600mAh battery. You can buy an 8-pack of 2800mAh batteries (each) for $15 on Amazon. So the manufacturer is definitely making money.

The recycling part is potentially interesting. Whoever figures out how to get a ton of these discarded can make money by making power packs.

You can only compare capacity in mAh if the batteries you're comparing have the same voltage. If not, you need to convert to mWh.

A 600mAh 3.7V battery holds the same amount of energy as a 1500mAh 1.5V battery.

We're talking about lithium ion batteries. They are all about the same voltage.

Except the comment to which I replied was talking about '8-pack of 2800mAh' from Amazon. I'm pretty sure they're talking about 1.5v Ni-MH AA batteries.

Oh, maybe I shouldn't have given them the benefit of the doubt. Why would they talk about incompatible batteries? Weird.

You can get a four pack of 2800mAh lithium ion batteries for that price, though.

Every time I throw an aluminum can in the trash I tell myself that I’m incentivizing the future mining of landfills. One man’s trash...

The earth's crust is 13% aluminium by weight, so there is no chance there ever will be a shortage. The thing with aluminium is rather the amount of energy needed to produce it compared to the energy needed to recycle it, which is about 20:1.

Once a can has been put into a landfill mixed with other stuff and with time also oxidized, that advantage is mostly gone.

> Once a can has been put into a landfill mixed with other stuff and with time also oxidized, that advantage is mostly gone.

What is the typical oxidization rate? (Average by mass, I guess.) I thought oxidation was mostly negligible because, unlike rust, aluminum oxide forms a protective layer. I would think this is fairly effective in a dump.

Nimble robots and better image recognition will eventually drive the cost of landfill retrieval way down.

> The earth's crust is 13% aluminium by weight

I found this astonishing, and looked for sources. It looks like they[1][2] say it's more like 8.2% aluminum by weight. That's still quite high, though, and also it's the third highest behind oxygen and silicon. (If you exclude oxygen, I think it goes up to 15.4% aluminum.) Very interesting.

[1] http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele013.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

> no chance there ever will be a shortage.

In our lifetimes.

One can only hope that by the time we turned 13% of our crust into cans we also have technology to mine stuff from asteroids.

I think it'll take a long time to use up the crust.

Honest question: is there a better option for non-rechargeable batteries for portable electronics? Where "better" means some combination of lower cost, higher energy density, more recyclability, more safety, or similar.

Plain lithium batteries (non-rechargeable) are cheaper and have higher capacity than lithium ion. Other factors are basically similar. I think the only reason to use lithium ion when you don't care about recharging is if you have a lot of extras, say manufacturing rejects or have some serious economies of scale going on.

Disposable lithium batteries (lithium iron disulfide) can hold a charge for 20 years in storage and have a greater temperature tolerance compared to alkaline. They're ideal for uses like an emergency flashlight that you leave in the glove compartment.

They're also 1.5v which makes them suitable as a replacement in for alkaine AA/AAA batteries. Lithium ion is 3.7v so it only works in devices made for it.

They're also lower weight, which makes the fact that they have higher total power and peak current even more impressive. They're ideal for not just emergency flashlights because of their longer storage time, but also for anything where you care about weight and power like a backpacking headlamp or bike light. It's just amazing chemistry.

It surprises me that alkaline batteries are holding on as well as they are. If something with the performance difference between alkaline and lithium ion disulfide came along for rechargeable lithium ion cells, every manufacturer would be on it just as fast as they could possibly pivot their supply chains. I guess people just don't care about primary cells as much.

Hi I worked for a short time at Duracell. I do not know why they were ultimately rejected, but all of the consumer battery companies were researching lithium cells decades ago. I suspect it is some combination safety, environmental, and cost concerns of Lithium vs Manganese. The alkaline manganse cells still have very impressive lifetimes and energy density. The chemistry is amazingly suited for one off cells.

It could also be there is just not a lot of market pressure. If a manganese alkaline cell last a bit more than ten years, are you going to be upset with Duracell ten years later when you have no idea how much it has been utilized?

