Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium | Hacker News Reader

Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

malaymail.com

477 pointsamarant291 comments

This is my wheelhouse (mining engineer) and sorry to say this is bunk from what i can see.

Its not 15M Tonnes of Lithium. Its 15M Tonnes of lithium containing ore, with an average grade of 0.4% (which i also question without seening core results).

Also terms such as "resource" and "reserve" have very specific meaning in mining (to do with economic viability of deposity/ level of confidence) and this is by no way a "reserve".

Most likely overzealous government minister/media hyper. (sorry to rain on parade!)

The real info is always in the comments.

Can you elaborate on the specific meanings of “resource” and “reserve”? This has piqued my interest.

The largest resource market on the globe is the Toronto TSX which uses the Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results ( JORC ) and other damn near equivilent definitions.

https://www.jorc.org/

Pages 8 & 9: https://www.jorc.org/docs/JORC_code_2012.pdf

Essentially: (Inferred | Indicated) Resources is weak guesswork

whereas: (Measured | Proved) Reserves is (almost) bankable.

If you're in a certtain type of geology that looks a lot like other geology that's been mined, and you have some surface geochemstry results you can claim to have (say) a 10 square mile area of indicated copper resources which correlates with (say) 500 million tonnes of extractable resources.

This will then appear in a resource map .. and it's fantasy footbal stuff.

The real money gravitates towards increasing proven resources - this is a volume of the earths crust that has been

* surface tested,

* geophysically tested,

* sparsely drill tested,

* densely drill tested,

* modelled as a 3D volumetric dispersal of elements and compounds,

* modelled for economic feasibility of extraction (will it cost less to extract than the value of the material extracted).

This is the evolution of potential mining ground from a prospect through to something that gets listed on a minerals exchange as a capital investment to build processing equipment and dig holes | shafts | leach mining | etc.

Apologies for so many typos ...

s/fantasy footbal /fantasy football /

> The real money gravitates towards increasing proven reserves etc.

Like a Reserve Bank - a mineral Reserve is a known entity - at least as known as anything can be to the limits of modern technology prior to actually digging it up.

There's been enough drilling to know the volumetric extents and grades of the materials of interest (most deposits have multiple minerals of interest), and quite often there's been an independant third party engineering and economic Technical Report commissioned on the feasibility of extraction, costs, methods, lifetime, and expected profit margins.

How would you interpret this news about phosphate in Norway: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/gre... ?

so like 6 million KG of lithium. or enough lithium for 750,000 EV cars

15,000,000t×0.004 = 60,000,000kg. 60,000,000kg/63kg per car [1] ≈ 952,000 cars, about 55% of Tesla's production last year.

[1] https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...

Yikes, looks like EVs are gonna be resource-constrained real soon unless new battery tech emerges.

Swear I read an article recently about cuts to a lithium project in Australia due to dwindling demand.

Here's an article about it:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-18/kemerton-lithium-proj...

Including: "Demand for lithium has dropped by more than 80 per cent in the past year and nearly 11 per cent in the past month alone."

Lithium is one of the most abundant solids in the universe. The earth has plenty, it's just going to become more and more economically feasible to extract it. You can even get reasonably large amounts from seawater if you have cheap energy.

Citations very sorely needed on every single one of your wild speculations.

These are not "wild speculations", they are all widely know facts. It is more common in the earth's crust than lead, tin, uranium, etc which we mine magnitudes more per year [1], and there are significantly more reserves in seawater [2], where extraction is mostly limited by how much energy we need to use to extract it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... [2] https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provi...

Dull speculation is more on the nail.

Do you know how many billions of dollars worth of platinum group elements (platinum; Pt, palladium; Pd and rhodium; Rh) are literally lying on the roads and roadsides of G20 countries?

As dust from in use catalytic converters it's substantial. And unrecovered.

There's a problem with economic feasibilty - extraction costs (digging up and processing every road surface and road side) are prohibitive - greater than the value of the material.

From your [2]

    The advance is still not likely cheap enough to compete with mining lithium on land,

In a nutshell this is still very much the issue with mining seawater for Lithium, Uranium, etc.

The 0.2 parts per million (PPM) is a problem, a literal ceiling on diminishing returns, the more you extract the less remains and it's tricky to keep processed seawater from mixing back with unprocessed.

Per [1], lithium is somewhere between "too rare to consider" and 33rd in the list of elements sorted by abundance. The yield of the other quoted elements from their respective ores are magnitudes higher than that of lithium, and those ores are also important sources of other metals such as silver as byproducts of the refining process, so there is relatively much more value in exploration and mining those elements vs lithium.

Your claims of economic feasibility are still well within the range of speculation, you haven't backed up your claims with any serious evidence or analysis. Your claims of abundance are of the flavor of "wait and see how much more we find" which is speculation by definition.

More lithium deposits will be found now that it is more desirable. The earth has plenty.

