Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found
chemistryworld.com
chemistryworld.com
However lithium operates more like a advanced chemical then a base metal. Each mine lithium mine is different and has to be separately qualified for each battery manufactures/car company.
There are very, very few companies who have actually managed to produce battery grade lithium and many, many company who have been struggling for years to achieve it.
We simply don't have a lithium problem, what is lacking is the expertise to actually bring deposits like this to use.
Historically, lithium was not interesting to mine at scale until the invention of lithium batteries thirty years ago. And only about ten years ago we figured out that we needed a lot of lithium to power things like cars, trucks, planes and electricity grids.
We've only been looking for lithium for a relatively short amount of time. Before we started looking, it was a relatively low value by product of mining other stuff. There's this perception that we have to go to places like Bolivia, Australia, etc. because that's where the known, easy to access deposits are. But as this article shows, there are probably loads of other places that might have rich lithium deposits.
The market for refining lithium is basically expanding at the pace we can build refineries. It's apparently a big reason Tesla chose to build their own refinery in Texas because the rest of the industry was not moving quick enough. Supplying lithium to the refinery isn't the issue. There's plenty of it. And if you start looking, you'll find some more. Rich deposits like this are of course nice and rare. The high concentration of lithium means extracting it is relatively cheap. But you can get it out of ocean water, there are natural brines in various places that have it, clay and rock deposits all over the place. By mass, it's one of the more common elements on this planet.
Rather than being used to bail out Banks & Airlines...and in America, Churches apparently.
If it were up to me, I wouldn't just ban plastic straws. I'd ban almost all disposable packaging. Go to the supermarket, buy products and get them in sturdy plastic containers that you pay a deposit on. The next time you return you drop them back where they're cleaned for reuse at the location. Products like say a Coke are delivered in bulk format to the supermarket and dispensed into the relevant container at the location.
After moving to the UK (from NZ), it's fucking disgusting how I go to the supermarket and _everything_ is in a disposable plastic container with a "sorry we don't recycle that yet" plastic film over _everything_. And the UK isn't even the worst place for this behaviour.
We really are going to kill our planet at this point.
Lithium comes in many forms, on a high level there are 3, hard rock, clay and brine.
Hard rock was initially common, when lithium was new and was mined in North Carolina. It turn out it was cheaper to produce lithium from brines in South America. This basically means pumping salty water from below the earth and using the sun to evaproate the water [2].
However since the battery revolution, Australia has been a leading miner of Spodumene [1]. This then shipped to China and turned into lithium chemicals.
Clay has not yet been exploited, but many are tying (like Tesla showed in their presentation). Another technology much talked about is Direct Lithium Extraction, that simple extracts lithium and releases slightly less salty water back into the environment.
From these mining operations two different chemicals are produced as input for battery cathode refining processes, lithium carbonate [3] and lithium hydroxide [4]. Different methods of mining and refining produce either of those. If my understanding is correct, most brine operations end up being carbonate and most hard rock operations end up as hydroxide. Often hydroxide is also produced from carbonate as a follow up process.
Depending on your cathode material and your process you need carbonate or hydroxide of specific quality. And because the material performance here is so important and the battery as a system is so sensitive, even the slight changes in source material and the process can have large impacts. Even the slight changes in source material and the process can have big effects.
So that means if you have a mine, you can't just mine do minimal refinement and then throw it on to the international standardized metals market the way it works for other materials. You need to build a highly sophisticated chemical processing facility that can handle your material specifically and produce high quality materials in a sufficient quantity that car makers can go threw the many rounds of testing that are required before a new source material ever makes it into a car.
Since the lithium industry is comparatively so small the necessary expertise to do these things is not at all common. A few companies can do it and that's not very many people. So getting a team together that can pull of a major project like that isn't easy.
Some media sources that do lot of good reporting:
Global Lithium Podcast - https://www.globallithium.net/podcast - Opinion-ed Insider and Interviews
The Limiting Factor - https://www.youtube.com/@thelimitingfactor/videos - Well researched videos on batteries but also lithium supply chains. Also some interviews with experts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodumene
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Lithium_...
Grain of salt, but Jindalee claims 97-98% extraction rate on acid leeching cores at the McDermitt site on the northern caldera, on an inferred 21.5 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent. They're expecting 1400 ppm on 3 Bt. Cores from Lithium Americas's inferred 19 Mt LCE find at Thacker Pass on the southern caldera is extracting at 84% on acid leeching. (For context, Clayton Valley's brine project converts at 85%.)