Rejected? They're in just about every grocery store at twice the price. But you have to be drawing a pretty high current before they last twice as long.

Rejected for replacing alkaline cells for AA, AAA, C, D, etc. Also I need to make a correction the comparison is between zinc and lithium, not manganese.

I often read that lithium cells suffer from volume changes during use but do not know if this affects lithium primary cells. The alkaline cells virtually never leak.

They replaced a significant fraction of the AA, AAA, C, D cells. But the alkalines are cheaper and on the same shelf.

Rejected for bulk replacement then

In all the towns I've lived in, it's illegal to put fluorescent bulbs and lithium batteries in the trash. They're supposed to be disposed of as hazardous waste.

It's not like they can really inspect the contents of your bin before the machinery dumps it all into the truck. You'd have to do something really dumb to get caught. Those rules really depend on most people not being dicks about it.

Most garbage collection in Australia has a camera to inspect bin contents and catch people abusing the recycling system.

It's been in place for a decade now.

https://www.news-mail.com.au/news/waste-truck-watching-you-g...

That's interesting. The non-recyclable waste is normally packaged up into black bags here in the UK and it's often pretty noxious. They're not gonna slice them open so a camera can have a look, so people can put almost anything in them so long as it fits.

My batteries and bulbs are picked up together with the rest of my trash, I just put it in a little box hanging on the bin. There's no reason what so ever to not put them in the right place. So everyone does.

Most supermarkets where I live have a battery bin near the entrance, and I've seen many times various packs or even sealed lead acids crammed in.

> In all the towns I've lived in, it's illegal to put [..] lithium batteries in the trash

That's not true anywhere in the US, for the primary cell LiFeS02 batteries (such as the Energizer L91). They are not considered hazardous waste and the suggested disposal route is your trash can.

You are probably thinking of lithium-polymer batteries, which are indeed hazardous waste (and cargo).

One thing that concerns me is, I don't think there was any mention of the sensitivity of the sites listed in the article. For example, the article casually listed the Yellowstone caldera.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Lithium-rich sites were significant sites to a significant number of people.

There are plenty of very large calderas that are unpopular and already host to mining operations. Much of the west coast is stuff like this. McDermitt Caldera contains over 3 million tons of lithium, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDermitt_Caldera

Hard rock lithium -pegmatites- were actually the majority of global lithium until recently. They were/are primarily used in ceramics. Brine-produced lithium has one fewer step to convert to lithium in batteries, but the cost is absolutely marginal. These pegmatites are common worldwide, unlike brine deposits.

Brines are mined somewhat like fracking- a borehole is drilled and water (without fracturing compounds) is injected and then pumped out into large evaporating pools, leaving behind lithium-containing salts. It's extraordinarily cheap because it's dead simple to purify and doesn't even involve actual mining. However these sites are uncommon (though there are still several in the US, and worldwide- they are not limited to South America) and since you're limited to land area, evaporation speed and water supply, this is a limited and slow process. And the water use can be a real problem- brines often exist in places with limited water supplies as the water washes the lithium away over long timescales. Still, the evaporation pools often support life for a time, and flamingos like them. It would be much better to not waste the water though.

Hectorite is the main focus of this article. It requires a couple more steps (limestone roast and acid leach) to extract and costs ~$2/lb[1] (NB that was in 1987) compared to current carbonate prices of $2.5-$3.5. I wouldn't say it's nonviable because it probably helps to put a ceiling on the long-term price of lithium, however high lithium content in these clays is .35-.65% compared to 6%+ in pegmatites. I'm not sure it will ever be relevant. Also note that although "acid wash" sounds bad, it doesn't have to be. The acids get reused.

The bottom line is that lithium is highly available. It contributes very little (<5%) to the cost of a battery, so huge disruptions (4x price increases in the last lithium shortage) have very little impact on the price of batteries as long as availability is not affected.

