$1.5B lithium deposit discovered in Maine; excavating it poses a legal challenge
themainemonitor.org
themainemonitor.org
What matters in lithium industry, is chemical processing. Nobody cares about a lithium mining company. What matters is lithium processing.
Lithium is not like a base metal, its more like a specialty chemical. The output from every mine is unique, there is not overall standard. Each output from each mine has to be qualified with each major battery manufacturer.
Nevada has 100s of billion of dollars worth of lithium by itself probably.
This will almost certainty not be mined. Making money from this kind of rock is difficult in the first place and doing it in a place with little mining industry makes that even worse.
Edit:
If you want insight into lithium industry, I recommend 'Global Lithium Podcast' by a guy that has been in that business for many decades and has worked for all the many of the major producers.
Anyway, the article is not about the operation of mining lithium, how to earn money on lithium or even chemical processing, it's about regulation about mining in Maine, the deposit itself just being the driver of the story. It also goes into describing the supply chain around lithium and some other goodies.
We've got good responses by disinterested parties who know a lot about lithium and mining here, and it's the single sided argument funded by unknown sources that is generating the sticky "but what if"s.
> The Freemans and researchers at Plumbago North knew the crystals they found were extraordinary as soon as they uncovered them. To determine the concentration of lithium, they sent bulk samples for analysis at labs in Australia and Germany.
> The results, said Simmons, were astonishing. The deposit showed an average lithium oxide content of 4.68% by weight. That’s three times the average concentration of the world’s top 10 hard rock lithium mines. By comparison, the world’s second-richest hard rock lithium deposit, the Bernic Lake mine in Manitoba, has a lithium oxide content of 2.76% by weight and contains roughly eight million tons of ore.
For comparison, Greenbushes, THE lithium mine in West Australia, is 1.60%. Note that Greenbushes is actually famous for its high concentration. More typical is Mt Cattlin at 0.50%. This deposit is 3x richer than Greenbushes and 9x richer than Mt Cattlin, which is in fact astonishing as the article says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8-YDMzg2bY Interesting video on the Lithium extraction
https://www.reuters.com/article/tianqilithium-australia-idUS...
So its not as easy as just selling it to the lithium ore market. You need a project partner that develops the project with you.
The only group currently processing spodumene to lithium are in China. Others want to make such project but I don't think they are online.
I'm not saying this deposit is worthless, I'm just saying 'this much lithium is there' is really not a good way to evaluate the actual value of a deposit like this.
Generally the location of mines like this is quite relevant, and a place that have bad regulation to begin with are very unattractive.
The traditional lithium belt in the US is in North Carolina, lithium was mined there for decades. Starting a new mine there, is already incredibly difficult. Doing it in a place with no such history will be far more difficult.
You don't need an upscale suburb to run this kind of facility. Employees won't be put off because the commute isn't 15min or because they can't go to a boutique sandwich shop during lunch break.
I'm guessing that their driveway won't be open to public traffic and would be built to withstand constant use by massively heavier trucks than are commonly seen on US2, so I don't think this is an apples-apples comparison.
The issue isn't a show-stopper, but you can't just say "it's a two lane highway, that's enough" and "we already have heavy loads on the road, it will be fine". The are more variables to account for when determining the infrastructure necessary for large industrial operations.
As long as the "road" is kind of flat and made of something slightly more sturdy than sand, these trucks can get through.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lawrence_and_Atlantic_Rail...
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Plumbago%20Mounta...
Here we are talking about Spodumene rocket deposit. These are typically somewhat higher grade but they have a proven track record and company with knowledge on how to commercially make lithium hydroxide or carbonade from it.
Spodumene was basically the original source for lithium, that we used to make nuclear weapon and later glass. This was for a long time almost driven out of the market by brine projects (mostly in South America) but the demand for high grade lithium hydroxide has lead to a Spodumene boom in West Australia.
I've heard a lot about the difficulty in processing lithium into "battery grade" metal. Is there merit to this claim? If so, what's so hard about it?
I can only say that there are not very many companies that can do it and even those companies seem to struggle a fair bit bringing new supply to market. Many startup have for long time tried all kinds of ways of bringing new supply to market, and many have seen huge delay.
Lithium was (and still is) a tiny industry and these process are pretty immature. Most lithium never needed to be as high grade as is required now.
Every company seems to have a lot of its own secret sauce. The people that are really knowledge about the subject are very thinly distributed and given the growth of the industry I would assume there are very few veterans.
You can just go out get a bunch of veterans that have done it many times before, buy some standard equipment and get going.
