Argentina, Bolivia, Chile to form OPEC model cartel on lithium | Hacker News Reader

Argentina, Bolivia, Chile to form OPEC model cartel on lithium

commodityonline.com

60 pointswslh8 comments

Lithium can be recovered from seawater:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304386X879...

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=lithium+seawat...

http://gas2.org/2008/10/13/lithium-counterpoint-no-shortage-...

While a lithium trading cartel can and will exist as long as prices for mining are lower than prices for extraction, the chance of a war over lithium are practically negligible. The price of lithium from the ocean is only five times the cost from mining, and the cost of lithium represents a small fraction ( < $100) of an EV.

>And that brings us to yet another issue: the fact that lithium ion batteries, despite the name, just really don’t use that much lithium. About 1.4 kilograms of lithium carbonate are needed per kilowatt hour of lithium-ion batteries. A kilowatt hour of bulk lithium ion batteries costs $300 to $500. Hence, lithium carbonate costs only make up 1/30th to 1/50th the cost of the cells! The price could increase tenfold and you’d barely notice the difference. Source: Gas 2.0 (http://s.tt/12zDD)

Thanks for looking at this in detail.

If you are right that the price could increase 10 fold without us noticing than the cartel is a brilliant idea since it will get them just under 5 times the amount they would get now.

It is also very important to know that currently there are many social activists working against mining in the region. Also it seems that the level of corruption in the relationship between the governments and the big mining companies is huge. More information at http://wp.cedha.net/?p=8321&lang=en

Yes, but unless I'm mistaken I think lithium is not mined in open-pit mines but in salt evaporation ponds. Activism is focused on open-pit mines at the moment.

It's also worth mentioning that the plan in Argentina is to produce batteries and compete with China. Well, that's what it seems to be. The first factory was just built recently. We'll have to see how it goes.

(Argentinian here)

This will really suck for these countries. As someone who lives in an oil producing country, OPEC is a horrible model to follow. Almost all the countries in OPEC are corrupt, inefficient and have dictatorial govts who oppress the majority poor in their countries.

That said, I wonder what impact this will have in other conflict regions that provide lithium or substitutes to lithium like Congo and Afghanistan.

Chile already makes much(most?) of it's money from copper, and lately it seems that they have a decent handle on things, in that it's a stable democracy.

What's the alternative exactly? Sell your resources as cheap as possible to avoid being corrupted by money? Surely there should be a way of capitalizing on your natural resources to improve the living standard of your people, and the explanation for most OPEC countries not being great is a big more complicated than this.

The link is broken, this is the goog cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JIzz0fD...

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