Lithium drilling advances at the Salton Sea
kcet.org
kcet.org
In absolute terms yes, there is a finite amount of lithium in the crust. Transmutation aside, What we see in real life is unequal distribution and then bad modelling on assumptions this represents all available lithium when in reality it mistakes availability for existence. There is a lot more lithium in the world. The problem is finding it, and its price in extraction complexity, density, and other "costs"
The ramp up time to replace all ICE with EV will consume a lot of Lithium. I have no doubt there will be rises and falls in costs of Lithium extraction, as a function of the investment cycle and demand. What I do doubt, is that we will "run out" for any reason other than investment in this discovery and extraction. What they're doing in the Salton Sea is sensible, and what will happen in Australia (which also has lithium rich soils) is sensible, and no, we're not entirely captive to some fantasy of "there isn't enough lithium in the world"
Aside from anything else, there are other battery chemistries out there. Lithium battery chemistry is only the one we like now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
I believe Sodium Ion is like LFP in its safety with thermal runaway, so it, like LFP, doesn't require as much cooling and equipment overhead so its Cell-to-Module, or even better, Cell-to-Pack is bettery than cobalt/nickel li-ion chemistries.
A sodium ion battery that CATL says it is putting in production is sufficient for low-end consumer EV transport: the 100 mile city car, possibly a 200-mile one with good drivetrain design, if the Cell-to-Pack napkin math works out correctly.
Concurrent with this, LFP batteries are reaching 200-230 wh/kg this year, which thanks to their bettery thermal protection, means the Cell-to-Pack density should be "good to go" for almost all Tesla car ranges today (my napkin math on Cell-to-Pack shows 400 miles for a model 3 for 230 wh/kg LFP).
The extended range Tesla vehicles are overkill for 90% of world drivers, and at least 80% of Americans. The 300 mile range is the perfect range for the "next 10 years".
The napkin math then says you can combine sodium ion and LFP to get to 300 mile pack designs, and no cobalt/nickel, reduced lithium from sodium ion, probably a 50/50 split or similar.
This is for the next 2-4 years of mainstream car / EV production scaling, which is may be the most important for kickstarting true widespread EV and averting climate change that we have left.
Hopefully in 2-4 years we get the following (per roadmaps):
- 260+ wh/kg LFP
- 180-200 wh/kg sodium ion
That will mean all-sodium 300 mile range cars, mixed sodium/LFP for long range, light trucks, possibly long haul shipping + container ships.
If we get 400 wk/kg or better solid state battery or Li-S, then all the better. Mix in those as needed, or maybe short haul aviation becomes possible, but the important thing is that for the majority of ground transport, sodium ion and lfp will serve to scale out huge portions of carbon emissions from transportation.
wh/kg cited are all cell densities, but there is reference to Cell-to-pack being 90% of cell density for LFP and Sodium Ion approaches, which is where are the napkin math begins.
The strongest case they have, is that all of us want the freedom of not being constrained by range, however rarely we use it. Somehow the 45min recharge ruins the experience. I personally think battery swap was a model which got us there but Musk drove the (current) industry to another place, and nobody in the west is seriously offering it, outside of special needs like buses and trucks. It's alive and well in the e-scooter space in much of Asia.
If your life involves driving the birdsville track every day, you are not the target of energy transition to batteries.
the 230 WH/kg should enable the 100 mile PHEV I think, although I haven't done the math on that.
I'm in the midwest, and while superchargers will probably take care of my needs (I don't tow), but PHEVs should serve all those people.
A 400 mile LFP should be doable for the pickup truck when we hit 260 wh/kg, maybe 500 mile. And if Li-Sulfer or SSB hits, then those people will be served all-electric.
The infrastructure will come around. And recharge times are something that when viewed from a total systems level with home charging is actually less than gassing up, and when chargers are available basically in every parking lot.
The fact that the fringe cases are hyped up is just astroturfing, and it is a symptom of a dying campaign. The economics are behind alternative energy and BEVs, there's nothing big oil can do anymore. From here the vehicles fall under price points that ICEs will never compete with, and even the "middle used market" may get chased out by cheaper chinese entrants.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/byd-dolphin-electric-city-car-...