Jindalee also claims they can also extract lithium phosphate from it and convert it to either carbonate or hydroxide. That's cool, but they don't really go into the cost of doing that, but I think the point is that it's supposedly a very flexible lode.
> Since the lithium industry is comparatively so small the necessary expertise to do these things is not at all common. A few companies can do it and that's not very many people. So getting a team together that can pull of a major project like that isn't easy.
GM and POSCO (the Korean cathode active material supplier for GM) are already working with Jindalee on feasibility of exploiting clay at scale, and GM already bought $650M of equity in Lithium Americas back in January for Thacker Pass. Probably know by February/March 2024 what the damage will be for processing clay, but Jindalee already expects to know whether they'll be shovels-in-ground by June 2024.
That is a very fast turnaround for something that hasn't really been done before at any scale, much less 30 Mt of LCE-scale. Which I think is also why this article is a bit more focused on whether they can learn enough from how this find came about to make more finds like it. They might not know how to extract clay for a while, but if they can learn how to find more similarly exploitable clay first, they can get more investment to catch up.
Inferring >30 Mt of LCE at 1400 ppm from just two sites in one caldera still seems like plenty of reason to fund figuring that out ASAP, though. Clayton Valley is like 6 Mt LCE; at this stage of the process, they were suggesting 1.3 Mt LCE at 900 ppm, on a feasibility target of 400 ppm. That was good enough for $700M in funding.
See: Preferred Lithium Extraction Process for McDermitt Project (24th March 2023)
https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20230324/pdf/45mzrdq...
It's part of the listing standards on mineral exchanges (such as the Canadian TSX, the Australian ASX, etc) that various levels of reports at various levels of accuracy be filed by independant third party mineral engineers.
The fascicle published above is a brief four pager outlining to investors where on track they are for now - expect within 12 months or so a meaty 400+ technical report rehasing the work that has gone into estimation and additional work outling scaled up extraction plans .. closely followed by an IPO | Prospectus to raise money for capital plant equipment for the project and potential spawning of a new sub company and listing.
My point is just that the additional found reserves don't change the situation all that much. Granted if they can find more location along this crater that has the same characteristics it could be simpler to replicate the mine and processing.
- The world has enough lithium for our electric vehicles, decades into the future.
- The world is currently not producing enough of it to keep up with demand. This could be a major bottleneck this decade.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-v...
We are sitting on a huge pile of matter, the earth. We have enough of every mineral to last us more than just 'decades'. (Remember the 'peak phosphorus' panic a few years ago?)
Your second point is the more interesting question: what are the costs of extraction? Is available supply keeping up?
Traditional brines are fine but need scale and time and still a surprising amount of process tuning.
Clays, lepidolite and alternative brine methods (DLE. Extractive beads, etc) are efficient media for extracting money from the public markets but that's about all.
The author is focused on answering questions around Tesla's ramp up, but the explanations are pretty comprehensive and general.
But again, there was already plenty of lithium in the US, this discovery changes nothing. The US already has competent lithium companies.
The US already has good relationship with South America and Australia where the resources are coming from. But currently 90%+ of refining is in China.
Controlling the 'raw' resources is mostly uninteresting in this case.
Same here, it's not like there is big chunks of Lithium just waiting to be picked up. It's a small percentage of dirt, and you need to process huge amounts of that dirt to extract it. That processing takes resources. Those resources are the limiting factor, not the raw ore. In the case of aluminum its electricity. In the case of lithium I gather it's also energy (to do the heating) and sulfuric acid, and the associated containment snd cleanup of such.
Source: "After the ore is mined, it is crushed and roasted at 2012°F (1100°C). It is then cooled to 140°F (65°C), milled and roasted again, this time with sulfuric acid, at 482°F (250°C), a process known as acid leaching."
https://www.sttsystems.com/industries/lithium-extraction/#:~....
If it could be as simple as “we produced this much aluminium from all the excess energy we had last summer! Go use it in residential construction, shelters, tools, whatever, heck even mounts for further more solar panels”
No, absolutely not. Aluminum refining, like all industrial processes at scale, takes a long time to get going and needs to run (hence be fed electricity) continuously, not just whenever the wind feels like blowing.