Somebody in the comments here was involved in setting up such a project, so that person have some more insight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Environmental_issues :
> Environmental issues
> The manufacturing processes of lithium, including the solvent and mining waste, presents significant environmental and health hazards.[134][135][136] Lithium extraction can be fatal to aquatic life due to water pollution.[137] It is known to cause surface water contamination, drinking water contamination, respiratory problems, ecosystem degradation and landscape damage.[134] It also leads to unsustainable water consumption in arid regions (1.9 million liters per ton of lithium).[134] Massive byproduct generation of lithium extraction also presents unsolved problems, such as large amounts of magnesium and lime waste.[138]
> In the United States, there is active competition between environmentally catastrophic open-pit mining, mountaintop removal mining and less damaging brine extraction mining in an effort to drastically expand domestic lithium mining capacity.[139] Environmental concerns include wildlife habitat degradation, potable water pollution including arsenic and antimony contamination, unsustainable water table reduction, and massive mining waste, including radioactive uranium byproduct and sulfuric acid discharge.
Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Precautions :
> Lithium metal is corrosive and requires special handling to avoid skin contact. Breathing lithium dust or lithium compounds (which are often alkaline) initially irritate the nose and throat, while higher exposure can cause a buildup of fluid in the lungs, leading to pulmonary edema. The metal itself is a handling hazard because contact with moisture produces the caustic lithium hydroxide. Lithium is safely stored in non-reactive compounds such as naphtha.
Your Tesla’s lithium was likely mined in Australia, tanker shipped to China, it leaves China as lithium hydroxide and may be final assembled into batteries in USA or Canada. Like almost all materials for “green” products, lithium, composites, aluminum, microchips, the western world has boxed themselves out of making these things. So China does it where they set their own carbon standards, and can manipulate value, pay, trade, subsidies.
There is a ton more to the conversation when someone says “we just need stricter cap and trade” because China knows the grip over everyone else they have. I rarely see people who know how things are made make that argument with any practical effectiveness, unless it ends with “we go to war”.
EDIT: So, to the topic, does it make sense to mine in Maine and ship to China for processing? Is this new reserve that good?
Tesla always had the vision of doing cathode processing in house, but I think in Nevada they never went that far (unless this has changed).
In Austin Tesla is planning a plant to transform Spodumene ore into hydroxide. This ore would come from North Carolina. However this mine project seem to be delayed so for quite a while they will likely continue to buy hydroxide (they have to buy anyway but buy less at least).
They are also planning, and are already building a cathode materials plant. There they would bring together nickel, lithium hydroxide and co to make a cathode materials.
They are also already building a cell plant where they would use that material to make cathode and cells.
They are also attempting to mine their own lithium in Nevada, but that will take a quite a few years to come online (if ever).
There are quite a few companies trying to get into all of these markets in the US, but compared to China its still a small amount and they are way behind
It’s actually really crazy but your green vehicle battery has to go from Australia to China to Japan to Nevada just to got one more place for final assembly.
Agreed on the if-ever. There is a lot my company is forced to do outside of the US and given the costs, we would never break even with buying from China, literally never.
> It’s actually really crazy but your green vehicle battery has to go from Australia to China to Japan to Nevada just to got one more place for final assembly.
And then might get delivered back to Australia or Britain or whatever.
This is also why one of Musk major focus on Battery Day was 'how far does a battery atom have to travel' is a major measure of success for them.
> And then might get delivered back to Australia or Britain or whatever.
Man, aluminum bugs me for that. Australia to China to Iceland to China to USA as some “fancy” case for landfill electronics at Walmart.
Realistically, $1.5B worth of lithium is a tiny amount of value for a US state. If I were Maine, I'd say no at $1.5B. You're probably going to get less than $60 per Maine resident - and that's a one-off $60, not even an annual $60.
The article keeps talking about how we need lithium. Ultimately, we don't seem to need it that much given how cheap it is. If I were Maine, I'd say "not now". If Lithium prices go up 100-1,000x in the future, then reevaluate. $6,000-$60,000 per Maine resident might be a useful amount of money. $60 isn't.
At current prices, any environmental damage is likely to cost more than the taxes on the profits would cover. $90M in taxes (30% of a 20% profit margin) won't clean up a lot.
I'm not saying that it's a global optimum for Maine to leave this lithium in the earth. I'm just noting that there isn't a lot of incentive for Maine to extract it. The article talks about other countries with less strict labor and environmental rules. That is true, but why should Maine risk its environment for such little money?
Why should Maine risk environmental damage for $60 per person? $90M in tax revenue is nothing compared to the cost to clean up environmental disasters. It's costing over $6M to clean up a single park in my town, never mind the type of environmental damage that might be caused by mining 11M tons of lithium. It seems like it would be foolish for Maine to alter the laws to allow the mining to take place at current prices.
Also, a certain number of people, very small but not zero, will get sick and die. All of those nasty diseases that come from any mine operation, especially something nasty like lithium.
Those sick people will go on Maine's disability / unemployment insurance / LTC / Medicaid / Medicare's system. Some of those people will live decades with cancer, their medical care paid for by the state (as it should).
At current prices, like you said, it might literally cost Maine more to open the mine than to leave the lithium in the ground, especially once you factor in environmental cleanup and healthcare costs.
