Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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TBH this reads more like a Piedmont Lithium (USofA) problem than it does a Global Resources (world) problem.

Over half of the worlds known lithium reserves (ie roughly measured) are undeveloped in places like Bolivia (with 21 million tonnes out of the known 89 million tonnes) and other not-USofA locations.

I stress known as that is distinct from "all" as it is restricted to those deposits that have been sufficiently exploration drilled to form an estimate.

> Projects get permitted [in Australia] in under a year,” Phillips explained. “Here, it's two, four, six, seven, eight years, which is a problem, especially in a business that's booming so fast.”

is, in my opinion, the crux of this article and interview. Phillips wants to mine more and faster within the US.

People with an interest might like to get a demo | account with:

Metals & Mining | S&P Global Market Intelligence

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

Also important to not that until a few decades ago, lithium was not a valuable commodity. So, we've barely started the process of actively looking for it. It's estimated to be a fairly common element in the earth crust.

If you contrast that with fossil fuels where we've had decades of very well funded research to identify new deposits of oil and gas, there are probably loads of unknown deposits of lithium.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/21/impossible-mining-is-combi... is an interesting alternative source of lithium.

Not one that Piedmont Lithium can benefit from, but those are the breaks sometimes.

Haven't we done enough harm to the oceans?

While working down there, we could use the opportunity to remove some plastics.

Sadly there both no economic incentive to do that, and plastics dont really sink like that - or clump up. The 'great pacific garbage patch' is mostly water, with bits of plastic floating around. It takes years for the plastic to eventually migrate down to the deepest part of the oceans. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/27/worlds-d...

This resource shortage problem can be reduced to a CIA problem/task.

It’s more a Department of State problem. You know the whole CIA stuff in the region is quite often used by populist politicians, particularly the left-leaning ones. If the US tried to pull what it did before, it’s effectively diplomatic suicide in the entire region. The US wants to establish some sense of goodwill in the region. Why? Because China.

The US is competing with China in lithium extraction in the region. Despite the US having better tech at lithium extraction, China is doing everything it can to gobble it all up by throwing money around.

I hate when populist politicans deploy the truth like that.

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