This is great, but keep in mind this is like a third derivative metric. North America is way behind China in number of batteries owned, batteries produced, and factories being built. This is just the growth rate of factories being built.
“given existing reserves, it is possible for the United States and its key partners to significantly friendshore production. However, given current production in democratic countries, it would require an unprecedented build-out of the mining industry to achieve 2030 clean energy targets.”
https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/05/03/friendshoring-criti...
Mining, refining, logging, chemical processing...these are dirty businesses. Why muddy up your local communities and reduce your future reserves, if one of your trading partners is willing to do it on their turf?
It does mean short-term pain if capacity and expertise need to be built out quickly, but that's the price of admission.
For example, the Interior Department instated a 20-year moratorium on renewing any leases for mining operations near the boundary waters in northern Minnesota. Understandably, the consequences of copper sulfide ore polluting the waters is severe, but the 20 year ban is nonsensical. The dangers won't be any less in 20 years. We aren't exactly 20 years away from magical technology that will make it safe. It's a purely arbitrary number meant to appease environmental groups without having to pay out to buy the land and permanently ban resource extraction.
For what it's worth, I'm not really in favor of the mines, per se, just irked that we keep playing games. Either do environmental reviews and let miners mine when they have leases to do so and appropriate safeguards in place, or don't. A 20 year moratorium just sets up political groups (mining and environmental lobbies) to suck up more cash donations and sets up another political fight down the road.
They are now, yes. I believe the point is, that's a relatively recent development. (And surely, from an environmental perspective, having all the damage in one area is good? Baotau isn't getting any better. By the same token, it's not getting worse.)
Side note but, with politeness, one enormously frustrating part of arguing with Americans is you really don't realise just how many problems are trivial to solve when you have US-level natural resources at your disposal. The social elements are still there, I'm not claiming every US problem is trivial, but the resource access element just isn't. You go to an electronics conference, you're researching some new PV tech, so are your US colleagues, but they've got hundreds of hectares of land that's perfect for the application and worthless to everyone else. And that happens in almost every field. Good for you, but JFC, that's not a universal experience.
This is in the same state with suburban areas that have water poisoned by water gremlin and 3M, so you might understand that people are a little sensitive to the prospect of a foreign-owned mining company (twin metals) wanting to set up a mine.
We do need to stop relying on cheap, unethical foreign resource extraction, and that means the environmental lobby needs to become more realistic about not trying to stop every single project. By the same token, resource extraction isn't going to get investment if doing it right means nobody will buy the results at a massively inflated price point, so we need to be wary of new operations claiming to do something obviously very hard while competing with cheap overseas stuff.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the end of my first post, there is a TON of money flowing into lobbying groups on this topic. So long as the fight exists, they keep getting money. Actually solving the problem in a reasonable way means the money stops flowing to these people.
The only actually easy methods of solving this would violate our government's constitution, so we're left with muddling through.
There has been a lot of coal and oil extraction, clear-cutting, etc. all around the world. Sometimes because the materials weren't commodities yet, sometimes because it's cheaper to produce locally. But as land and labor get more expensive, so does local production.
[0]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lithium-extraction-california-e...
I thought the actual problematic ingredient was in the anode/cathode, not the electrolyte, Cobalt rings a bell.
Edit:
"Lithium is one of the most common elements in the universe, we've got lithium pretty much everywhere" ... "you could get lithium from sea water" ... "it's called lithium ion but that's like the salt in the salad, do you like salt in your salad? sure, but it's not made of salt" - elon musk on jre #1609
We're a long ways off from being able to harvest lithium from, e.g., saltwater in a way that doesn't require more energy put into it the energy that's saved by the technologies made with the mineral. There's only a few places where it makes even economic sense to mine lithium and the environmental effects are pretty devastating. Chemicals like hydrochloric acid nearly always contaminate nearby groundwater used by people and more-than-humans alike. Even in Australia where it's mined with more traditional methods from a rock, toxic chemicals are still required to process it into a usable form
Unlike with something like a rare earth metal, which no amount of extraction optimization can put within your borders if your continent is geologically unlucky.
