Geothermal Plants Could Unlock Vast Supplies of Lithium in the American West
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
If you want to look at realistic lithium extraction in the US, look at Thacker Pass. That is much closer to being an actual reality.
Nobody has yet made Geothermal Brines a reality and nobody has even really managed commercial DLE.
The reality is all lithium in the world today comes from conventional brine project that use natural evaporation or it comes from Spodumene rock. We will scale those things first in order to increase lithium production.
Lithium industry is difficult, its very hard for these operations to be profitable. And the California is specially difficult.
But this is very much a very, very real problem. Lithium will be a huge cost even in LFP batteries as you can't take it out. We already know that not enough new lithium mines are coming online for coming demand. And high oil price made it even worse.
We do actually seriously need to move to other types of battery chemistries as well. The most promising by far is Sodium batteries and CATL (big dog of batteries) is commercializing it. It has far, far less supply issues and it will be dense enough to make standard cars practical.
There are lots of other ideas but the reality is, its absurdly hard to get even a tiny innovation in the cathode into actual cars and takes 5+ years. Doing it with a totally new chemistry is even more difficult.
The host has decades of experience in lithium and has interviews with many of those lithium companies. He is certainty opinionated but he is informed.
On battery in general, and partly on lithium: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/vid...
Many others but information is kind of all over the place.
But I'm not in that industry, more a general interest in batteries.
No one is going to want to drive on sodium batteries, which are merely good, rather than good enough. We're talking about the weight of a Tesla with the range of a Leaf, as a best case scenario.
As for lithium, there are absolutely enormous amounts of it in highly available form, in the parts of the world where brine evaporated relatively recently. The Great Basin has a lot of those.
When you say lithium extraction is difficult to do profitably, this is just a way of saying the supply/demand curve yields cheap lithium in 2022.
We're in no danger of supply issues at the right price, no one who wants to buy some lithium is coming up short, and no such future is at all likely in this century.
Do many people care about the weight of their car? I would bet most people couldn’t tell you what their car weighs with any accuracy (me, for one).
People happily drive giant heavy trucks (like an F150) for much shorter distances than the range of a Leaf.
Or weight matters for some other reason? Shipping?
More mass also means collisions are higher energy, so crash and pedestrian safety become an issue at lower speeds.
The tradeoffs have to justify the extra weight, so money saved on batteries has to exceed money spent on stronger frames, etc. I think Tesla is playing at the edges, so it's probably safe to say inefficient (heavier) batteries aren't going to be feasible.
As I pointed out, Sodium could get reasonably to LFP. So just as we moved from NMC to LFP, we will move from LFP to Sodium. That doesn't mean NMC or LFP will go away.
All of the above are needed.
People said the same about LFP and Sodium is getting pretty close to that on a system level. You have to consider the whole pack and its price.
The reality is that there are literally millions that could run with sodium and be a practical product.
And the extra volume required is actually not that big a problem in many vehicles.
> When you say lithium extraction is difficult to do profitably, this is just a way of saying the supply/demand curve yields cheap lithium in 2022.
No actually lithium is getting more and more expensive and demand is growing at insane rates while getting new mines in production is really hard. So the price will likely continue to go up.
> We're in no danger of supply issues at the right price, no one who wants to buy some lithium is coming up short, and no such future is at all likely in this century.
Price go up until some people that had plans will reconsider those plans.
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0014-y?from=artic...
The same is said about every innovation or invention ever. If you have knowledge about why it is infeasible, then your references are welcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30802349
From https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/zero-carbon-lithi... “A pilot plant to demonstrate DLE from the project became operational in April 2021 while the first battery-quality lithium hydroxide was produced from the pilot operations in September 2021.”. They are doing it and obviously believe it is commercially viable to do so.
From https://geo40.com/geolithium/ “We have successfully recovered lithium from low, moderate and high-grade brine types covering Europe, the Americas and New Zealand at laboratory scale. We will move to pilot stage in 2022.”. I am more sceptical about the economics of this (some government funding, possibly for positive discrimination, and no obvious commercial investors). “Lithium bearing geothermal fluid is allowed contact with Geo40’s proprietary GeoSeive compound. The GeoSieve is then regenerated to release the lithium”, and reused.