>The estimated $1 billion impact is on top of the income that lobstermen earn when they bring their catch to shore and sell it, which in 2017 was $433 million statewide.
According to this study Maine nets 1.5B per year from lobsters alone.
This happens to be in the same vicinity as the most popular ski resort in the state, and a number of other popular outdoor attractions.
It's not quite your average rural economy that's desperate for any sort of new business/jobs/investment.
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A mine has to be weighed against the risk it represents to their existing economy - both in actual impacts of environmental disasters, and reputational if there's any negative stories coming out about it.
Tourists don't want to go have their destination wedding in the town that's in the news regularly because of X or Y pollution, even if they can't see it and it's not a risk to them on their visit.
A billion dollars worth of minerals is not a lot of minerals. It would be worth extracting if it were something readily shipped and processed like gold or crude. But from what I understand of lithium processing, just the equipment along might ring up in the hundreds of millions, and you still have to pay to get it extracted, processed, etc.
On other hand with deposits it's nothing. Reasonably considering the needed investment for exploitation from equipment, planning, permissions, workers etc. I really feel that currently it is nowhere near enough to justify exploitation. Big mines are not cheap to build or operate. I doubt 1,5B of material is enough to justify initial investment.
At least the lithium deposit near the Salton Sea is already in an area that's an ecological disaster. It makes sense that Maine would want to protect their natural resources.
Yet here we are talking about a lithium mine, which is not clean.
The problem is that in open conversation like this a simple statement like 'Yet here we are talking about a lithium mine, which is not clean' is insufficiently contextualized to know where the commenter is coming from. Are they just trying to be transparent and realistic? Are they someone that has no dynamic range in their understanding of ecological harm? Are they long in petroleum and want to throw interference up at any point where electrification of transport comes up? Are they just being a contrarian troll?
Not to suggest OP was doing this, but it seems a bit weird to start your mouth watering at the notion of "I can't wait to strip 11 million tons of rock out of the side of this mountain, melt it down and refine it, so that we can start being clean with it by recycling."
For folks who don’t live in Maine it’s a no-brainer: sure, go for it! Bring the USA more domestically produced lithium.
But… mining fucks up entire ecosystems and pollutes water etc… and even if companies can “promise” the operation will be clean, come to implementation they likely walk back on that and the damage is done.
At the very least, all the demolition and vehicles, fuel, explosives, chemicals.
Shits going to leak into the rivers one way or the other. In addition, they would likely use up a ton of local water supply.
It’s a no-brainer. Maine is not in the middle of some desert.
It is just a lot more expensive then.
Which is why most mining is done in remote, or poor areas, with laughable regulations, where no one dares complain for the jobs.
Because it's worse than lithium and contributes to a global catastrophe that threatens billions of lives.
1. Mine lithium 2. Drill oil 3. Do nothing
You have to store energy somehow, even if the entire world shifted to walking everywhere. Goods still need to traverse the world and thus far there hasn't been anything else with a high enough energy density to get close.
The argument being made is that if mining lithium becomes more popular, its likely to lead to advancements that do limit its ecological impact and provide a more sustainable method for storing energy...
Mine somewhere else.
Non-lithium approaches to storing energy.
Coal releases the most CO2 per unit energy. It's almost pure carbon after all. But to compare with a gasoline car you have to consider:
(1) Large power plants are anywhere from 1.5X to 3X more thermally efficient than a small piston engine. How much better depends on whether the power plant is an old school boiler and turbine or a newer supercritical steam or combined cycle plant.
(2) Gasoline is the highly refined and quality controlled end product of a long supply chain. Oil must be drilled, sometimes cracked (for heavy oil), shipped (often more than once), refined (this uses a lot of power), doped with small amounts of manufactured additives, then shipped at least one and sometimes two or three more times to a gas station. Every step of that supply chain uses even more energy, and this must be subtracted to get the overall end-to-end efficiency of a car engine. This makes car engine efficiency from oil well to tailpipe really suck. Coal meanwhile is often shipped only once or twice and requires minimal processing, usually just pulverization and then flue gas scrubbers at the exhaust end.
(3) ICE cars require a lot more maintenance and fluids that have to be changed, etc., and all that has to also be considered in their energy footprint.
EVs are superior in every single way except range and recharge time: complexity of the vehicle, reliability, acceleration and driving experience, urban pollution, overall emissions, and end to end efficiency. They remain superior even in the worst case of a 100% coal fired power grid, and very few regions get their power from only coal. The range and recharge time gap is already small enough to make EVs practical for 90%+ of driving scenarios and the gap is closing. The oil age is over.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of shitty cars on the road. A power plant's engine is going to usually be well tuned and maintained because small increases in efficiency can be worth a ton of money when you are generating tens of gigawatt hours per day of power. How often does a typical driver of a middle-aged car take it in to be tuned with the objective of maximizing energy efficiency?
