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Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

As with all the 5000 news articles talking about lithium discovers, please remember, lithium is very common, discovering it is easy, there is plenty around and plenty of known location.

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.

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It's not so much an expertise problem but more a problem of having to tailor the process to the supply of lithium. We're talking typically low quantities of lithium mixed with a lot of other materials in either some kind of clay, brine, or rock. Or recycled lithium batteries. Those sources of lithium require different approaches and there are multiple companies working on all of those.

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.

Sounds like every discovery is bad news for the environment because it raises the threshold for recycling even higher?

I don’t see why, recycling is refinement at a high density in a form that is near perfect for battery use. It’s probably more in wait of a high enough volume of input materials.

Which is why taxes should be going into subsidies for products made with genuinely recycled material, where the recycling is done in a sustainable way also.

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.

Banning plastic straws is one of the lowest effectiveness and most absurd ideas ever. Plus those paper straws are really bad for your health and the contain "forever chemicals". I'm sorry for the inflammatory comment but anyone who advocates for banning plastic straws in America is wasting time on environmentalism theatre.

This is really interesting, could you explain a little more? Is it that each of these mines is a different lithium compound, and there's no economical process to convert it to some base form?

Just to be clear, I'm not a chemists. This is just what I have learned from following this industry. Any real domain expert feel free to correct or expand.

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_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_carbonate

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide

Appreciate this comment. This is why I love hackernews.

very interesting, thank you.

Indeed! According to Hannah Ritchie:

- 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...

> - The world has enough lithium for our electric vehicles, decades into the future.

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?

Great research thanks

> 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.

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.

In reseource development flow Jindalee's project is currently midway beteen Final Technical Report (where mining engineers produce a resource estimate of shapes, volumes, and densities) and Economic Feasibility Report (where production engineers sketch out one or several methods to get material out cheaper than the market value of the material)

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.

Yes, Thacker Pass has been a known resource for a while and Lithium America is one of the most promising lithium mines in the US. I have even invested a small amount in them years ago.

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.

Why is buying whatever composition crudely refined at the various mines and turning that into a precisely controlled product for sale for use in batteries not viable?

I'd assume from the above that you'd pretty much need a different processing plant for each site that you're buying from.

Nothing really beats good spodumene yet, and even that's pretty hard to get right at the mining stage, let alone at the refinement.

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.

If that is the only efficient method for lithium extraction, is it fair to say that accessible lithium is not as abundant as people typically say?

If you want a very comprehensive answer, then this series of (3?) youtube videos might be interesting to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqF_OZJSbxY&list=PLyvdbTy3v1...

The author is focused on answering questions around Tesla's ramp up, but the explanations are pretty comprehensive and general.

I'd be surprised if the US cannot build the industry necessary for it, and even if that were the case, it seems that they could export ~raw lithium, and then buy it processed, or as batteries if needed meanwhile they figure things out, as the US doesn't really want to keep China owning critical production lines for the technology that's coming in the next 20+ years.

Here is the thing. Its not about what can happen in 20+ years. Of course the US can do whatever it want's in 20 years with enough money. In 20 years lot of things will be very different.

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.

It's very similar to aluminum in this way. Aluminum mining is very different than many other minerals and metals. It's basically a processing thing. It's all about where you can get the resources to do the refining, not where the ore is. In the case of Aluminum its electricity. They call aluminum solidified electricity for a reason. That's why the biggest aluminum smelters in the world are where electricity is cheap.

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/#:~....

Interesting to hear about refining of Aluminium. It is a very useful metal, and if it is electricity intensive to define, I wonder if it would fit the use of excess renewable electricity. A lot of times, UK has excess wind power than they can pass on to any grids that they idle the windmills. Same with countries like Morocco that gets a lot of sun, but not enough transmission lines to push them into(for a lot of geo political reasons, building out transmission lines seem to be a lot complicated).