> Lithium will be a huge cost even in LFP batteries as you can't take it out.
The figure I have heard is ~5% of the battery cost is related to the cost of Lithium. The cost of the raw Lithium compounds is not a dominant factor in the cost of most Lithium batteries, for example see https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271367/1-s2.0-S037877531... I did some googling to find something recent that could compare the raw costs of materials, but they usually only break it down to the cost of the cathode material rather than individual metal compounds. https://www.crugroup.com/knowledge-and-insights/spotlights/n... imply that Nickel and Cobalt costs dominate currently.
Email in my profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonebrunozzi
Thanks!
https://theconversation.com/how-a-few-geothermal-plants-coul...
Elon is casting around for Lithium I suppose he doesn’t have the bandwidth to Elon another industry.
As mentioned Manganese, Zinc are also useful products.
Potassium was glossed over I thought one of Russian invasion issues was that Ukraine was a large exporter of Potassium.
But for each anion there’s a cation. If the carbonates are removed will that leave sulphates, and chlorides for the other metals?
Will the removal cause issues since a more dilute brine would I assume leach out more minerals.
Finally water, water, water. This is California with an ongoing drought. Is next to the Salton sea flooded by a broken canal a 100 years ago.
I take it the geothermal plant uses water from the aquifer.
https://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/changes/anthropogenic/subsi...
(Seperately, one of their execs started a battery recycling firm with a similar mission of providing battery chemicals)
This article* talks about enough for 3 billion EV's, depleting supply in 2100-something.
* https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/09/15/how-long-will-the-lit...
Lithium price has gone up a lot because demand is growing faster than the mines and plants that extract it. That 80 million tonne figure was based on low prices -- at high prices a lot more reservess become viable and we have a lot more.
Also, batteries more suited to grid-scale operation like iron-flow are already in commercial use and will likely replace a fair bit of the large-scale lithium ion battery market.
The concerns are building new mines and extraction plants fast enough to meet during demand, and the environmental damage from doing so. There are no concerns about running out.
You use something like Starship to deliver construction equipment that can be used to build engines on the asteroid it to earth orbit for processing.
Ideally you'd bring the minimum amount of equipment necessary to do in-situ production of the rest of the equipment, but we're not at that boot-strap self-replicating level quite yet.
Or the fuel required to get the fuel you need to the asteroid.
Fuel that has to be lifted into orbit. Which requires fuel.
Go look up the costs of lifting equipment just into orbit. Then look at how much lithium is worth per kg.
Then go look at the fact that we have exactly zero manufacturing capacity in space. Simple operations and repairs using pre-made parts on the ISS take hours-long spacewalks that require weeks of planning. And you think we can "build engines" on asteroids?
This is also why things like gold or platinum are good to mine from asteroids, because they have not had the opportunity to sink to the core of those asteroids like they did on Earth. (And getting to the core of an asteroid is a significantly more reasonable proposition than getting to the core of the earth)
These guys look like they have some promising technology: https://energyx.com/ They are currently testing membranes that can selectively let through lithium. Their solution vastly reduces cost, water usage, and energy usage.
The problem with lithium is that it is spread out, that means you can't really find good ores with high concentration.
Additionally, lithium behaves less like copper, nickel and so on, and more like a specialty chemical.
Mining lithium is basically more running a chemical plan and only very few companies can do it so far.
This leads to a situation where lithium mines are very hard to make profitable and you need a huge amount of knowledge to run one. The on-boarding of new mines and expansion of capacity is the problem, not the total availability.
Lithium ion batteries use a zeolite cathode which have atomic sized pores that safely 'stores' the metallic lithium[1]. Issue with sodium is unlike lithium sodium increases in size when reduced. That tends to damage the cathode.
For ion batteries the cathode is the big technological challenge. Has to be cheap, manufacturable, stable, conductive, and hold as high a percentage of lithium as possible.
[1] There are lithium batteries with bulk lithium cathodes. But they are hazardous.
Edit: Here's one Nevada lithium mine that is facing challenges due to water issues. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/wikieup-lithium-mine-bi...