While it is an excellent business opportunity for electricity that is cheap because it is renewable- and why Canada produces more refined aluminum than any other Western country thanks to its electric generation being overwhelmingly renewable for the entire time it's even had a grid- it's not something you can turn on and off whenever you want and not a good candidate to burn off excess power ("just not using as much naturally-pumped stored power" is not an "excess" of power by definition).
The problem I’ve always seen with this sort of plan is that the refinery is extremely expensive and so you don’t want it idle; it’s cheaper to overbuild solar than to turn off your refinery for 25% of the day. But interested if this applies here, maybe the energy-intensive bits can be made cheaply?
https://aluminiuminsider.com/trimet-aluminium-betting-enpots...
How it works: https://enpot.com/assets/pdfs/enpot-how-it-works.pdf
Energy modulation: https://enpot.com/assets/pdfs/Enpot-Energy-Modulation-of-Alu...
First was operational since 2019. If you push past the “virtual battery” marketing nonsense, a summary of the tech is… they modulate the cooling fans for closed loop thermal regulation, regardless of processing rate (+/- 20% long, 30% short term).
Talk about low hanging fruit.
As we get to higher total renewable contribution, presumably we’d see a more dramatic price difference in energy at different time of day.
This tech suggests to me that, as you say, there is low-hanging fruit that could be harvested, and which perhaps isn’t cost-effective yet with a small diurnal energy cost-delta, but with a higher peak-to-trough cost difference might become viable to extract.
It’s worth noting here that seasonal variations seem harder to deal with, and varying the energy intensity of industrial processes doesn’t seem helpful for that issue due to capex/utilization concerns.
And for diurnal fluctuations, batteries are actually not too expensive these days.
> The “virtual battery” concept relies on installing adjustable heat exchangers that can maintain the energy balance in each electrolysis cell irrespective of shifting power inputs. Since aluminium production requires a constant energy supply, any fluctuation could have heavy consequences for the molten metal. The technology also ensures that grid power fluctuations do not affect the magnetic fields in the electrolysis cells.
This seems to be solving the even-harder problem of handling on-demand/dynamic fluctuations rather than planning for a diurnal cycle. I wonder if there is scope to use a heat reservoir (molten salt or similar) as a buffer for these sorts of process; basically if you need to dump heat into a process perhaps you can shift the heat production but leave the process itself unchanged.
Amusingly I was reading the wrong Wikipedia last night and it’s mentioned right there too:
> Particularly in Australia these smelters are used to control electrical network demand, and as a result power is supplied to the smelter at a very low price. However power must not be interrupted for more than 4–5 hours, since the pots have to be repaired at significant cost if the liquid metal solidifies.
About 75% of all aluminum ever produced is currently is use, because we're so good at recycling it.
We need to get lithium from 5 to 75%
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:text=....
As long as you store your old batteries (and other lithium containing gadgets), I shouldn't make too much of a difference if you recycle them now or in ten years?
In landfills?
This brings up an aside I've been wondering about for years, when are we going to start mining our old landfills?
You could probably just stick them in a warehouse? Or a specialised landfill that only keeps electronics or batteries. (Most just to keep the overall volume down, so it's more economical to make whatever special arrangements you need to keep everything safe enough.)
Float glass plants work by literally floating a thin sheet of molten glass on top of a giant tank of liquid tin. They have a swimming pool of liquid tin, float molten glass on top, and then push it along the tank length wise.
The glass and tin is then gradually cooled until the glass is solidified. It's then cut into pieces, cooled and stacked.
If the thing suddenly stops, or there is a hiccup of some kind, the thermal expansion of the glass, along with its extreme hardness (lack if strength) it will just shatter the whole mile long sheet of glass. My understanding is that it takes the better part of a year to recover from something like this.
In aluminum, its basically electroplating. They basically electroplate the aluminum out of the ore onto the ingots. My understanding is that takes a few weeks to a month to recover from a similar incident.
Or ceramic cladding for an iron pole, depending.
Either way it's a rebuild, not a restart.
I love that way of describing it.
The idea that we’ll do industrial chemistry with intermittent energy surpluses is unrealistic unless we are okay with yield per unit of energy being very poor relative to continuous processes.
Have a read about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akosombo_Dam
Then watch this documentary on the devastating effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(British_TV_se...
As Wikipedia says about the dam:
"The Ghana government was compelled, by contract, to pay for over 50% of the cost of Akosombo's construction, but the country was allowed only 20% of the power generated."
- Yes, it has had a severe impact on the ecosystem, and also on agriculture.
