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?
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_...
- 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?
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.
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.