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”

Most industries that deal in refining or other heat-intensive processes are nearly hard to impossible to pause or stop. My understanding is that glassmaking plants, for instance, will literally solidify if they ever stop operation--making it an extremely rare occurrence. I wouldn't be surprised if aluminum refining is the same way--fighting entropy keeping things hot is a losing battle, so not very dispatchable.

I confirm that an aluminium refinery is not something you stop lightly. I remember something about taking two weeks to restart? Maybe more. Source, had family working at a large northern plant.

Being able to restart it at all makes it better than a lot of industries. Many of these liquid-metal affairs depend on convection and inertia to keep the metal molten, and if it solidifies inside a pipe—well, then you don't have a pipe anymore; you have a bimetal pole.

Or ceramic cladding for an iron pole, depending.

Either way it's a rebuild, not a restart.

Totally, like magnetic induction pumps that pump molten iron, once the iron solidifies its a composite tube.

> well, then you don't have a pipe anymore; you have a bimetal pole.

I love that way of describing it.

That is true about float glass plants but for a different, very interesting reason.

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.

If I remember right, you can stop the electricity to an aluminum smelting plant. But only for a while.

Right. The wall has to continue to be cooled -- if it reaches the temperature of the melt, it's ruined -- so there's always some heat loss. And if the electrolyte freezes you're also in trouble.

Glass melting furnace never stops after it's started. If it cools down it's basically destroyed so yeah, they run uninterrupted for years. Any maintenance or fixes need to account for that.

How do they account for power outages? Huge generators? Or is it gas fired?

From what I've read its gas

There are electrically heated glass furnaces. They work by immersing electrodes in the molten glass, which is electrically conductive, if somewhat resistive. I imagine they could use gas for startup though. The use I saw for this was in making fiberglass from recycled glass cullet.

Most aluminum for European countries comes from recycled sources. It's way less energy to just smelt old soda cans.

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=....

> We need to get lithium from 5 to 75%

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?

Where and how do we store them safely?

In landfills?

This brings up an aside I've been wondering about for years, when are we going to start mining our old landfills?

We just need more people to accidentally toss their bitcoin keys in the trash! https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/15/uk/bitcoin-trash-landfill...

> Where and how do we store them safely?

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.)

Well if we're comparing the recycling of old soda cans to lithium batteries... I had to throw a few old phones away recently. I Googled and found a mobile phone store near me that accepted e-waste for free, so I went a bit out of my way and took the phones there. I was not, however, given a bit of cash for every phone I returned..!

Soda can deposits are far from universal an do not result in free money... they simply refund the deposit that was paid up.

But they do make sure more bottles amd cans get recycled. In practice it creates a whole ecosystem of people collecting amd cashing them in. If we didn't have the deposit, the government would have to pay for that cleanup

Batteries in Norway have a very high recycling rate and large batteries like car starter batteries attract a specific tax (miljø gebyr, environment charge) that assists in funding the recycling operations. Everyone who sells batteries has to be a member of an approved recycling group and be willing to accept for recycling batteries of the same general type even if they did not sell them. So you can dump your old phone batteries in a box at any supermarket.

Indeed, aluminum refining is a relatively large industry in Iceland for this very reason. Geothermal energy production in excess of what people need means you can devote a bunch to industry cheaply. If Nordural’s website is to be believed, they use 25% of all electricity generated in Iceland: https://nordural.is/en/

>It is a very useful metal, and if it is electricity intensive to define, I wonder if it would fit the use of excess renewable electricity.

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).

If you have a predictable pricing regime can you vary the power load on a diurnal cycle? Say, drawing more at noon and less at 7pm each day? If so it could still be useful to shape the demand curve (ie use power when solar is cheapest so that meeting the evening peak doesn’t require as much overprovisioning) even though this doesn’t help with inter-day variability of supply.

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?

These kinds of refineries take *weeks* to start up. There is no idle. Period.