If the federal and/or state governments go with some price support, and unit costs to a customer on-road get to $30k, I would think seriously about trading in my Hyundai i30 with 5 years left on its 7 year fixed price maintenance/warranty. I got a powerpoint fitted in the unit "just in case" although with low amps, it would be trickle charge only. The "dolphin" BYD is releasing is comparable size inside to my i30.
Tesla isn't responding to price competition, they see enough demand at their AUD $70k+ pricepoint. They're targetting a different market, one which Volvo, Mercedes, BMW &c occupy with high-end ICE cars (although I am told the build quality on a Tesla is below par, even if the driving experience is good)
I think the "low price point" EV is a myth in the short term. I don't think there is enough materials to make the volume required at that price point. This seems to be why Tesla put a hold on their $25k model - which they now seem to be making a "dedicated robotaxi" and betting on solving self-driving.
1) they are just scaling existing models (same reason roadster / semi / cybertruck is on hold)
2) the chinese already own that price point worldwide, and Tesla likely can't compete in that segment, well, or the margins aren't worth the effort right now.
As for limits on materials, as I described, Sodium-Ion and LFP are the path for 10-20 million BEVs per year (or... 3x-5x that in PHEVs) over the next four years. Lithium is not the major limiter, additional sources (Salton Sea, many others) will come online, but Cobalt/Nickel for LMC chemistries are.
Long term most of the global production of consumer vehicles (~80 million/year in 2021) should be doable with 180-200 wh/kg sodium ion technologies, while 260 wh/kg LFP, 300-400 wh/kg LMC, and 400-??? densities from Li-S/solid state battery can address long haul shipping, sports cars, trucks with towing, etc.
To emphasize, that's is why these viable densities of Sodium Ion and LFP chemistries are so important.
IF Tesla did achieve usable robotaxi self-driving (and while I find their current achievements amazing, it's still fundamentally short of the mark), much like IBM and Microsoft in the early days, it would be stupid to limit their software to Teslas only. Release the software for licensees and make at 3-5 grand on EVERY car.
IMO, current LFP batteries are already "good enough" and "cheap enough" for 80% of car sales. Reportly in 2021 China, 5000-cycle LFP at ~$70/khw. Chop off 1000 cycles, add 20% price margins, and it is still good enough.
If you could conjure up x10 manufacturing scale, you would still sell every single cell.
It will be easier to improve charging infra, that to improve NMC or stablize sodium.
/end of rant
The world governments really need to get onboard with pushing worldwide manufacturing of these cells and modules. Tesla's Berlin delays were shameful. If you are running coal plants, you as a government can't say anything about environmental damage from a new BEV or battery plant with a straight face.
I'm thankful that at least science and technology have given humanity a path forward that is clearly economically superior, because it is clear that humanity's collective political governance is incompetent.
The fact you can take decades of global warming science, point out the end state and dangers, and the effective intelligence of worldwide leaders over that time is less than the intellectual and logical capacity of a third grader, even one that has missed their nap, is one of the most depressing things in the world.
I'm loathe to credit the Chinese government with anything based on their current leadership's autocratic and genocidal leanings, but their policies subsidizing battery and solar cell production have been the only effective governmental level environmental policy in the global warming era.
I'm honestly not convinced this will happen. I think the ratio will get a lot more even but I highly doubt ICE will be replaced. Especially as the atmospheric CO2 concentration increases the economic viability of reducing it back into hydrocarbons increases. Already it's much easier to grow microalgae than it was during the first government experiments in the 60s. As these technologies improve there will be continued downward pressure on the price of petroleum products despite the state of oil drilling and the regulatory pressure against them will be gone because this makes them carbon neutral.
On top of that there are still applications where electric motors just don't make that much sense. Also transporting and storing energy in a fluid is far easier than transporting it in a battery.
And thats after a 20+ year transition, based on the average vs maximum realistic lifetime of vehicles either on the road, or soon to be.
But for liquid energy transport, I think LNG with H2 injection, and Ammonia will fit the energy density niche. I don't see deep well petrochemicals as a sustaining model of energy shipment, if we move the economy away from them for transport.