- Yes, Ghana itself only gets about 20% of the power generated by the dam (or apparently a bit more in recent times).
- OTOH, the dam gives Ghana access to at least some power – much more in fact than what's available to any of its neighboring countries. I have heard people say that this is one of the major reasons for Ghana's relative economic & political stability.
It's exactly the opposite. The pots[1] in the smelter get their lifetime reduced if they have to be restarted, and if restarted multiple times that can be quite significant[2]. They can survive without power for a few hours, but they freeze over after a day or so which leads to the most damage.
As such they really want stable and cheap electricity, like hydro.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting#Layout_of_a...
[2]: https://aluminiumtoday.com/content-images/news/Oyeweb.pdf
Sibling comment mentions, correctly, that these things need to be running at full utilization for a long time to make sense. So, you'd need batteries to smooth wind or solar, which is still economical (and will become increasingly so).
That article snippet doesn't fully do it justice. They sell electricity to aluminum smelters at 1/4th the price of the EU, and a surprisingly large portion of their total energy consumption is industrial.
Iceland has done it correctly, though, in that in order to tap into their natural resources, you need to be an Icelandic company investing in Iceland. Some want to build a cable to Iceland to help the European electricity market, even though it's never been done at that length before. Some in Iceland are (rightly!) worried that would increase demand for hydropower and further industrialize Iceland, etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/us/politics/american-comp...
You can also run electric furnaces intermittently because they are inherently a batch process.
> ... with China being responsible for the refining of 90% of REEs and 60-70% of lithium and cobalt.
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-technology-perspectives-2...
Lithium and lithium batteries are a critical resource. If the US can mine the lithium, refine it, and turn it into batteries all domestically, that has big geopolitical implications.
Are we sure US can anymore? Last I checked we couldn’t build a high speed rail despite spending billions of dollars and lots of time. I would not be so optimistic. Even for things as crucial as defense supply chain we can’t seem to figure out how to build things at scale.
Lithium mining is more like the shale oil boom, when the US went from an net importer to a net exporter of fossil fuels, environmental damage be damned.
When it's for private industry's profit, the US is quite competent at eliminating any oversight of environmental and societal concerns.
https://www.consumerreports.org/water-contamination/how-frac...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/frack...
https://www.propublica.org/article/scientific-study-links-fl...
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/fracking-oil-gas...
Etc etc
Japan is not China either, yet Japan has little trouble building new bullet trains. We're building a new maglev train right now between Tokyo and Nagoya which should be finished before the decade is over, and 90% of the route is underground.
The US just doesn't really want to build high speed rail.
Yes, the US can lose lots of money building a lithium industry. But what would be the point?
Why is corn vital to the national interest? And what's the national interest you want to protect by subsidising lithium?
Most of those 'national interest' justifications are pretty flimsy, and there's almost always a better and more targeted approach to protecting the stated national interest than the subsidies and protectionism they are used to justify.
Details obviously depend on the specific case. But have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendshoring for some inspiration.
That seems like a silly conclusion. It might still be vital for your country's future to subsidise renewables, but it doesn't follow from the observation.
If China wants to spend taxpayer money to give foreigners cheaper renewables (or cheaper anything), that's nice of them, but doesn't mean anyone should imitate them.
If you have insufficient local workers for a task, and you are the US, you can always open the floodgates of (skilled) migration.
Also you don't need to subsidize renewables. That's a sore game of trying to pick winners and introducing extra bureaucracy. Instead you can hit the same policy goals simpler by taxing fossil fuels (or carbon emissions). Distribute the proceeds amongst all voters, if you want it to be revenue neutral.
With a tax, someone can react by just driving less (eg by moving closer to work) and benefiting from that choice. With a subsidy, you'd actively have to go and buy eg a subsidised electric car to benefit.
And just 'subsidizing' things isn't a replacement for actually playing your energy grid and energy production.
The entire oil supply chain has no chance of ever becoming sustainable.
When you include the very low tank to wheels efficiency of an ICE vehicle, the overall efficiency is even worse.
Self-correction: I meant electrolysis, not hydrolysis
Step 1: grow trees (or any other plants, in fact)
Step 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator
Not the most clean or efficient technology, to be sure, but has been around for almost 100 years now (the second part, the first part a bit longer).
Using solar to power a process to make a fuel before burning a fuel that at best (way less in reality) uses 2x more energy than just powering an electric motor directly is not sensical.
But we demonstrably get more energy out of the useful life of a solar panel than we have to put in to manufacture it.