How large is the tolerance though? Would it be feasible to heat things up a little more from say 9:00 - 17:00 and using more electricity so that you don't need to heat (as much) during peak demand-supply imbalance? Even a couple of hours can help with the duck curve.

Looks like aluminium smelter demand flexibility is already in use, but it doesn't rely on process temperature variation:

https://enpot.com/

https://aluminiuminsider.com/trimet-aluminium-betting-enpots...

Ah, hacker news, from “ No, absolutely not.” to already being done in 3 comments.

To be fair, first operational in 2019. Variable speed cooling fans, for heat loss regulation, are bleeding edge tech, in the world of aluminum.

I just wish people would be more open minded and curious by default.

They only are if they're incentivized: most ignore the rewards, those you admire who don't ignore self-motivated open-minded-ness and curious-ness, they must have already been rewarded previously for having these traits, and so they continue to express them.

Interesting, thanks!

> 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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting

Here are some pdfs:

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.

This is particularly interesting to me because we currently have some unanswered questions about how viable renewable energy is for ~100% of generation.

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.

Efficiency for industrial chemistry is massively dependent on the processes being continuous. The processes often don’t work, or work poorly, until you reach a stable equilibrium, which can take many hours. An enormous amount of effort is expended to ensure this in real industrial processes. Otherwise, you are just burning resources for negligible output.

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.

Exactly. Chemistry can be done that way, in batches. Chemical engineering cannot, it's not a batch process, it's all rate stuff.

Aluminium smelters already adjust their electricity consumption throughout the day to take advantage of changing power prices.

Even if you ignore the difficulties of start / stop the factories and imagine we have a new manufacturing process that can be restarted immediately, having idle factories and employees sitting around doing nothing for half a day would be a huge money sink

No way, you can't run a factory for 1 hours a day. Aluminum is only "solidified electricity" under normal circumstances. Not when capex is 24x because the normal price of electricity in the UK for most of the day is ~7x what you'd pay in Texas (which isn't even that cheap globally)

But don't the crypto-bros have dibs on all the excess renewable energy so they can Get Rich Quick?

When I was a kid there was an aluminium smelter in Anglesey, North Wales that ran off the base load of the local nuclear power station

You're not thinking big enough.

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."

Having been to Ghana and to Lake Volta & the Akosombo dam in particular, I'm somewhat torn:

- 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.

> I wonder if it would fit the use of excess renewable electricity.

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

I recall a big part of Iceland’s economy is processing aluminium. Basically producing as much as, if not more than, the US.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/us/politics/american-comp...

Not Aluminum. However iron can be reduced in a low temperature aqueous cell. I can't think of why that couldn't be done intermittently. Takes about 3-4kwh per kg of iron produced. That probably works out to $150-250/ton.

You can also run electric furnaces intermittently because they are inherently a batch process.

You can also make iron by direct reduction with hydrogen. IIUC, this is actually more energy efficient (with green hydrogen) than direct electrolytic reduction. And electrolysers for hydrogen are getting cheap enough that running them intermittently will make sense.

Iceland has incredible hydropower resources, and aluminum is the primary way they export their excess energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iceland#Aluminium

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.

90% of rare-earth elements, but only 60-70% of lithium and cobalt (which, as said in parent, are not rare):

> ... 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...

It is indeed mostly uninteresting, but it is exactly what naysaysers along with paid lobbyists of the oil industry telling us - "you are trying to replace oil which is sufficient, for lithium which is fundamentally insufficient and there is nothing you can do to make it work". Glad to find out for certain that this isn't true.

These dismissive "oh this big event that's just occurred is uninteresting" comments on HN are always so weird. Like just because you don't see the ramifications doesn't mean they don't exist, why not keep an open mind?

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.