All this is very much "after my lifetime" -Much as my parents lived through the transition of horse power to gas engines, and I was on the cusp of steam trains to diesel and electric, some things happen in timescales beyond my lifetime
EV’s got to skip that growing pain because they could piggyback on electrical infrastructure.
Wouldn't the cost of building a new Hydrogen setup equivalent to gasoline be insane? You can't retrofit gas stations that easily since the tanks weren't meant to hold a gas. I suppose they could add Hydrogen storage to existing gas stations but you still need central distributions and another set of trucks to bring it out.
For volume shipment between economies, Ammonia is the way to go.
They are unstable breaking down either in the fire making complete combustion important, but a catalytic converter or at worse just the atmosphere works. They last just long enough to be a problem locally. But that also means people have local incentives to fix the issue unlike CO2 which has a much larger tragedy of the commons issue.
I think it will. For cars and trucks, at least.
There is a massive recurring cost to maintaining the refining and distribution infrastructure for gasoline, to say nothing of developing, building and selling a new vehicle. All of these systems have been built for scale. When demand dips below the level to maintain them, they become obsolete. At that point, one must build new infrastructure at the smaller scale, which, why?
There will still be ICE cars for enthusiasts. But you’ll have to special order the fuel at expense, have replacement parts custom built, all of which makes it infeasible for general use. (I’m expecting within ten years to see gas stations closures stranding isolated communities, with the phenomenon becoming commonplace by 2040.)
Gas stations make most of their money as convenience stores, often selling gas at very narrow margins.
Additionally, the average age of the cars on the road is >10 years. The sales today are not supportive for your thesis unless the price of gas continues higher.
Right, which they increasingly won’t be able to do as demand for gas drops. The timeline might be longer than above, and it’ll be stretched out by the fact that so much infrastructure has already been built, but I think it will happen eventually.
Even if the concentration were to hit 5,000ppm - not only beyond dangerous climate levels but directly dangerous to human breathing - that's still only 0.5%, which makes very little difference to the feasibility of extracting it from the air. There is also no natural market for doing so. It'll pretty much have to be mandated and subsidized if that's ever to happen outside of pilot plants and the US navy.
Oil drilling cannot be carbon neutral, you're inherently bringing carbon up into the atmosphere. Oil drilling plus CCS? Maaaybe.
I think it needs some external political shock like the invasion of Ukraine to trigger a big push against energy imports and towards local energy production.
The Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and I'm sure many other smaller disasters happened due to oil. I would even add in both gulf wars which costs massive amounts of money, resources, and lives wouldn't have happened if the US didn't have a vested interest in oil.
As long as Lithium doesn't cause the same issues isn't that an improvement?
Ukraine: https://www.trade.gov/energy-resource-guide-ukraine-oil-and-...
Georgia: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-gr...
Afghanistan (more disputed though) https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/pipeline-politics...
Lithium isn't burnt up and released into the air. You build one battery with a few kg of lithium inside and that will drive you for 100000s of miles and might have use in other applications after that.
And even at the very end of life, the pack still has all the metal in it an can be recycled (and that will make sense once the scale is large enough).
Unlike Oil, lithium is highly distributed in the earth crust. Pretty much every place on earth has some form of lithium assets. Going to war for lithium would be even more dumb then going to war over oil (and its questionable that Golf wars were about that at all).
As for mining.
Lithium can be sourced many different ways. Traditional hard rock lithium mines are basically not all that different from nickel or copper mines. Not the cleanest thing in the world but its also not specially different or dangerous. Its also a way larger scale then copper and will never reach that scale.
Lithium however can also be sources in a way that is environmentally totally fine. If you have some brine resources and you use DLE, you end up taking a little of the salt out of the water and putting the water back. Nothing in the ecosystem depends on the salt content being just a little higher as far as we know.
Lithium can also be based on clay mining, in such a process its very likely to require a lot of tonnage mined, but its also likely that after you extract the lithium you just put the clay back where it came from. Places where this would be done would likely be deserts where nobody lives.
A current common way is to use brine and let the sun evaporate most of the water. This is environmentally sub-optimal as it actually can use water. But even here its not clear exactly how this is bad, its more maybe a risk that we don't fully understand.
