Tesla’s new patent involves using table salt to mine lithium

Brine, if it's actually brine, is safe to dump into the sea, too. Kinda cool if waste dumping ends up being adding more seawater to seawater.

Perhaps couple with de-salination?

and might use a lot less CO2.

Castings or forgings?

You do realize that has been the standard response of the "experts" to industries the Elon starts to enter. And then "experts" find there are details they overlooked because they knew they were right.

Can Elon be wrong? YES. But can the experts be wrong? Happens all the time.

GM, Ford, and every other car company enter the chat. "It's impossible to make electric vehicles work. There is no charging network, it's too difficult to build, no one likes it". Blah blah blah. Boing enters the chat "rockets that land on their arse are impossible. it can't be done." blah blah blah blah.

Excuse me if I could care less what old industry experts have to say - time and time and time and time and time again, he has proven them wrong.

It was written very lazily and quickly, by someone who knows that getting an article out first is going to be one of the most important things to driving clicks.

“Writing very quickly and publishing your first draft” - it’s a popular new technique for increasing productivity.

There's also the long quote from Electrek, which they claim "sums up the most important parts," but the quote just describes previous methods. The full Electrek article follows that with Tesla's method. That part is shorter, so you'd think a human would have quoted that instead.

Whenever I see the pay rates for writing on the internet, I'm amazed more articles don't sound like this.

I've heard that Fred Lambert (the author) is not a native English speaker. I think this might be the cause.

SEO?

"gotten hold of" aka "looked it up"

It is. https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...

They aren't typically published by the USPTO until 18 months after the priority date.

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1120.html

IME, it's typical for news outlets large and small to mine public data sources and imply that their source is somehow exclusive/private/etc.

Not necessarily before they're accepted I guess?

They are. Electrek just likes overstating their own importance.

The main source of lithium now is extraction from subsurface brines, mostly in South America (e.g., under salt flats in Bolivia, which is a major producer). Demand is expected to outstrip what these countries can supply as the EV and grid storage markets grow, plus countries with no lithium brines want in on the action, so there are various efforts to find economically competitive approaches to extracting lithium from other sources. Both the story you linked and this new patent are attempts to do that, but harnessing from different sources (seawater and lithium-rich clay, respectively), and using what appear to be unrelated chemical processes.

The article seems to imply that it was disclosed last year. Not the details of it, but the high level idea.

Hi think the author should have said instead “but we first heard about the concept last year from Tesla”

The rest of the sentence clarifies. Usually it's a good idea to read past the semicolon:

"The concept isn’t new; Tesla CEO Elon Musk first mentioned it at last year’s battery day."

Tesla pretends the concept is new to get the patent. The concept isn't actually new.

Would be far from the first time patents were granted this way...

I expected that Tesla got a patent on table salt and that some crazy Tesla fan (not every Tesla fan is crazy, but some are, as it happens with fans almost universally) is actually trying to sell it as a good thing.

Me too! I actually thought maybe they did that as a way to prove the absurdity of the patent system.

Those were my first thoughts as well!

Yes, the title reads more like click bait, perhaps because the title "SELECTIVE EXTRACTION OF LITHIUM FROM CLAY MINERALS" from the patent application would not generate enough clicks.

Apart from the semi-novel concept here, the word "about" is used frequently in the patent. It seems very hard to make something useful with the patent, with the uncertainty this introduces.

Is that standard procedure ?

Yep, my first thought was, I'll have to pay license fees now for putting salt on my meal.

Electrek is a glorified Tesla fanboi (Fredrick Lambert) blog which often skews reality. I'd never put "better source" and Electrek in the same sentence.

I'm saying this as a Tesla owner mind you!

The huge investment in lithium-ion has stayed ahead of any materials cost advantage (so lithium-ion has been cheaper for all applications, in addition to being better for applications where density and weight matter).

Nifty. At first I thought you were talking about molten sodium batteries, which have been around for a while but inconveniently have to be kept at high temperatures to keep the sodium liquid and so haven't seen much adoption. But yeah, sodium ion batteries are now a thing and don't have that limitation.

This is a valuable comment that is also a pun. Tesla having a patent on a process does not mean that it's necessarily what they're going to do, simply an option they're exploring. Hence, take this article with a grain of salt.

HN does not welcome low value comments

Tesla did change the game in automotive, creating a viable market for pure electric cars. SpaceX did change the game for space launch providers, proving that it's a viable and profitable business for startups with reasonable funding. Today we have lots of startups in the market competing for different niches, before SpaceX there were only slow moving giants like Boeing and Northrop Grumman.

Of course the press likes to pump up the hype and will subsequently call everything they do game-changing. But it could be justified in this case. This could be game changing for lithium mining. And that's a game we are all somewhat invested in because of how prevalent lithium batteries have become in the last two decades.

Improving the cost of lithium extraction, if this can be scaled up, is actually a really big deal for electric vehicles. The single largest cost of a modern EV is the battery. Tesla thinks this process reduces the cost of lithium extraction 30%.

Weird. I test-drove a Tesla a couple years ago and it seemed pretty real to me.

Can you point to a previous implementation of lithium extraction using table salt?

>I have not seen a single thing come from Elon Musk that didn't turn out to involve some kind of clever fraud, business trickery, or downright deception on closer inspection.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Awarded_global_comme...

> but I'd swear this is not a new phenomenon.

Consider actually reading it, this is pointed out in the text.

> by presenting something that's rather mediocre and mundane

0% of global lithium is produced from clay extraction. But I guess its so mediore and mundane that you could easily do it.

> Elon Musk that didn't turn out to involve some kind of clever fraud

Like when they delivered Astronauts to the Spacestation. Everybody know that that is actually filmed in a desert in Nevada.