I bet the average gap across all cars on the road and including transmission loss is at least 2X.
Also it's tough to argue against the second point. Look into how much power is used in the oil to gasoline supply chain, especially if the oil is coming from heavy oil that requires an additional cracking ("upgrading") step or fracked wells that require a lot of energy to drill and hydraulically fracture. I recall reading an analysis years ago arguing that the Canadian tar sands are almost an indirect natural gas to oil conversion operation rather than a net producer of energy. A huge amount of gas is burned to get that stuff out of the ground and into a form that refineries can handle. You could instead just burn that gas in a combined cycle power plant and run EVs with it and emit a lot less carbon.
Thing is when you are buying any oil product you are really not buying energy. It's ridiculously expensive compared to energy from any other source. You are buying conveniently stored energy and paying a huge markup for it.
Of course some of those losses would also apply to EVs but still, “wasting” 3/4 the energy of a highly refined, carbon intensive product is a pretty low bar.
Page 53 onward: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/5764...
While I'm also in favor of EVs, I can see two other ways in which EVs are not superior: weight (every article about EVs I read seems to mention that they're heavier than the corresponding ICE vehicles; on the other hand, the weight distribution seems to be yet another way in which most EVs are superior, with their low center of gravity), and price. The price seems to be the main barrier to EV adoption IMO, and is probably the reason they are so rare where I live (it's a major metropolitan area, and yet so far I have seen a non-rail EV only once).
The cost is higher up front but lower overall. The comparison is also only fair if you compare similar cost/luxury classes of car. It's not fair to compare a Tesla Model S to a Honda Civic. Instead you'd compare a Model S cost to a mid-high end BMW, Mercedes, Audi, etc. You'd compare a Honda Civic to a Nissan Leaf or a Chevy Bolt.
So I agree that you have to compare similar levels/trims, but many times the lower trims don't exist in the EV market.
Interesting. I live near a (relatively!) affluent suburb of Cincinnati and I see at least one or two Teslas a week, depending on how much I'm driving. Our next door neighbors have an electric BMW (i3). And I'm not a car guy, so there could be a lot more than that I'm missing.
Next car I buy will probably be a Tesla? Though it might be a few years.
Of course, this doesn't disprove your point that price is an issue in adoption.
If you live on an area with electrified rail transit (which is where we ought to be going) but effectively no EVs that's surprising. Where is this?
Today, the price of EVs has dropped to within comfortable reach of middle to upper middle class people, who are most of the people who buy new cars anyways (the lower middle and working class are much more likely to buy used).
The bigger issue is cultural - with some areas (US coastal states and cosmopolitan cities, cosmopolitan parts of Europe, etc) being far further along in the cultural adoption of EVs.
This is changing though. On a recent trip to Michigan I saw a significant rise in EVs (I'm more well off areas) vs the not distant past and I suspect this is because Detroit automakers finally have solid EV offerings.
EVs, like smartphones, are now aspirational goods.
Railway lines in poorer or second-world (ex-USSR) countries were sometimes electrified since it ensured the most flexible and reliable fuel supply: you could run trains not only from oil, but also coal, gas, nuclear or hydroelectric power. Compared to diesel, the locomotives are cheaper, faster, quieter, and more powerful, and the operating costs for trains and track are lower. The ride quality is better, and it still felt "modern" to make the upgrade in the mid-20th century.
Sort by percentage electrified length on [1] and you have Ethiopia, Armenia, Montenegro, Georgia, Bulgaria, India, Poland, Azerbaijan, North Korea, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Morocco, Ukraine, South Africa, North Macedonia etc all with a significant proportion of their rail networks electrified.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
Rio de Janeiro. Off the top of my head, we have Supervia (commuter rail, overhead catenary), Metrô Rio (subway, third rail), Corcovado train (touristic train, AC overhead catenary), Santa Teresa tram (tram, overhead catenary), and VLT Rio (tram, APS third rail). I know there are some EVs (I've seen it in the news a couple of years ago, there were something like five EVs in the whole city), but I've only seen one personally once (I believe it was a BMW i3).
The bigger issue here is IMO still price - and all EVs are AFAIK imported, which makes them even more expensive.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/09/electric-ca...
I would also imagine there is immense heating from the road surfaces. Not to mention the fumes, chemicals used in the processing, and all the transportation.
For example, where is the energy coming from to charge those batteries? Even if we say wind or solar, those devices end up in landfills. Maybe we should look at making these devices recyclable as an integral part of the strategy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/10/tesla-jb-straubel-redwood-ma...
And while nuclear power isn't ideal, it's the only tech that has fully decarbonized power grids at State level.
Otherwise we need battery power on an utterly insane level.
That said nuclear base load makes a _lot_ more sense.
Unfortunately I didn't take notes as to what the source was and I read this about a year ago. Google has been entirely useless as I've tried to dig it back up.
Finding the right balance of overbuilding supply and storage efficiency is going to be a long process.