But it might be necessary for 'green' planes, if the energy density of electric batteries does not improve enough.
Energy density is steadily increasing. Hydrogen will be a short-term solution for medium/long haul flights, but will eventually be replaced by batteries.
Either go with an electric battery, or go with a hydrocarbon like kerosene or methane or so.
I made the original comment contemporary batteries ain't good for electric planes. And I would not bet on batteries becoming good enough anytime soon.
But I don't think physics prohibits anything here?
Things that involve metal-air reactions are basically fuel cells and don't count. If you go down that route, you'll quickly find yourself working with some kind of chemical fuel. They will suddenly look a lot like existing airplanes in terms of basic concept.
Use biological solar panels AKA plants.
So I don't think this analogy holds up.
Since I'm being down voted, I'm adding a reference:
5% of lithium batteries are currently recycled https://www.cas.org/resources/cas-insights/sustainability/li....
So, not renewable
This also ignores the large number of those batteries that will be re-used in grid storage after being removed from a car, and eventually recycled.
>5% of lithium batteries are currently recycled
Whether something is currently recycled and whether it can be recycled are two different questions. For a long time, copper wasn't recycled very often. Then the price went up, and now it's very valuable trash.
Lithium is absolutely renewable. It may not be renewed, but it is renewable.
Let's put more effort into getting that 5% up to 100%, that's where the real effort and headlines should focus.
75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:text=....
We need to get lithium to that level
75% of all aluminum every smelted is still in use today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:text=....
We need to get lithium to that level before we make any more big, environmentally hazardous mines.
The lifecycle of the lithium that will come from this hypothetical mine is probably 20 years from now until the first time the material will be recycled.
The highly profitable recycling logistics will have been fully worked out a decade before it’s needed for a new mine’s output.
I'm proposing we put equal effort into both. My expectation is that we don't currently.
75% of all aluminum ever made is still in use. We should be able to do that with lithium too.
The recycling effort is highly profitable, there’s little need to subsidize it. It will simply grow and consume all available supply.
Large scale lithium battery storage is still truly just getting started. We need to be super smart with lining up supply for essential inputs for growth.
Neither are photons [1] nor individual gusts of wind. Lithium has a theoretically closeable cycle in batteries in a way fossil fuels do not.
[1] If you want to be pedantic, the useful energy in a particular photon.
We are still early in the development cycle of recycling technology, which means we'll be closer to 99.x% in a decade when the first large wave of EV batteries (from the last decade) could start getting close to End of Life.
Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem.
There are people who "throw away" the coupon by not returning the old battery, but hey that's on them.
It’s also one of scale. We don’t yet have enough EV batteries being retired to merit the recycling infrastructure. China is just reaching the point where it does.
Sure there is a theoretical closable cycle in batteries, but guess what, the same can be said for fossil fuels. Just use energy to turn air and water back into fuel, boom cycle closed.
What matters is not if something is 'renewable' but if its a strategically correct thing to do in regards to climate and energy security.
Calling lithium 'renwable' is ridiculous. Its literally just a fixed resource on our plant like iron or copper or whatever.
On geological time scales involving massive deposition of organic material.
In contrast, lithium can be recovered from batteries with an industrial shredder and chemical processing.
Fossil fuels are non-renewable in a trivial sense but are grossly different in a practical sense; treating them as equivalent is a borderline specious argument.
Sure, if you want to be painfully pedantic. If you want to have a real conversation, lithium batteries are absolutely "renewable" in the sense they can be recycled, and some studies have shown that they actually perform better after being recycled.
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-lithium-...
The issue is that much of the work ends up being overseas or all over the world. If you go to any mine site in the world, I guarantee you will find American trained Mining/Geophysics/etc engineers
Source - I went to the Colorado School of Mines and most of my friends and acquaintances from school work in those 2 industries.
The Canadian TSX is the global centre for listed public mining, Anglo-Australian mining companies dominate there.
No one is going to deny the Colorado School of mines their little corner of the pie but they haven't hit "much of" in a clear majority sense by a long shot.
People are not fungible resources. You can’t simply turn a programmer from Google into a Lithium miner by paying more.
20 yrs is a very long time.
Although apparently Australia is a big lithium producer so it must be possible to do in an environmentally conscious way. Or Australia's lithium mines have managed to fly under the radar of the environmentalists. It looks like Australia's lithium deposits are unusual being hard rock deposits, and we have it processed in China because I assume that part of the process is illegal in Australia.