> But apparently a substantial part of today's (global) society just loves to be fooled

Or you know, maybe you are not as smart as you think you are. I know witch one is more likely.

> "but Tesla gave away their patents to help humanity." (...) "Change the world" (...)

They did, tho.

They've pretty much forced the worldwide electrification of cars to happen, in spite of the market wanted. That's a huge help for humanity and a big change to the world.

It's funny you should become skeptical over the rare case where pretentious slogans were actually true.

>their propaganda/PR machine

You mean Elon's tweets?

Because Tesla has, by far, the tiniest "propaganda/PR machine" in their industry. Do you have any idea how much their competitors spend on PR, advertising and lobbying? Also, how much their suppliers and partners (e.g oil and gas) bring to the table?

Battery production is definitely getting cheaper per unit capacity? I haven't seen any evidence in the other direction.

The hydrogen storage solution remains inadequate and does not seem to be improving at the same rate. There's also the "unclean hydrogen" problem: at the moment, if you go out and buy it, there's a very good chance it will have been made from natural gas with the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere. At that point you might as well use existing LNG/CNG cars.

No, hydrogen isn't a much safer bet, all Hindenburg jokes aside. Quite the contrary, I think hydrogen already has lost out in the car space and might even so in the truck space. Battery costs are still falling a lot. With the changes outlined at the Tesla battery day, production costs for battery electric vehicles might be cheaper than combustion engined cars. If you compare a Tesla with a BMW, the Tesla already might be cheaper, it certainly is if you consider the TCO.

Meanwhile, hydrogen cars are much more expensive than battery electric cars, there are only a few models available at all and there are few filling stations - they are really expensive to build. On top of that, distribution of the hydrogen is much more complex than using the power grid for electricity. And you can charge an electric car at basically any outlet, if need requires.

But the largest problem is, that for renewable hydrogen, we need about 3x as much as electricity than using a battery electric vehicle. Not counting anything else, this is 3x the cost.

Over the last decade, the price of cells has dropped 85%. UBS predicts it will drop another ~60% over the coming decade.

See chart at the bottom of the link.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/30/battery-developments-in-the-...

The cost of lithium-ion batteries has dropped 97% over the past three decades. It's been a steady improvement and the trend is expected to continue.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/chart-beh...

It looks like cost parity with ICEs will happen around 2023.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34992832/battery-price-dr...

Hydrogen is likely to be better for some applications though, like long-haul jets.

More than 95% of the hydrogen produced comes from coal and gas[0]. If we manage to switch to hydrolysis, we'll have to generate at least twice the energy we'd need for Li-Ion batteries to due energy loss in weel-to-wheels measurements[1].

Also, there's no lack of materials for battery (NB: Tesla only uses LFP cells in China now, and achieve similar specs as their NMC chemistry used in the US).[2]

There's no shortage of materials in sight and it's far cheaper than hydrogen. Hydrogen has very few use cases were it's more efficient than batteries (industry, agriculture and aviation, mostly)[3].

[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production)

[1](https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...)

[2](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-china-idUSKBN26L26S)

[3](https://twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1397267000196534283)

It seems like we are set for much slower price decline, only halfling the battery price every ten years or so. But honestly that's fine, today's EVs have batteries that are large enough for most people in most places. Better charging infrastructure, and maybe faster charge times are what's missing most.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a fine technology, but it has no momentum. It has a chance to win long-distance trucking, but I doubt it will be the future of personal transportation.

The lack of smell and explosiveness of hydrogen gas/air mixture is pretty terrifying. Consider an underground garage full of (possibly ageing) cars with hydrogen on board. There might be ways of storing hydrogen more safely than a pressure tube, but I encourage hydrogen enthusiasts to experience what the air/gas mixture smells like and how it burns.

I would take that bet. In 5, 10 or 20 years electric vehicles will still vastly outnumber hydrogen powered vehicles.

>It seems like battery production and materials is not getting much cheaper

It might seem that way but they are.

Looking at inner cities, where most cars are, I don't see the opportunity to put enough charger stations in for everybody. Most cars are parked on the street. It works now at comparatively low penetration, but I can't imagine it work close when almost every car needs charging.

If you have to drive to a dedicated spot to do all your charging, all the time, >30 min for charging is /long/. Filling up a car is what, 5 min? And it lasts longer. Don't see this scaling, and people will not like it.

How much power can you realistically get to an European inner-city parking garage without major infrastructure changes? Comparing the timeline for all-electric to the timeline of major construction projects in Germany, I'm not optimistic....

I think we need a "fluid"-refillable e-car. Hydrogen is an option, or maybe build a battery with a replaceable fluid as the energy store. But we might be in a trap: Right now, battery cars are clearly better -- better availability, range, price, choice. And now, charging is not a big problem in most areas, with dedicated spots for charging, it is sometimes easier to park than a gas car! But at some point, these spots will be saturated, and I don't see the capacity ramp up fast up with demand. (Same for green energy production, at least in Germany, without nuclear as an option). Part of that is "not in my neighborhood" initiatives against ugly charging ports running along every street, against construction for more cables, transformer stations etc.

So we could end up with many battery cars and a charging infrastructure which doesn't scale fast enough, and no hydrogen cars, where we could retool the gas infrastructure for filling up and scale quickly.

Hydrogen has the advantage that it is rather cheap and efficient to transport it over large distances. You could do hydrogen production in Africa, for example, and ship it to Europe. Even less danger than oil-tankers. A ship accident is either a big fire, or nothing. No large oil spill. Production could be local to power/far away from people, so social acceptance is better. In-car storage and safe filling up seems to be the problem.