The city of Milan built a new subway line, and some of the cheaper subway stations cost €8 million. The city of New York added a single wheelchair ramp to Avenue H which cost $14 million. https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/8/17/22629915/mta-looks-to-ramp...
Someone's going to complain "but environmental review is important to protect the environment!" which is why NYC's congestion charge is going to be delayed and litigated for the next 10-20 years in environmental review while cars stuck in traffic spew pollution into the environment.
And someone's going to complain about me mentioning labor unions, too, and admittedly they're sometimes a small part of the problem (when not suing under the environmental review laws) but the Second Avenue Subway still had to give the unions a six-figure payout for using a tunnel boring machine, and every crane has to have someone employed as a full-time oiler because it's still 1910 and we're on steam power. European labor somehow manages to avoid these levels of absurdity.
Not that this is necessarily the top problem. The notoriously free-market pro-business right-wing New York Times (cough, cough) brought over the guy who was in charge of Crossrail, and he was shocked at how many people were standing around the dig site doing nothing. The MTA had no idea why most of them were there getting paid. The MTA also has a bad habit of completing Phase 1 of a project, letting all the contractors who know anything about it go on to other projects, then starting again from scratch on Phase 2 a while later, so that there's absolutely no in-house expertise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
edit: and I'm not saying that cities are our only option, I'm saying that cities are our only option if we want to avoid having to create and maintain an utterly staggering amount of batteries.
I dispute that cities are necessarily dirty and disease ridden, particularly the latter. There are models for cities that would work in this regard (e.g. Tokyo, Singapore).
That said, I don't necessarily have much sympathy for the notion that we shouldn't rely on electric cars -- we should just do the simpler option of completely restructuring American cities and reallocating vast numbers of people. Which would be overwhelmingly, unfathomably expensive, as well as rely on people actually wanting to move to the new cities. (Or forcing them to, I suppose.)
Speaking for myself, I like having a bit of space. My very long term goal is to have a house or cabin in some decent forest, secluded and private and peaceful. City life just isn't appealing.
Houston famously has the largest highway in the US - the Katy Freeway (I-10) is 20 lanes + 6 frontage lanes at its widest, and it is an absolute eyesore [0]. Despite the almost $3 billion spent to expand it to 26 lanes, traffic has only gotten worse because of induced demand and the fact that cars are a horrendously inefficient way of moving people since the vast majority of traffic will always be single-occupant. Once you need two lanes in either direction to "fix traffic," you will never be able to keep up with demand unless the area depopulates.
Houstonians who rely on public transit find that their mobility is severely impaired. This is because our suburban sprawl is fundamentally incompatible with the "transit must be partially/wholly sustained by fares" logic which has been employed since the systems began to fall into public ownership as private operators began folding during the post-WW2 white-flight to the suburbs.
Even if you have self-driving electric busses (no driver to pay), you cannot provide sprawling neighborhoods with large minimum lot sizes and detached single-family homes enforced by zoning restrictions "good" bus service simply because of the capital required to purchase enough vehicles to run into these low-density areas regularly. And it should be noted that sub-10 minutes is the headway you need to provide for people to routinely take transit over their car because that feels frequent enough that people don't plan around the bus [1]. More than 20 minutes, and you have lost most potential riders. But in many cities, even 15 minute headways are the exception, not the norm. My home county has a total of 5 bus lines that run once an hour and stop at 8 PM, so the only people who ride it are those without cars. The city I currently live in also has lines that run once an hour (despite having a population of ~850k vs 160k).
So at this point, you might be thinking that America is forever doomed to repeat the abject failure of 20th-century urban planning. But that's not the case: Houston wasn't built around the car, it was destroyed and remade for the car. Like other American cities, if you look at photos of downtown from the early 1900s [2][3], the roads were much smaller, and things were at a human-scale. Photos from the 80s [4], by comparison, are filled with massive roads and parking lots to an almost comical extent. Of course, downtown Houston is nowhere near that bad today [5], but there is still a ton of land producing next to no tax revenue for the city because they are only used to store cars.
My point is that our cities weren't always like this. We can fix them. Yes, it costs money, and yes, it is temporarily inconvenient, but we spent hundreds of billions, if not trillions, rebuilding our cities around the car, so we could easily fund comprehensive public transportation, road-diets, bike lanes, and highway capping (or even outright removal) projects by raising taxes on the rich and eliminating wasteful spending like that which regularly occurs in our defense industry. It means a fundamental change to the American landscape again, of course - the reason we even have large, sprawling neighborhoods that cannot be retrofitted for good public transit is a byproduct of previous federal policies (like red-lining) and zoning restrictions - but as we head towards a climate catastrophe, we have to do something, and it's cheaper to pay up now. Electric self-driving cars will not get us out of this mess; private industry cannot begin to save the environment on its own, nor is it in its best interest to do so.