[0] https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2022/05/13/lithium-vall...
One problem is that, even without mining, it's on track to poising the air of something like 33% of the Los Angelos metropolitan area in the next few decades. So, anyone that touches it will now own that environmental disaster.
This can, and should, be fixed by spending huge amounts of federal money on environmental remediation, and I can imagine using lithium revenues to offset it, but none of that will be politically easy.
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/mi...
Yeah, lithium is much more plentiful.
[1] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
I mean, they might (honestly, reasonably) be inclined to give us an artificially bad place in line, given the fuckery we’ve gotten up to on their continent, but it would probably be a decision to prioritize history and politics over economics. Or they might want to own battery manufacturing as a whole, I’m which case… fine, whatever, it would be nice to manufacture them in the US, but we should be happy with buying from in our general neighborhood.
If I were in charge, I would want to keep nearly all of that manufacturing and minerals in-country and export battery cells initially, and later full systems that integrate the battery cells, and as the manufacturing capabilities expand I would start to add tarriffs to battery cell exports but ensure the systems that integrate the cells are able to be exported pretty easily. I would ensure to define the "system" as something more than a few battery cells wired together, it would have to be a fully integrated battery pack for a home or commercial building or a car maybe, or some other product that is similar. I would want to focus on vehicular and grid based energy systems, not consumer products because those batteries should eventually get replaced with supercapacitors and battery tech that is less unstable. I would never export minerals for batteries, though, I would just force companies to invest in manufacturing in Brazil.
brazil had 68k and 8080 clones that were sometimes better than the originals. mostly sold to Soviet bloc countries and yoguslavia.
until they decided to also ship full mac clones instead of only the 68k cpus. the lore says jobs pushed for demands to dept of state, and got that brazil both closed the two cpu clone factories and also added a high eletronics tarif to further make inroads into a viable competition harder. the leverage state dpto used was cutting imports of oranges, from brazil, which was provided by most of the farms from corrupt military-politicians in power at the time.
not many sources online https://www.cultofmac.com/266710/meet-unitron-mac-512-worlds...
...those same people now own soy farms, which china buys and usa sells. so guess which way they will align.
Last I heard, copper mines took 17 years to permit. But in 17 years time, we will need to increase copper production to 150% to 200% of its current value, ie go from 28M tons/year to ~50M tons/year. (And important to note that only 5M ton/year are from energy transition demand).
And the volume of material needed for the energy transition is small compared to existing mining, and in particular to the amount of material that we move around for fossil fuels, which will all drastically decrease.
This is a big project to solve, sure, but it needs to be compared to the scale and scope of what we currently do, and what would happen even without the energy transition. And when we do that comparison, I think we will find that the energy transition will be far less resource intensive than the expansion of our fossil fuel industries that would happen anyway.
Demand elasticity is a funny thing. Some applications, like turbines, really need copper. Others, like the wiring of a house, can in principle get away with aluminum just fine. Currently, houses are built with copper wiring because the thermal expansion of aluminum requires some additional engineering complexity to achieve fire safety. But it's hard to project copper 'needs' when we use so much of it out of 'convenience'.
The cause is that over time, aluminium joints become higher and higher resistance, and get hotter and hotter till one day they fail.
There is some special gunge stuff you can get to put in each joint which supposedly stops this happening. But personally I don't trust the gunge to keep working for the 100+ years the wiring might remain in use.
Particularly if there is a water leak and the gunge is washed away - and then your 10 year timer starts ticking till a deadly fire.
They're cheaper than pure copper, and the plating means they don't have the fire problem - since it is always the copper surface that makes contact in any joint.
