The new 'gold rush' for green lithium
bbc.com
bbc.com
So here's my summary. From googling around, So lithium costs about $13,000 a ton. Hard rock mining releases 15 tons of CO2 for every ton of lithium. Carbon offsets cost about $8 a ton, using the numbers for Stripe's cheapest carbon offset program. So even if the CO2 was fully offset, that would be adding $120 per ton or about 1% to the cost of lithium. This doesn't seem like a very big deal.
For water consumption, that same ton of lithium takes 170 cubic meters, which is about 2 person-months of urban Chilean water consumption. I don't have a specific price or tradeoff to put on it, but it seems unlikely that the cost would amount to as much as the carbon dioxide.
I think what's really going on here is that the current methods of producing lithium are really not very environmentally harmful. IMO this proposed lithium production facility in the UK would be nice, but supporting it by saying that the current methods of lithium production are environmentally unsound doesn't seem right to me. This seems like a case of two different groups of environmentalists shooting each other in the foot, when the best thing for the environment is focusing on getting off fossil fuels instead of preemptively minimizing the small impact of lithium mining.
It sounds to me like I should set up a giant CO2 production factory and then people can pay me not to run it. Great business. The people paying me are still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere but greenwashed with a carbon offset gimmick.
Water use compared to personal use isn't that important. Most water used by an industrial society is used in agriculture and that's probably true for Chile.
I think what's really going on here is that the current methods of producing lithium are really not very environmentally harmful.
Agreed. The negative impact of mining generally comes from companies incentivized to cut corners. Strong regulations requiring waste be contained, etc, are what needed. The worst problem is that large companies do cost arbitrage across the world, incentivizing countries to lower their standards - why all the "rare earth" mining went to China when they were willing cut corners and then the West screamed bloody murder when China stopped wanting to be the world's garbage dump.
Oh that's a good point. So for comparison, a ton of wheat takes about 1300 cubic meters of water, so 8x the water per ton as lithium. That wheat sells for about $200, so lithium is using orders of magnitude less water per dollar of revenue. This comparison makes lithium mining look even more environmentally friendly than comparing it to urban use does. Of course these are all estimates based on brief internet research so the true numbers could be different.
I couldn't figure out from Google where exactly the CO2 emissions from lithium mining comes from - that sort of thing would have been great for the actual professional article to provide.
m3 of water is a nonsense metric. Water is abundant in some places, and in those places it might as well be free. In other places it is highly scarce. Furthermore water is not consumed it's just borrowed for a while. So really you need to look at it more qualitatively, tell a story of the consequences of the water use.
From my limited insight into the issue, I got the impression, that the mining of lithium in itself isn't the problem, but that is being done in the cheapest ways. For example, when mining it from water, the water is being evaporated and the wind carries it to other places. But shouldn't it be possible to required miners by law to pump as much water into the ground as they pump out of it?
That would be more expensive, but as far as I understand it, it should reduce the environmental effects significantly.
I truly wish Bolivia to raise itself from poverty, but ideally without the destruction of its magical wonders. Damn I miss traveling...
This would despoil the area around the pump, somewhat. But this would be less than 1% of the 10,000km of the salar. Factories aren't very attractive, but enormous dunes of lithium-depleted salt might even be pretty. A matter of taste, let's say, but again, the great majority of the landscape would be untouched.
It would also create some subsidence, I imagine. But this wouldn't be visible.
And this must be balanced against the great good to humanity which is realized by the enormous amount of lithium batteries which could be manufactured with this resource.
I'd say this is worth persuading the Bolivian people to accept, and isn't worth overthrowing their government over. But I don't get to make these decisions, alas.
1) Stealing land rights from indigenous people. 2) Lack of environmental regulations, oversight and rehabilitation. 3) Getting ripped off by big mining corporations from across the world with a strong tendency to corrupt politicians and local police. 4) Ensuring good working conditions and compensation for miners.
But alas, for powerful people "persuasion" is often just a synonym for repression and violence.
$1.2B to Brazil: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-amazon-norw...
$150M to Gabon: https://qz.com/africa/1714104/gabon-to-get-150-million-from-...
Indonesia: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/05/indonesia-norway-redd-paym...
Guyana: https://news.mongabay.com/2009/02/norway-to-pay-guyana-to-sa...
edit: clarity.
Does damaging a world heritage site constitute hurting someone else or does it constitute only self harm because it's within sovereign borders?
So unless you can somehow move the worlds' nations to enact sanctions or invade, each state is free to mine what they want.
Sounds like business deal to me. If I am going to not earn money from a resource that is mine because of you, then you need to pay me back for that amount of money I was going to earn.
All around the world places have parallels or similarities. Patagonia reminds me of Alaska. The Sahara is a bit like the Simpson, white sand beaches in Northern Australia are similar to those in Thailand or the Bahamas.
Not so with Bolvia. I've never seen anything on the planet remotely like the high Altiplano around the Salar and the entire South Western part of Bolivia. It's utterly breathtaking and unique.
[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/the-uyuni-salt-flats-to-chile-1
Obviously my opinion is subjective, but it's a bit like comparing the mountains and wilderness of central Alaska to that of California. They're not on the same scale.
> The Aral Sea ... was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan (Aktobe and Kyzylorda Regions in the north) and Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan autonomous region in the south) which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up by the 2010s.
> Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km2 (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size...
> By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea.
I would go so far as to say that pumping up lithium enriched brine from underneath it is unlikely to despoil the natural beauty of the entire salt flat. One corner of it, perhaps.
Once that resource is exhausted, the choice could be made to strip-mine the surface. But that would be a choice, the slippery slope argument strikes me as tenuous here.
That’s incredible. I presume this is because no one has been looking for large reserves of lithium until recently.
There's no salar like Salar de Uyuni, so no, it isn't a simple matter of looking harder. There's plenty of lithium-bearing rock, for some value of 'plenty', but this is both expensive, and entails grinding and leaching ore, which is enormously more environmentally destructive and energy intensive.
Maybe it was an attempt at a joke, but considering he’s one of the richest men in the world who has a vested interest in lithium, and considering there was a Bolivian, quasi-US-backed coup just this past year for reasons which at least partially include these lithium deposits, it’s not at all funny to joke about.
On the other hand, MAS intends to exploit its lithium. It just plans to do that in a way that grows a high tech domestic industry instead of just exporting raw product. They also plan to keep the profits local to fund social programs and such, which rubs the neoliberal free market imperialists like American foreign policy goons the wrong way.