> The city of Milan built a new subway line, and some of the cheaper subway stations cost €8 million. The city of New York added a single wheelchair ramp to Avenue H which cost $14 million.
This is in large part because the MTA is a state agency. The city has little real control over the MTA. Because the NY legislature is in Albany, they are entirely detached from the realities of city residents who have been hoping for change for decades. Andy Byford is a great example of this: he spearheaded the single greatest increase in subway speeds in a generation, and the SPEED team he created has continued to increase speeds across the system [6]. He is also the reason CBTC is being deployed much more widely across the system [7] (relative to its deployment when he was appointed), and anyone who has taken the 7 or L at rush hour has seen the effects of that: trains run so close together that they oftentimes have to stop and wait for the train in front of them to exit the station.
And Cuomo ran him out of town because he realized Byford was the one getting good PR, rather than the media worshipping him. It's not often that you find people who genuinely care and are able to manage a juggernaut of an agency and make meaningful improvements while warding off meddling attempts from a hostile boss, and I doubt another one will come along for awhile.
There are a lot of reasons the MTA has such high costs. It's basically death by a thousand cuts - many individual laws that, on their own, increase very little, but as a whole have ballooned things to an absurd degree. And because the state legislature doesn't take the MTA to go to work in Albany, they have no reason to try and improve it. There's also a large rural vs urban divide in the legislature, which ultimately makes fixing the cost overrun problems about as easy as making bidding on DoD contracts more competitive.
Really, the best thing that could happen is for the MTA to become a multi-state agency because it already serves NY and CT (via MNR), and NJ gets the shortest straw despite having tons of commuters who would love to not have to drive. Regional planning is next to impossible with the current situation. Combine PATH and the MTA (at minimum), ideally NJTransit as well. Imagine being able to board a train at Trenton and through-run all the way to New Haven or Montauk. This would revolutionize passenger rail in the region, and because all three states would have to agree to such a venture, it would allow side-stepping many of the cuts that plague the MTA today without having to explicitly repeal the legislation. (Not that it would eliminate graft, of course - PATH has plenty - but it would reduce a lot of it.)
But more realistically, the most likely thing would be for the MTA to return to city control. It would likely be much better since local politicians actually use the system and can be held directly to account without the rural vs urban state divide that encourages not improving the status quo, but would still suck for everyone across the Hudson.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Katy-Freeway.jpg
[1] https://spatialparalysis.xyz/blog/headway
[2] https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/62636
[3] https://www.houston.org/timeline
[4] https://i.redd.it/tz0j51a117n31.jpg
[5] https://i.imgur.com/uNL0GtY.jpeg
[6] https://new.mta.info/press-release/update-mta-new-york-city-...
[7] https://ny.curbed.com/2018/6/4/17423376/nyc-subway-andy-byfo...
Have you read anything in the intervening decade-and-a-half? Battery and solar power prices have come down by 90%+. Wind by 70%. (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/li-io... for batteries, https://static.dw.com/image/56696354_7.png for the rest). Nuclear power is more expensive than ever, and easily 3x as much as the alternatives.
While there have been massive advancements in wind/solar, the only tech that has been successfully used to create the backbone of a zero-carbon power-grid is nuclear.
No shot.
Greedy lobbyists in the state capital would object to this. Ecotourism is seen by voters as one of Maine’s largest industries. Much of its real estate industry and its most well-known brand (LL Bean) relies on it.
Mines even in mining friendly places is very, very hard. Doing it mining unfriendly places where you have real popular opposition is bordering on impossible.
Lithium mines produce localized environmental damage, _but so does fossil fuel extraction_. Think about environmental damage from mountaintop removal coal mining, fracking, offshore oil spills, etc.
With fossil fuels, you get localized environmental damage, _plus_ climate change.
With lithium, you get localized environmental damage, but you hopefully support a transition to renewables.
There's been enormous conflict about simply building a high voltage transmission line across the boondocks of the western mountains to bring cheap green power down from the Quebec Hydro dams.
There might be less conflict if that line wasn't solely for the benefit of Massachusetts.
While it is known that lithium itself has environmental issues the potential reuse and benefit of pulling it out of the earth to make batteries will have a very long and positive outcome for us.
And to a certain degree the initial disruption might be totally worth it in the long run in comparison to stuff we just burn away.
So compare that 30,000 lbs of oil to the amount of lithium in a Tesla battery pack, which is about 138lbs. 138lbs < 30,000lbs
Then figure in that those 30,000lbs of oil all go into the air producing not only c02 which is changing our climate, but particulates which are bad for our health and cognitive function, vs the lithium in a battery pack which can be recycled and/or re-used
This seemm like a large net win to me.
All of that said, yes, all of the resource extraction industry, from the iron and aluminum to the oil and lithium, has a bad history of responsible stewardship of the lands they exploit, and I support forcing them to do a better job.