I don't know why we don't use them - they would make electrical jobs cheaper, and mean we can afford to upgrade in other ways - like for example having every circuit powerful enough for a dryer rather than needing a special dryer circuit.
Basically, both copper and aluminum are "rust-proof" because they develop a thin, hard layer of oxide immediately upon exposure to air. However, this also means that when a new crack forms (by vibration of the wiring or thermal expansion for example) that crack will be immediately coated by an oxide layer. At the same time, moisture in the air will create a galvanic cell with the copper as cathode and aluminum as anode (because aluminum is more active, more willing to give up electrons, which is because its bond with its electrons is weaker than copper's.) As the electrons leave the aluminum it develops a positive charge, which attracts negatively charged oxygen.
It is this last effect, galvanic corrosion, which I believe to be the chief issue with CCA wiring. Copper and stainless steel, for example, are much closer in the galvanic series than copper and aluminum, so copper and aluminum corrodes significantly faster.
Unfortunately, galvanic corrosion is a tough one, because lots of modern American houses are built with poor ventilation - as you can see by the large number of homes with mold issues. That moisture is exactly what enables galvanic corrosion. I think if we used CCA wiring across America we'd see a number of house fires caused by moisture -> corrosion -> higher resistance -> heat -> fire.
It seems like if we want to achieve the goal you mention, we could switch over to 240v like much of the rest of the world.
US residential has 240v at the home fuse box from the upstream 3-phase.
But I imagine it'd require a big adjustment at the utility level if everyone started drawing from +120v & -120v, instead of the current balance around the neutral.
NEC 2020 edition, Article 334 Non-Metallic Sheathed Cable
334.104 Conductors.
The 600-volt insulated power conductors shall be sizes 14 AWG through 2 AWG copper conductors or sizes 12 AWG through 2 AWG aluminum or copper-clad aluminum conductors.
More dual amp/dual volt wiring devices: https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/NorthAm1combi.html
Wouldn't that eventually cause mechanical adherence issues with dissimilar metal plating?
but they can be caught early using a cheap $45 IR camera from E-Bay/Amazon. I caught one early and a retightened of a wirenut is all that is needed.
But to go up to 2020 NEC code, you must replace all wirenuts with the purple Alumniconn lug strip.
Purple wirenut is now not to code for permanent jobs; only temporary. For that, all future wiring jobs must be redone with Alumniconn lug strip and tightened to 15 lb/ft
One is $48
https://m.aliexpress.us/item/3256805363165906.html?spm=a2g0n...
https://www.amazon.com/4%C2%B0F-752%C2%B0F-Accuracy-Infrared...
In the United States, the current political climate will either support and fast-track or essentially deny/permanently delay all mining permits.
It's probably up to whoever replaced Tucker Carlson (who was it? I never heard). The entire right will align with their stance, and the left will rally against whichever stance it is.
Heavy industry isn't a freaking SAAS startup with an indoor playground and free beer where profit isn't expected because you're just going for a buyout. It takes many years if not decades to build out brand new physical supply chains on any meaningful scale. Yes we're just getting started, but without this metric we'd be going nowhere.
So, while it is better than nothing, the situation is still much worse than other classes of terrible news would be.
For example, if our expansion of lithium production was being outpaced by China at a constant 2:1 ratio, that would mean we had solved the second derivative, and (if you count growth rate by percentage of current footprint) also the first derivative problem.
This is a great start, I just wanted to make it clear that there's a long way to go :)
We can probably build capabilities in the order of a decade and we are already starting. In fact the pandemic showed that simply relying on globalized trade is a national security risk, let alone the other factors at play. I expect China will become increasingly marginalized on the global factory floor - which sadly I think will destabilize the situation. As their economic future hinges less on trade, their militaristic and exceedingly strident nationalist wing will demand growth through expansion and conquest.
It’s a race against time to see if we get there. Then it’s a race against rationality to see if we survive.
The need to reduce noise from motors, the need to reduce emissions in much denser cities.