That's a large assumption to make without any investigation.
Lithium has been a trendy commodity for years. If the US doesn't have a lot of active lithium mines - which it does not - it is going to be because of legislative impediments. Probably environmental ones. There aren't a lot of other reasons. It is common for environmental restrictions as the root cause of mines not being started, particularly in lithium from what I gathered.
You're not going to get a citation, this is literally just stuff I happened to know quite well a few years ago.
Sadly, both don't seem to be true. Australia's lithium mining has a higher carbon footprint than others (3.4): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...
We has some of the highest CO2 emissions per capita, so it's not much of a surprise we are doing this inefficiently too.
Im sympathetic to the point that its fairly common but cant we overstate it’s abundance? As far as I know its not very evenly distributed and not everyone has good access to it.
Not every country is going to be self-sufficient in every natural resource, or be efficient producers of every product or service.
[1] https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/united-kingd...
I've no doubt that a sudden cataclysmic change to international trade would spike food prices and increase poverty-derived food insecurity. But I doubt there would be physical calorie shortages.
If there was a sudden change, there might be calorie shortages. However, I agree that if importing become more expensive over the longer run, or even if there was a quick change, but one that could be predicted years in advance, there would be no calorie shortages.
However, the same is true for lithium: the UK could mine its own lithium, if importing become infeasible. I am not sure though, if it would make commercial sense even then: you can make batteries (and other gadgets) without lithium, and for many applications you can make do without batteries at all.
Eg instead of solely driving electric cars with home-grown lithium batteries, on the margin I would expect more people to take the train.
Whether or not its paranoia is the issue so you can’t presuppose it. Also, there is no reason you cant be concerned about multiple dependencies at the same time. In this case the topic is lithium.
Europe may've gotten the short end of the stick, but there's plenty
If need be plenty more could found in Europe.
If you process many things in the West, you can't leave toxic chemicals in pools any more, to leak into ground water and cause cancer and other problems for people. So processing costs are going to be way more expensive than in a place where it's still OK to process+pollute and therefore kill and maim your citizens to make money.
The West cannot compete with that.
Do you have actual evidence that lithium refining is a massively dirty industrial process that would cost multiple times more the West? Or are you speculating?
Tesla is building a lithium refining plant in Texas right now, they didn't seem to have massive environmental problems and delays so far.
In reality, the lead china has in these fields is more because of state investment policy and their drive to have an export car market. They saw the EV revolution as being able to make that happen, and it did.
I’m a bit on the fence about whether Zeihan is a crank or a prophet (and there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground), but serious people pay green money to have him speak. If he’s right, the difference between “expensive lithium even amortized” and “unreliable lithium at best even if someone has a gun to your head” is existential.
The vast majority of new deposits are leveraging different technology to enrich yields or extract it from challenging environments. Seems like a common problem for resource extraction that gets solved with time and investment.
The end result of this is that it's harder to take advantage of economies of scale where you can have a handful of processing facilities working on a very specific type of ore.
The main reason America develops great oil tech and not lithium tech vs China is that the USA has lots of oil, while China doesn’t.
Here is a recent article about this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/business/australia-lithiu...
So in oil its very worth it to build the right refining capacity for large resources and there are tons and tons of experienced people to do those things.
There are some domestic companies further along in the process. But existing sources like South American brine and Australian hard rock will continue to be a huge part of the market.
The US companies that originally mined in North Carolina are still around on the processing side.
So its not really clear if having the mining domestically makes much of a difference. China is refining mostly things from Australia.
Tesla is setting up a huge lithium refining factory on US soil but most of the material won't be mined in the US.
But generally speaking yes, there are 100s of junior lithium miners and all the big miners as well engaged in lithium extraction.
Clay is as of yet untouched in mass production of lithium with many companies wanting to exploit it.
Maybe most common is research on DLE, lithium extraction from brine where the brine is simply pumped back. This also exists in a deep brine variant where you pump water from super deep reservoirs.
The problem is the ev market is going gang busters and even established companies spend decades on getting new plants up and running.
Some environmentalists and local native Americans aren't terribly happy about the idea: https://apnews.com/article/nevada-lithium-mine-court-appeal-...
It's actually a pretty interesting bit of country to see, because it's rare for most of us to experience places that remote. A few years back, when visiting Steens Mountain (highly recommended) we drove the paved road from Frenchglen to the Alvord desert. We saw I think 2 other cars in an hour.