I think you need to account for the amount of material that was mined to get to that 138lb battery. My understanding is that it's orders of magnitudes more than what gets removed/disrupted for oil. I don't know the figure (and I welcome someone telling me) but I think it could well be in excess of 30,000lbs of raw material mined.
There's also battery recycling to consider.
I don't know which way the result swings; I'm just saying that it's much more complicated to figure out, and far less clear cut, than you suggest.
That is far better then blowing tons of things into the air. Its just a stack of crushed rocks.
How much dirt you have to dig up to get a thing isn't really much of a measure of impact though. If I dig up 50,000lbs of dirt to get 138lbs of lithium, but the dirt just goes back to being dirt, no problem. If on the other hand sulfuric acid leeching makes it an uninhabitable wasteland for years, problem.
But yes in the end, recycling batteries is going to be the real big win, where all the components can be reused rather than mined.
For example, fracking in California results in 26 acres of toxic storage pools that are leaking and contaminating ground water with specific toxic chemicals:
https://grist.org/accountability/fracking-waste-california-a...
However, every single story about the toxicity of battery production remains vague and I haven't been able to find any that specify what the damage is. I have found that indigenous people are having their land used without much permission or process, but the damage has never been specified.
Does anybody have some specifics about what's going on? Presumably there must be an environmental cost but it's really unclear what it is, or how it compares to the regular destruction that we embrace from fossil fuels.
“Yet lithium is a metal, and state regulations passed in 2017 prohibit mining for metals in open pits of more than three acres, which would be the only way to cost-effectively extract lithium at Plumbago North. “I don’t know of any underground and manganese or lithium mines in the world,” said Dr. John Slack, a geologist who co-authored a separate upcoming paper on critical minerals in Maine. “Because those metals have a relatively low cost, in terms of their concentration per ton or per ounce, you need to excavate large volumes of rock cheaply in order to economically and profitably produce the metal you’re interested in.””
Basically, Maine demands that whatever mining is done, is done underground, like coal. But open carrier mining is cheaper. If all this lithium is so important, someone will find a way to mine it properly underground, I guess.
"But [the lithium] reserves also would not present the same type of potential environmental issues as ... other base metal sulfide deposits in Maine, such as Bald Mountain. That’s because the Plumbago North deposit does not occur in, or contain, sulfide-rich rocks, said Slack and Simmons. Mining for lithium there would instead be similar to quarrying for granite or gravel."
Are rock queries outlawed? I don't believe so. Thus, is this a lithium rock query or a lithium mineral mine?
The only open pit mine I'm familiar with is measured in the literal thousands of acres. Hell, the local gravel pit that supplies the VERY rural area I live in is over 70 acres.
*) Lithium on Mars? https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012arXiv1208.6311D/abstra...).
I don't see why wars wouldn't be fought over it, certainly has been the case for oil.
And if you see from other perspective, oil are both energy storage and energy source, which is "almost" equivalent with solar cells and batteries.
Lithium as an input to storage is really just a small part of the whole picture. Like a barrel is for oil.
Its not an energy source and the ratio of how expensive it is to mine and how expensive you can sell it is nowhere close to oil.
Fighting wars over lithium deposit would be insanely dumb and that will never happen.
Lithium is not a consumable, once you have it you keep it. We need it now to grow the fleet but once the fleet is replaced recycling will be the most economical way to get it.
I think I saw a projection for a yearly consumption of around 1.7m tons in 2030.
I'd say the biggest issue is simply going to be environmental impact. This is a big reserve that can't be mined because of environmental regulation. That's a lot of money to just pass on, and I don't think that's going to hold.
Put another way: if it was a lot of money they’d find a way to do it underground.
I think we’ll wage war over water before we wage one over Lithium.
What is relevant here is that this is salty brine water, not drinking water.
And the water usage is very different for what we are talking about here. This is not a brine mine, but a spodumene rock mine. That uses far less water.
As a result all lithium deposits we’re created during the formation of the planet as it coalesced out of interstellar dust. Consequently the distribution of Lithium around the planet is pretty even. There’s no “hot spots” of high concentration, and every country has a supply proportional to its land mass.
That, plus the relative abundance of Lithium, means it’s unlikely that fighting a war for Lithium will ever make sense. Much easier and cheaper to just dig in your own backyard, than fight for someone’s backyard that has the same dirt in it.
'Naturally forming' elements on Earth are limited to uranium fission products.
Lithium (also aluminium, magnesium, sodium) distribution is due to it being light and chemically active, thus ending up in crust, while heavier metals (iron, nickel) end up in mantle and core. It takes specific geological circumstances to bring mantle material into crust, so there are 'hot spots'. Lithium is already there, so it is spread somewhat evenly.
How is a $1.5bn deposit, a major, significant source? That's would be about 10 days worth of oil. The whole global lithium market is just $3bn-$4bn pa. The rare earth market is about $2.5bn annually. Seems super low, relative to headlines/concerns/etc.
How are these materials simultaneously of such importance, and also so economically minor. What am I missing here?