It's not really a question of if the US can though, it's a question of will. Even before this finding the US had known massive lithium reserves that were essentially just sitting there idle. The US refining a larger chunk of the market is just a question of if we want to do it or continue outsourcing that. The US definitely have competent people (or still has access to, convincing international people to work here) able to build and operate the refining side of it. There's loads of capital available to build the refineries. The US just has to choose to do it.

> Of course the US can do whatever it want's in 20 years with enough money.

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.

Building high speed rail is complicated because of land rights, the US is not China where the government can just order people off large swathes of land as needed.

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.

Shouldn't we be seeing wide-scale, obvious signs of environment destruction consider how many barrels a day the US produces? Maybe it is not covered well by the news, but do you have any sources for major environmental destruction?

https://news.stanford.edu/2016/03/29/pavillion-fracking-wate...

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

I did not say or believe that fracking causes no harm to the environment, just at the scale fracking is done at there would be more than minor incidents, there would be mass devastation wherever fracking was taking place. Most of these issues are fracking be done too close to underground water reservoirs.

>Building high speed rail is complicated because of land rights, the US is not China where the government can just order people off large swathes of land as needed.

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.

It's easy to set up lithium extraction. The problem is setting up commercially viable lithium extraction.

Yes, the US can lose lots of money building a lithium industry. But what would be the point?

Sometimes it might make sense to subsidize an industry that's vital to national interest the way we subsidize corn and many other things.

Corn subsidies are really bad and stupid to boot. So I wouldn't bring them up as a good example.

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.

This mine is owned by a company controlled by a Chinese company. The US should be cautious about subsidizing foreign companies who are under control of competing powers.

Just don't subsidize anything, that's safest.

USA lacks workers in those fields. So the problem is really "how to discover new twchnical expertise labor" to extract those lithium. It is same thing with solar and now silicon chips in USA.

Isn’t the problem always that wages for skill is too low, so too few people know it

No, this isn’t always the problem.

People are not fungible resources. You can’t simply turn a programmer from Google into a Lithium miner by paying more.

The expertise China has built up is only around 20 years old, so it’s not like we couldn’t develop it in 20 years. Doing so in a free market way that isn’t undercut by Chinese suppliers, however, would be tricky (so some non free market mechanism is needed).

> so it’s not like we couldn’t develop it in 20 years.

20 yrs is a very long time.

It’s not really that long, but I guess it depends on how old you are (perception of passing time speeds up rapidly after 40).

^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital to our country's future. All the folks losing their minds are being short-sighted. While I agree in principle that the organizations should be paying their employees more, there's also the reality that China HEAVILY subsidizes their renewables AND has a lower base pay rate. Only one way to compete with that.

Lithium isn't 'renewable'.

And just 'subsidizing' things isn't a replacement for actually playing your energy grid and energy production.

> Lithium isn't 'renewable'

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.

Exactly. Batteries are being recycled at scale today with 98-95% material recovery rates, depending on the company.

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.

Batteries can be recycled at high rates of recovery, but most non-EV lithium batteries aren’t being recycled (basically because they aren’t sent to battery recycling centers given their small sizes). The anti-EV crowd then uses that statistic to deride EVS.

But the value of nickel in say a NiMH battery makes it feasible to reclaim/“recycle”

Most small batteries are sent to landfills, whether they have lithium or nickel. EV batteries and nickel car batteries are easier to recycle because there is an auto shop involved to collect and send the battery to a recycler. If you replace your NiMH 12V battery yourself (rather than having it done in the shop), you might be tempted to just throw it away in your garbage can also (even though you shouldn’t) simply because you have no idea how to get it to a recycler. You are unlikely to change the big battery in your Tesla on your own, so that isn’t a problem.

Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem.

> Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem

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.

Most EV batteries that age out of car use can be repurposed for home/solar, so this is true. But they will eventually need to be recycled.

In Canada at least, when you buy a car / ev battery depending on the chemistry you get a coupon that you redeem for a significant amount of money when you take your old replaced battery back to the place you bought the new battery. The vendor will take back any brand/regardless of where you got the old battery from.