It's also true that mines have a huge track record of getting in, digging stuff up, making money, and then leaving the mess for someone else to clean up.
If you look at the satellite map of the area, you see the former Cordero mercury mine: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9221322,-117.8162339,7151m/d...
There's a whole report on it here: https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=7029
> The EPA Site Assessment program conducted a Site Inspection in 1988 which recommended no further action. Upon request from the Fort McDermitt Pauite Shoshone Tribe, EPA Emergency Response conducted an additional site visit in November 2009. At that time, EPA was notified of the possibility that mine waste had been used as fill at locations within the town of McDermitt and on the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone Reservation.
In other words, they tried to get out of doing any cleanup. Then they found that "well, actually..." there was some cleanup needed.
So... it's probably still worth doing because of climate change, but it'd sure be nice to ensure it's done right, and they do right by the people who have always lived there. I imagine the local tribes are also pretty wary of getting screwed, because that is something that has been very much par for the course throughout US history.
https://www.google.com/maps/@28.0170789,-98.9525815,39702m/d...
https://www.google.com/maps/@32.2481804,-102.7177912,13375m/...
You only have to glance around to find other mine disturbances. They are sized proportionately to the amount of the material humans want. Copper mines are pretty impressive. Potash and borax mines are rather large. Iron mines are absolutely gigantic.
:(
Your example actually is proof of this. It got cleaned up. It wouldn't in most countries.
To be clear I think EVs are cleaner, but you can’t conclude that from the fact that it doesnt emit while driving. EVs just squeeze the emission event further up the supply chain where a shocking amount of people don’t see it.
If that isn’t saying things should be mined, just not where they can see it, I don’t know what is.
I mean, if I'm a native American, I am not going to have a whole lot of faith in that process...
"NIMBY" might be accurate, but "knee-jerk" is unfair.
/s
And there's such a prestine track record of resource extraction by trillion-dollar conglomerates.
/s/s
I think the knee jerking is yours.
My youngest always asks to play "Lithium by Nirvana" song when it's his turn to pick.
Would be cool for the US to produce better batteries.
> Benson says his company expects to begin mining in 2026. It will remove clay with water and then separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.
How economical is the refinement of lithium clays compared to stone or brine mines? Do they have similar chemical, water and mechanical refinement requirements?
For example, there is no genuinely ecological way to have our current car-based infrastructure, let alone expand it into other parts of the world, regardless of whether they're EVs or ICE.
We absolutely must wrangle with the fact that we need a society not premised on infinite growth. Anything else is inherently NOT ecological and makes any claims about things like extracting lithium for a 'green transition' nonsense.
If one's reaction to this is "we can just develop artifical life support": suggestions that a well-functioning planetary ecology is not necessary had better come with a demonstrably viable alternative. We are nowhere close.
Even if we were, is there no value in the beings we share this planet with? Can we really justify their indiscriminate destruction? To what end?
It happened with oil and now it's happening with lithium.
A good battery lasts years, maybe decades. And in theory it can then be recycled.
Sourcing lithium is something we've been thinking a lot about, whereas we haven't reached peak fossil fuels or scarcity. There are plenty of places to continue drilling: the US, Greenland, the Arctic Circle, Antarctica ...
The problem with fossil fuels is the carbon entering the atmosphere.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-produc...
It's hard to extrapolate a trend though - there was a dip caused by COVID, and global oil use has been growing since then, but it's still not back to where it was 4 years ago.
Also a lot of people think peak oil means that we suddenly won't have any gas available. No. Peak oil means all the easily extractable oil is gone, and so all future projects need to use more capital-intensive, technologically-advanced extraction techniques that cost more, and so the price of oil goes up, and then we use less of it while it's replaced by other technologies. Which is exactly what's been happening for the past ~5-15 years. U.S. is back to being the world's top oil producer, but all of it is in shale oil fields that aren't economically viable below ~$50/barrel, and so gas will never go back down to the $1/gallon it was in the 90s.
The OPEC countries could produce far more oil far cheaper, but they don't want to. There are plenty of oil fields left. Not to mention fighting economic war against Iran and Russia, two huge producers.
It is likely we are or have peaked.
The way I see it, we bootstrapped our existing tech off high energy density oil.
If it were gone, we would find it extremely difficult to repeat it all.
Now that we have built all this up, it is also our opportunity to bootstrap something far more sustainable, or we do risk a serious regression and a lot of people die.
