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I don't understand this criticism. You mine lithium once. You have to pull fossil fuels out of the ground constantly even after you build the car using iron you've mined out of the ground.

If you’ve driven along the gulf coast the cost of oil is obvious. Growing up it was beautiful view of glistening water under a beautiful sky. Now it’s a post industrial view of oil platforms as far as the eye can see. Where fracking happens there’s earthquakes in geologically stable areas. Etc. Lithium extraction isn’t for the light hearted, but the deposits aren’t as vastly dispersed and extraction and processing happens in a smaller foot print. (Unless you consider extracting from ocean water, but even then the industrial footprint is contained) oil extraction is sprawling and pervasive, and once a well dries up, become discarded blight.

There’s also a function of scale: the amount of lithium in a car battery is orders of magnitude less than the amount of oil a non-EV will burn over the same lifetime, and even if you’re buying fossil fuel electricity the greater efficiency means you’re still using less.

To be fair, petroleum extraction is minimally invasive. You can easily live with an oil well on your property. You can't live with a lithium mine on your property.

Not sure what you are talking about, it highly depends on the way lithium is extracted.

A lithium hard rock mine is like any other open pid mine. Its a big hole in the ground with trucks going up and down.

A brine operations is basically a bunch of huge fields of water that just sort of sit there. It needs lots of space.

New forms of DLE Deep Brine mines look very much like a petroleum extraction well (even using old holes from that). However not fully commercial yet.

However I would also say that petroleum extraction on a large scale, specially in the ocean has lots of bad effects. And the gas from those mines will escape for decades.

As other have pointed out, the amount of lithium that needs to be extracted is much smaller than the amount of oil that is already being extracted.

An EV battery will use around 8-16kg of lithium that should last for the life of the car. Then the battery can be recycled. Current recycling programs can recover around 95% of the lithium. Over time, the demand for lithium will reach a much lower volume than oil.

It's always a good idea to just flat out compare the mass of alternatives.

A tank of gasoline weighs more than the lithium in an EV battery. The entire battery weighs as much as 10 tanks of gas. And 20 some kg of lithium is way less than the 1000kg of steel that goes into making a car.

And then you can look at the many, many kilograms of gasoline that would be extracted to fuel an ICEV vs the 20kg of lithium used for the life of an EV.

In some places, where it is still possible to use classic wells to pump oil. But in most locations, these have become rare. That we still can extract way too much oil is due to technologies like fracking, oil sands and what else. So claiming petroleum extraction is minimal invasive is a gross misrepresentation.

Why not? The process doesn't look that bad.

And how much fossil fuels are required to pull the lithium out of the ground?

I don’t have the answer I’m just helping you understand the criticism

Probably no more than is used finding, drilling, extracting new petroleum wells. Especially as we seem to have already gotten to a lot of the 'easily' accessible crude oil, and are drilling in Arctic and Deep Sea environments.

Seems like a sunlight rich area such as the Nevada high desert is about as energy friendly as one could imagine. The main requirements seem to be water, sulfuric acid, and (of course) power.

It very much depends. There are many different ways of mining lithium.

An Australian hard rock mine will use the same amount of fossil fuel as any other hard rock mine.

Brine operations don't use much but the lithium still has to be transported from a desert.

Future technology such as DLE (Direct Lithium Extraction) have to potential to require basically no fossil fuels at all.

These type of questions are not serious. This person already knows it's just a tiny fraction of what a non-EV vehicle will burn throughout its lifetime.

Just downvote, flag, and move on.

People are weird, I think fossil fuel is idiotic too.

How much of the lithium in a typical electric car battery is able to be extracted and put into another battery?

I think the answer for "able to be" is 100%. I think the question is how economical we can make it to separate it from the rest of the materials and then process it into a new battery.

I'm sure we'll never be able to get back 100% cost effectively, but I'm sure someday people will be working on driving it as close to that as they can.

The article made this extraction sound pretty trivial compared to other lithium deposits. The clay is close to the surface and won’t require significant mining.

> ‘They seem to have hit the sweet spot where the clays are preserved close to the surface, so they won’t have to extract as much rock, yet it hasn’t been weathered away yet.’

> 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.

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