There are people who "throw away" the coupon by not returning the old battery, but hey that's on them.

It is incredibly profitable to recycle an EV battery, so I’m not sure why the coupon is needed. The owner should get cash or a discount on their new battery.

My reaction was not pro-fossil fuel but rather that I think the use of 'renewable' as a statement of general positivity is idiotic.

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.

> Sure there is a theoretical closable cycle in batteries, but guess what, the same can be said for fossil fuels.

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.

Besides brushing off the difference in difficulty between refreshing our petroleum stock on the planet and recycling lithium, I think the point of the original use of "renewables" is the push toward renewable energy for all possible things, such as transport, and the part lithium currently plays in that plan.

Oil is 100% non-renewable. A single, relatively efficient ICE vehicle will use over 45,000 lbs of gasoline over its lifetime (excluding all the oil to extract, refine, and transport that gasoline).

The entire oil supply chain has no chance of ever becoming sustainable.

So is lithium

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

I can't tell if you actually believe your logic is sound or you're just trolling.

A bit of both. I'm trying to say that it's not so cut and dry. Making lithium batteries and thr mining of lithium is a messy business. It's not a panacea. We need to be honest and realistic about the costs of doing that business, and often we arent.

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.

A chokehold on new mining of a crucial ore for renewables sounds like a terrible overall idea.

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.

This is reducto ad absurdum. I'm not proposing that.

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.

I was responding to when you said “before we make any more big, environmentally hazardous mines”.

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.

Then why hasn't it been keeping up? It seems that lithium recycling is way behind exploration and mining. Why? It's highly profitable as you say, are there technology limitations?

There isn't enough material yet for a large robust recycling industry, and collection of small batteries is still an issue.

While the 5% number may be presently accurate, it is mainly for tiny Lithium batteries. Those from vehicles are of very large + high value, and will likely end up well above 95% recycling rate whenever it is time for them to be scrapped.

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.

>Since I'm being down voted, I'm adding a reference:

>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.

Agreed.

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

As the value goes up, companies that sort trash and recycling will be incentivized to separate the electronics, and claim the value as an extra revenue stream.

Not true: we might learn to pull carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into gasoline so that instead of using solar and wind energy to charge electric cars, we use to make gasoline for ICE cars.

Making gasoline for cars from renewable energy isn't going to happen. The end to end efficiency of that process (Hydrolysis, CO2 capture, Fischer Tropf) would likely measure in the single digit percentages. Charging a car battery (especially from local solar) can be over 90% efficient.

When you include the very low tank to wheels efficiency of an ICE vehicle, the overall efficiency is even worse.

> Hydrolysis

Self-correction: I meant electrolysis, not hydrolysis

That isn't really "renewing", though. If part of the process involves the substance being dispersed in the environment and then extracted again, that's different from capturing waste as it's produced. Furthermore, you're not necessarily capturing the same carbon dioxide that you released, but when you recycle a battery, it's the same lithium. And getting the lithium from a battery should take less energy than mining it, while capturing and reducing carbon dioxide definitely requires more energy than pumping oil from the ground.

So I don't think this analogy holds up.

I'm having trouble seeing how it'd be feasible to do all that while expending less energy than you can get out of the resulting gasoline.

But we demonstrably get more energy out of the useful life of a solar panel than we have to put in to manufacture it.

Producing synthetic fuels for internal combustion engines doesn't really makes sense for cars: electric cars are good enough.

But it might be necessary for 'green' planes, if the energy density of electric batteries does not improve enough.

Electric cars are better. Less moving parts/maintenance, quicker, 3x as efficient, can be charged nearly anywhere with existing infrastructure and no ongoing supply chain requirement (fuel delivery).

Energy density is steadily increasing. Hydrogen will be a short-term solution for medium/long haul flights, but will eventually be replaced by batteries.