The biggest price factor in most batteries is cobalt- it's very expensive and makes up many times more of a battery's mass than lithium. Currently most of it comes from two countries in Africa. The DRC is one of the few places in the world where cobalt can be found on its own. Despite this it's almost always found with nickel, which is produced in huge quantities. For the moment the cobalt supply for batteries will remain stable solely because of the recovery of nickel prices- this has caused a half dozen or so mines to open/reopen in the US. There was a strong fear that cobalt would put a brutal penalty on the price of lithium batteries during the nickel price crash, and eventually that might still be the case. It's also worth noting that there are many alternate chemistries that don't use cobalt, but the best ones do. It's possible that a new chemistry (such as li-metal/foil batteries) may change that, but unlikely.

Finally, graphite is the last supply threat. Battery graphite is about a 40/60 synthetic/natural blend- both types have advantages and disadvantages, so they are used together. High quality spheroidal graphite is hard to find, but the synthetic stuff is nearly as cheap so it's unlikely it'll be a problem. I don't know much about the specifics but I think it comes down to a lack of searching, ie it's easier to sell high quality graphite as anthracite coal than to worry about selling to battery producers.

[1]: http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/techreports/PDF/USBM-691.pd...

The problem isn't lack of lithium. It's a lack of cobalt.

There's no lack of cobalt, it's only the most constrained supply. There's no problem with abundance as long as mines are opened.

Secondary problems of increased cobalt demand: the price of nickel will probably crash again, as they are found together except for in a few countries.

How is cheap nickel a "problem"?

At a guess: if the price falls too much it becomes uneconomical to mine it.

It'll hurt the nickel industry!

Seriously, though, like any commodity, dumping lots of excess nickel on the market could force mines to shut down if they can't weather the temporary explosion from a temporary demand spike in cobalt due to this lithium concept. Then when the explosion stopped, cobalt mining slowed down, you'd coast on excess reserves for a while.

When those reserves run out, suddenly you need nickel but the mines haven't been profitable for a decade, it takes time to restart surveying activity, procure specialized equipment, find/train employees...you can't turn it back on like a switch. But you can almost turn it off like a switch with new tech that obsoletes an industry.

Price crashes cause longer term price increases. The problem scenario is that a huge increase in cobalt demand could lead to a big oversupply of nickel as happened in 2007[1]. Mines are cash-poor so it only takes a few years of bad prices for most of them to go bankrupt and be forced to sell their assets. Since nickel and cobalt are mined side-by-side, the price of cobalt skyrockets to make up for the low nickel prices. Supply and demand bounce all over the place and the uncertainty makes it super unattractive to investors, which makes it harder to open or upgrade mines, which long-term raises prices.

Ideally careful pricing would avoid that situation, and most nickel mines will also be selling cobalt and will be well aware that nickel prices will be affected. However pricing is never perfect and the possibility of a crash is still there.

Also, lithium futures would get trashed, which would be bad for anyone invested in them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_commodities_boom#Nickel

TL;DR - in addition to the usual spots at the bottom of drainage basins, lithium also exists in pegmatite and hectorite deposits. But there's currently no commercially-viable process for extracting it. Headline is kind of hype-y.

> But there's currently no commercially-viable process for extracting it.

No, that's just hype. Hard rock lithium -pegmatites- were actually the majority of global lithium until recently. They were/are primarily used in ceramics. Brine-produced lithium has one fewer step to convert to lithium in batteries, but the cost is absolutely marginal. It's plenty easy and commercially viable to produce batteries from pegmatite lithium.

Hectorite is specifically what she was talking about as nonviable, which appears to be broadly correct. It requires a couple more steps to extract and costs ~$2/lb[1] compared to current carbonate prices of $2.5-$3.5. So I wouldn't say it's nonviable because it probably helps to put a ceiling on the long-term price of lithium. However high lithium content in these clays is .35-.65% compared to 6%+ in pegmatites. I'm not sure it will ever be relevant.

[1]: http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/techreports/PDF/USBM-691.pd...

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