My guess is the amount of skill required to get these materials. Miners can be paid pennies and they'll still do the work. Something similar to how garbage takeaway is of very high importance, but economically pretty minor.
I concede the point that small individual parts of the overall waste economy are prominent problems... but where's the way back to lithium.
Lithium is cheap enough that Elon could buy all of it with just his bitcoin. He's a guy with a use for lithium. Why not solve all possible scarcity concerns with the jingle of a purse. More realistishly... Unless there's something I'm missing, I can't see how a lithium price spike could affect the price of an electric car noticeably.
That doesn't scream scarcity.
From your comment that the lithium market is so small, yet always talked about as criticial - I guessed that perhaps that's because it's similarly easy to find and train lithium miners.
As for Elon and lithium, I remember recently watching some interview or talk that he gave, where he mentioned that he doesn't consider lithium a problem at all precicely because it is so abundant in the US.
So yes, to me it seems as well that there is no scarcity to fear. There might be a temporary shortage, but it can be solved rather quickly with money.
Some of the politicians bringing this stuff up as major future risks could personally afford to seriously mitigated on their personal accounts.
The current ongoing thing here is that the power company wants to build a power corridor to transport electricity from Canada to Mass. The power company has gone through questionable means to do this and the locals are rightfully unhappy about it. It's hard to not hear about it right now.
Maine is full of holes in the ground where granite was extracted. I can totally understand why some of the population wants to strictly regulate mining.
I went camping in Maine a few years ago, and the campground had visible artifacts from mining. The people running the campground told us that "everyone" goes swimming in deep flooded granite pits.
The campground itself had a flooded granite pit near the bathroom. It had a paddle boat that I used, but swimming was prohibited because of "insurance" and supposed abandoned mining equipment in the bottom of the pit. There was also an abandoned pump visible at the top of the pit.
When we walked around, there was surface granite clearly stripped away as well.
Regulating resource extraction out of existence is popular in southeast Maine where the economy runs off of tourism and retirement savings from people in Massachusetts for a variety of reasons that biol down to ideology and no skin in the game.
>>The former mine is now a Superfund site, and a 2013 study by researchers at Dartmouth College found widespread evidence of toxic metals in nearby sediment, water and fish. Cleanup costs, borne by taxpayers, are estimated between $23 million and $45 million.
Yup, that company successfully extracted the value and externalized the costs onto the taxpayers - they got the benefit and we hold the bag of crap.
Which is precisely why the laws were passed in the first place, because this was not an exception, but standard procedure.
If they want to relent and allow standard mining, then they need to require an up-front bond of the appropriate amount to fund the cleanup, on the scale of $100 million.
Anything short of that is utterly foolish (it's not like we're ignorant of standard mining practices).
<sarc>I'm sure the financial genius MBAs can figure it out (along with how to still screw the general public plebes). </sarc>
The mining has to be does somewhere at some point... barring a breakthrough in alternative battery chemistry in the next half decade. Not saying it needs to be in this mine, but the countries that do currently supply the world with lithium are securing a greater economic foothold. Of course I'd wish for every nation to be all honky-dory with each other but there are regimes whose optimization function is absolute domestic power and international domination.
Please refrain from pointing out the tired old truth that the US was or is such a country.
This is SO FAR from being a $1.5B deposit it's not event funny.
That area is pretty. The idea that we would choose maine (vs the many other places in US with deposits) would be crazy for this industry I think?
https://cdn3.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2...
for a photo of what the processing might look like.
Its also absolutely terrible for the local environment to mine it. That should be well known by now (e.g. effects in Bolivia / Chile).
I'm more interested to see where Catl and Faradion or others go with sodium ion technology. Zinc and potassium are also good candidates too. For now, the lithium show continues though unfortunately.
Here's a beautiful quote for you: "There are more than 19 vehicle fires every hour in the United States. They account for 1 in every 8 calls that fire departments respond to."
That puts the handful of burning EVs that catch the news once in a while a bit in perspective. It does happen but not that often. Even if you consider there are about 20x more ICE vehicles sold in the US, it's still quite a lot in comparison.
Anyway, lithium battery fires are comparatively slow so mostly people just get out of the vehicle. Basically, you stop the car, get out and call the firemen. Petrol tanks going boom is less common than Hollywood movies make it seem but still, they occasionally do blow up with people still inside the car. Not a good place to be when a few gallons of fuel is combusting. Hence a couple hundred casualties every year.
In comparison to fossil fuels lithium is obviously way better but I think long term I would prefer to use sodium based batteries due to their abundance, ease of manufacture, and potential lower extraction-related pollution. Explosion related concerns are not the best counter argument.
Surely there are some National Lab boffins with expertise in environmental protection.
And btw we are not 'strip' planet, we are simply moving things from one place on the planet to another.
Does the earth have some sort of inherent will that lithium should stay where it is?
If only we could kill all humans then finally the planet could heal.