Why would you ever want to use hydrogen? It's essentially a terrible battery with terrible fuel density (if you take into account the weight and volume of the tanks required to contain it).

Either go with an electric battery, or go with a hydrocarbon like kerosene or methane or so.

You are basically ignore the laws of physics. There will never be a airplane with decent range running on conventional batteries. Even now, battery powered airplanes are just powered gliders or ultra-lights, not something that will send real passengers.

What do you mean by 'conventional batteries'? You need to add some assumption so that you can say powering a plane with them is physically impossible.

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?

Anything that works like existing rechargeable batteries. Those would be considered conventional batteries. There is basically no path to a high enough energy density for airplanes for those types of batteries.

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.

> Anything that works like existing rechargeable batteries. Those would be considered conventional batteries.

Ok, that definition works.

I would have gone with 'whatever people (in the future or now) use for powering their phones, laptops and electric cars' is by definition 'conventional' at that point in time.

> I'm having trouble seeing how it'd be feasible to do all that while expending less energy than you can get out of the resulting gasoline.

Use biological solar panels AKA plants.

This technology already exists.

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).

Yeah, I meant figuring out how to do it so efficiently that it becomes preferable to batteries for powering cars. We talk like it is certain that battery-powered cars will win out, but I haven't seen a proof that that is how it must turns out if we learn to create nanomachines that use solar energy to suck carbon from air.

Unfortunately, physics says battery-powered cars have won.

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.

And the battery makes the car 1.3 times the weight of a gas-powered car. Making the battery requires much more energy than making a gas tank. The charging infrastructure might prove more expensive than a network of gas stations. Long trips are punctuated by idle periods needed for the battery to charge, so the car's "utilization rate" is lower than a gas-powered car. All I am saying is that it is not 1.00 certain which technology will retain the lowest total cost of ownership as both technologies improve: battery tech is more likely to win, but not certain to win.

>Lithium isn't 'renewable'.

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-...

> ^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital to our country's future.

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.

You may say China is subsidizing their lithium industry. Actually, by exporting cheap lithium, they're effectively subsidizing all the other countries' economy, regardless of whether they like it or not.

When standard oil used dumping tactics it was with the expectation that they would be able to clean up the market later, and they at least, were right.

The world lacks workers in those fields.

Not really, we actually train many of the world's mining and petroleum experts. Many of the people around the world that do this stuff were trained at the various "A&M" or "...School of Mines".

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.

Sure .. alongside Scots, Russians, South Africans, Australians, Norwegians, and all the other non US mining engineers.

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.

Agreed. I was never trying to say it's the whole pie. I'm replying to a parent comment that implies the US has a big deficit in this kind of skill and training, which isn't accurate.

Also it is likely that, because of environmental regulations, it is not possible to mine the lithium economically. I haven't kept up, but the lack of lithium production in the US suggests that there are regulatory factors at play.

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.

> 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

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.

> Also it is likely that, because of environmental regulations, it is not possible to mine the lithium economically. I haven't kept up, but the lack of lithium production in the US suggests that there are regulatory factors at play.

That's a large assumption to make without any investigation.

It would be. But I've made a lot of investigations.

{citation needed}

I've done modelling work for mine planning projects when people were deciding where to put a mine. Quite a lot of it.

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.

It's a pretty well understood fact that lithium processing has withered in the West because currently it's an extremely polluting process.

Does the UK have lots of lithium in their borders? France? Germany?

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.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-lithium-resource-...

Europe may've gotten the short end of the stick, but there's plenty

There are more locations in Europe then that. Britain used to get Lithium from Cornwall and there are companies trying to revive that. But Europe simply hasn't put much effort into finding them.

If need be plenty more could found in Europe.

When I read that something is being shipped to China for processing, it makes me mentally add "Where there are no environmental laws, and processing in a very polluting way is OK".

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.