Longer term, we use oil for far too much.
Getting off of it preserves a resource we may well find need of again.
If another collapse happens, and without oil, people could believably bootstrap straight from electricity + batteries. There'll be endless amounts of quality scrap material and manuals. A lot of critical small scale appliances can be powered by hand-cranked motors.
If we were to collapse, we would be left with some remnants that we would be unable to reproduce!
The tech needed for that runs on fuels we would find ourselves unable to procure.
That's coping, not building or bootstrapping.
Longer term the same processes that turned algae and other life forms into oil are still happening and try as we might we aren't going to stop them, but they proceed at what is likely a pace that will take long after humans are extinct to replenish what we have used.
This is unfortunately not true.
The vast majority of our fossil fuels are formed from carbon that was sequestered into cellulose in plants, before anything had evolved the ability to digest cellulose. It piled up, and eventually compressed into coal. Look up the ʾCarboniferous Period" for more details.
These reserves are no longer being formed because we have fungi that break down these materials and return the CO2 to the air.
Planet Earth will never again have oil and coal reserves of the size it did 200 years ago.
The above processes are costly, but we know how to do it.
That being said they're astronomically more efficient than even an ideal carnot engine.
An easier to recycle battery that had very slightly fewer charge cycles could be a net win. For scale this depot has enough lithium for ~10 billion of EV’s using Tesla’s battery chemistry and pack size as a benchmark. How expensive it is to extract is however unknown.
Fun!
That was not what I was trying to say.
The math is something like:
MTBF cycles * capacity of battery = usable "life" of the battery
usage of lithium by mass in the battery * best recycling technology recovery rate = recoverable lithium per battery
((mass of lithium in battery - recoverable lithium per battery) / usable "life" of the battery) = lithium effectively used up per joule of energy used from that battery
It may be that that number is zero grams, or a few picograms, so it doesn't matter. But I don't think with current recovery rates on battery recycling that's true. So, while a failed battery has the same mass of lithium as a new battery, effectively every charge-discharge cycle "uses up" some lithium, which ultimately ends up wasted as recycling byproducts or unusable salts.
In a battery lithium is not consumed completely after every use like oil. The lithium in a battery is used hundreds or thousands of times. When the pack is dead it can still be downcycled and eventually the individual cells recycled. With the lithium being recovered and reused.
Yes, there is or will be a “lithium rush”. But it will look a lot more like gold or aluminum than oil.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/alumi...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ev-lit...
It's always fun when we go masks off on HN.
Yes I'd call that a failure in management.
>company will (..) separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.
And:
>‘If they can extract the lithium in a very low energy intensive way, or in a process that does not consume much acid, then this can be economically very significant,’
Centrifuging doesn't seem to be a very low energy process compared with what they do in Bolivia (just let the water evaporate in huge shallow lakes then gather the material with dozers). And the acid thing is just contradictory. They plan to leach with sulphuric acid and hope to find a way to not use acid at the same time?
It is very good more lithium deposits are found outside China, but isn't lithium one of most abundant things on earth? And isn't the key difficulty in economic extraction the fact established mines use practices that would not be allowed in places like US/Europe?
Surely, we should start with funding r&d to come up with an economic and less polluting process of extraction.
It's very easy to come up with a back of the envelope calculation to say we have this much Lithium, or this much Copper and come up with an absolute whopper of a number, the question is how much of it is recoverable and can it form part of a resource. There's a reason we (mining industry) don't let people produce these kind of numbers offhand, it's wildly speculatory and holds no basis in mining reality (yet!) - however very cool stuff and might provide a new exploration target in the future.
On the one hand: cool, less exploitation of developing nations by a few billionaires. (Downvotes. Cool. I know it is hard for some people to accept reality because they just need to worship a wealth they'll never experience, no matter who or what it obliterates.)
On the other hand: dammit, we were just getting around to cost-effectiveness of lithium recycling, but now it looks like that's another several decades off.
I’m imagining that volcanoes are a little bit like the channeling hazard when making espresso, where the shallow or disturbed area are more likely to erupt with hot liquid.
This is relevant because I have seen it said that meteors could be a source of lithium.
I would guess that large-scale recycling is only just coming online in the next few years.
Of course there is initial supply now, but battery production is growing exponentially (for EV and Grid) those battery lifespans are 5-10 years or longer.
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
[ ] your claims are lies.
[1](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1700805058370113934?t=D0...)