So in summation, there is really nothing like 'Deepwater Horizon'. And even if their was, the result would simply be the ocean being a tiny bit more salty.
There’s ruined, half buried buildings near the shores. Tons of abandoned structures. Also the air was so acrid it was burning my eyes and nose the entire time.
Absolutely surreal. Wouldn’t be out of place in a Fallout game.
"There are eleven commercial geothermal plants at the Salton Sea, producing 400 megawatts of geothermal energy a year."
Is this really so hard? Nobody who took physics in high school able to proof read this otherwise excellent article? None of the chemical engineering/geology professors interviewed for the article able to land a hand there?
Journalists generally believe that it is inappropriate, or even unethical, to let "sources" see, let alone edit, an article before publication. Some don't even want the copy leaving the newsroom at all.
I think this is derived from more investigative/adversarial types of reporting. If Mayor Quimby accidentally mentions that "a friend" gave him a new car, you don't want him to edit that out of a story about bribery allegations. However, it's a weird fit for writing where seemingly similar words may have very different meanings.
More here: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/should-journa... I'd note that this seems much more...flexible than the journalists I spoke with.
,,How does Tesla plan to secure raw materials required to scale to extreme size?''
I'm quite interested in the answer as well (which we'll get on APRIL 20, 2022 4:30 PM CDT)
I am sure there are real experts looking into this..and there is probably something that is in the plans to deal with this.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable can throw some light on this. Lithium extraction needs fresh water throughout the recovery cycle.
Do you mean it'll just be drier and therefore suck more water out of the local ecosystem?
There's a whole infographic in the article explaining this.
> Hot brine is pumped up from deep underground, generating heat which is converted to electricity. Then, lithium is extracted from the brine before the fluid is injected back underground.
Pretty brilliant, really. There's already a geothermal energy site right there, so the whole lithium mining business could potentially be powered with zero emissions.
If they really do need freshwater, there's a ton of it - the Colorado River Aqueduct goes right by the Salton Sea. In fact, that's how it was created in the first place.
If they really need freshwater for this, they will have to fight a lot of people for it.
Indeed, if we gave up on farming in the area, we could cut an aqueduct from the Sea of Cortez and restore the Salton Sea to a thriving inland riviera. The real estate and tourism revenues would likely more than make up for the farming revenues.
With indoor ag, they can be substituted..but at great cost. California ag is ridiculously uber optimized and on very thin margins. We feed millions. Abs cheaply. Mostly because we convert fossil fuels into calories. And forex. We sacrificed our dairy industry because it’s cheaper to export alfafa to China in shipping containers than to truck it within CA. The economies of scale is messed up. But because we exported thirsty alfafa during a drought ..we were essentially exporting water for china’s dairy industry. Once again using fossil fuels.
Having said that, central coast/Monterrey/Salinas region will deal with salt water intrusion in max 30 years…guaranteed. Central Valley is already having to deal with ground water contamination. Our aquifers risk running dry with every subsequent drought.
We are better off with every metric from conservation, carbon sequestration to water usage efficiency if we did away with the badge of pride(over $50 billion worth..highest in nation..far second is Iowa at 25 something.) that is CA Big Ag(rather diff from National big Ag).
However, ag in Ca supports a crap ton of jobs that can’t be replaced. Most of them are low paying or middle class jobs. We are a state with a large teacher/tenured profs population, service sector and many many unionized essential jobs. This demographic has to be supported. Minimum basic income won’t cut it because they come with pension benefits. So now we have a problem that Sacramento cannot solve if they interfere with status quo.
Don’t know what the solution is..but the problem is obvious and glaring. Most of this Ag sector is going to disappear when the cheapest resource…land and water becomes useless to the big industrial farmers who have grandfathered water rights.
California ag and water rights is intricately connected to its politics. It’s just a matter of creating a powerful energy lobby to supplant the ag one in Sacramento. But it won’t be easy. Their reach goes as far as D.C. but certainly doable.
I only hope that when CA ag crashes…and it will within 3 decades max..we are self sufficient for our food supply and energy.
Why would they use potable (AKA drinking) water for lithium extraction from the brine? Nothing in the described extraction process involves potable water.