I think people are to quick to just talk away any success China has as 'don't care for the environment' and 'don't care for people'. This might be sometimes true bit also more often isn't.

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.

That's the thing with people promoting communism, they always see themselves assigned to do something similar to what they do now. No one ever expects to be the person sent to the lithium smelting plant.

its also funny how the most committed communists are those who wants others to fund it. Their exact level of "take home money" to spend on what they want, is the EXACT amount that "should be allowed". Similar to how bernie sanders were giving his "millionaires and billionaires" spiel, when he then became a millionaire himself, the tune changed, and his speeches became "billionaires!". And suddenly "you too can become a millionaire if you write a book"

That shows none in the vast majority of European countries. Im sure there is more than that diagram shows but its not what the diagram shows.

I know it wasn't exactly your point, but the UK imports 46% of its food.[1] If one was going to be paranoid about import dependence, I think that ranks a tad higher up the list.

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'm sure the UK is reliant on imports in order to enjoy a full breadth of non-essential discretionary choices, and to sustain current levels of food waste. I think it could be misleading to describe that as "import dependent". If the UK lost all access to international trade, people would have to change their diets. Diets would contain more meat, fish, cheese, root vegetables and wheat. They'd contain less rice, processed food, sugar, and a narrower selection of fruits.

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.

> 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.

There was already a preview of this a year or two ago, when there was a shortage of salad vegetables in the UK (Brexit + Covid + weather, I think). The government minister recommended eating turnips instead, as they were in surplus.

> If one was going to be paranoid

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.

At some price it’ll get figured out.

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.

Those who can't get lithium will just use oil. Which will be cheap if electrification happens.

Oil is cheap due to economies of scale. There's unimaginably vast suply chain. When that starts to unravel, it might get cheaper but only temporarily.

How is this different from oil?

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.

One of the biggest differences is that oil is all _primarily_ the same stuff and the difficulty is pulling out impurities. This means it can be quite cost effective to ship it where it needs to go to be processed. Crude oil is considered sour for example if it contains 1-2% sulfur. Ores on the other hand are usually mostly not the actual mineral you're looking for, and you're lucky if you're hitting double digit percentage concentrations, Lithium being "high concentration" if you're reaching 6%. This means that you ideally need to be doing most of (and usually all) of the processing at or very near the mine. One of the only minerals we regularly ship raw ore of is iron, since it tends to be in relatively high concentrations. Some Lithium mines might ship some ore but this is usually only done as an initial source of revenue while the processing is being built.

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.

So all of that Australian lithium being shipped off to China, is it being mostly processed in Australia first, or is most of the processing done in China, or something half half?

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.

A lot of it is sent as partially processed ore, but two major reasons for that are: 1) a lot of these mines are very new and 2) Australia in particular is _very bad_ at secondary industries. We have a long history of just sending our minerals and raw food ingredients overseas to be processed and are lacking in expertise.

Here is a recent article about this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/business/australia-lithiu...

Its not that different from oil. Oil has the same different from different sources requiring different refining. But oil is an industry is about 100-1000x bigger. Lithium until just a few years ago was a absolutely tiny industry.

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.

If the expertise is to be developed, is it better for the US to develop it on their own deposits, or on the deposits of a competing nation?

It depends on when you need those things. A new discovery will take 10 year minimum before it can be ready, more likely 20. So discoveries like this aren't gone do anything.

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.

Is the market for lithium going to collapse in 10 years? I’m confused why something taking 10 years is a problem.

Next time in the news: "Huge silicon dioxide discovery in the desert could end semiconductor shortage soon."

So then if prices of battery-grade lithium go up enough then it'll incentivize new production techniques?

They already are. With increased production, the price per unit staying stable means you either have an extremely mature industry, or the existing players don’t have any competition and can maintain insane YoY increases off of volume alone.

There are various different compound of lithium at different qualities that count as 'battery grade'. That is what makes the market so complex.

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.

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