And if we run out, we can finally make Teslas useful by recycling them!

I don't see how EVs are any more viable than ICEs if they continue to be as crassly oversized and overpowered.

A 20 KG e-bike can get a person around with 0.3 BHP, so 200 KG and 30 BHP is already pushing the boat out.

But people want another order of magnitude on top of that.

It's difficult to move a family and groceries around on an ebike, as it is to transit multiple people (many underaged), move the elderly, disabled, obese, or pretty much anyone who doesn't fit into the image you appear to have of people transiting.

Somebody's not travelled to Asia then ...

From India to the Philippines and out to Indonesia rides a population on petrol engine scooters and motorcycles that exceeds the US population ans is currently transitioning to EV bikes.

Many are elderly, disabled, ride with multiple passengers, few are obese to US standards.

I have, and in both of those countries it is difficult and dangerous. Safety standards are extremely different, speeds are slower - traffic conditions and quality life is so uncomparable to the US that I'm finding it difficult to believe that if you've been to those countries you're not intentionally cherry picking here.

Or new lithium sources

Looks like existing worldwide reserves are 26M tons [0], so this is a big find.

[0] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-lithium.pd...

I think that true global reserves are much higher than what we know now.

Before, Lithium was important, but not nearly in the quantities needed for EV's. Now that EV's have picked up, more people will be looking for Lithium, and that will make all the difference.

When you look at elements' abundance in Earth's crust lithium is about 50% more common than lead, but we mine 268 times more lead every year.

We just weren't looking very hard to find lithium compared to lead till very recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

Minerals can be common but infeasible for extraction. Aluminum is one of the most common elements but we extract it just from bauxite

We extract aluminum only from bauxite because it's slightly (think 5%) less expensive to refine it from bauxite than the next class of materials.

If all of world's bauxite reserves ran dry, we would move to the next best sources, and this would impact aluminum prices less than typical yearly variations in electricity costs near smelters.

Nearly all aluminum minerals are potential ores for aluminum, the only question is how much other, undesirable material (mostly silica) you need to remove. Bauxite is nice because nature did a lot of the early separation process steps (slightly acidic rains washed away silica over millennia).

Just like uranium.

Lithium is a pretty volatile chemical though. Does the 50% more common take into account the fact that some lithium blows up?

Lithium isn't found as a pure element, if that's what you mean. It's part of minerals bound up into stable molecules. So it won't blow up.

It's very hard to find anything volatile in nature, pretty much by definition. Exceptions are things that are continually generated, eg you can find reactive oxygen in nature because plants keep making more. That or things that are only volatile once you purify or transform them in some way.

That “blowing up” already happen billions of years ago. Lithium salts (ore) is what is left when lithium violently oxidizes.

Is lithium normally mined in its elemental form? If not, its volatility as an ore might be wildly less than in its metallic form

Essentially no metals are mined in their pure elemental form - only the noble metals like gold or platinum.

Native copper exists. Sometimes even to a minable degree, as with the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan.

Does the ore blow up often?

I suppose it depends on if blasting is utilized at a given lithium ore production site.

A big part of that is simply in the meaning of "reserve". For something to be counted in the reserve it has to be a) measured, and b) known to be economically viable to extract.

There are plenty of known deposits of unknown size and quality. They are just by definition not included in the reserve. As demand grows those will be explored and included in the total count.

> I think that true global reserves are much higher than what we know now.

That was certainly true of oil. As reserves got depleted, progressively more advanced techniques allowed people to extract from more difficult locations.

At ever-increasing costs.

And decreasing EROI.

Maybe you meant that, but it’s worth stating outright, as no amount of money can fix that.

The EROI of Solar PV is quite decent. I hope a lot of demand can move to Solar peak at different locations, especially industrial demands.

Yep, that’s frankly a much bigger deal and something I should have specifically noted.

It’s not really a big deal because we have renewables that can fund the extraction. Oil isn’t useful for its contribution to global energy, it’s useful because it’s portable.

Renewables used for extracting oil are renewables that can’t be used for other uses, and this shortfall will need to be made up for by… burning fossil fuels.

There is excess renewable generation in regions very frequently and coal can be burned rather than oil in the case fossil fuel is needed. You’re not making a coherent point.

That's what I learned from the "Peak Oil" scare/fiasco.

Let's not be fooled again!

It’s very likely to go the way of oil. EV demand has slowed down recently (honestly I don’t believe the world is ready for mass adoption and EVs themselves are not ready also), so we’ll keep finding more and more and always beyond the consumption.

I hate the weasel words of "demands slowing down". It's always not clear what exactly is happening from this phrase. Is the production or sales going down year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter? Because that's what people think "demand slowing down" means.

However what's actually happening is that demand is going up, but at a rate slower than before. Imagine that in 2022 demand increased by 60% YoY but in 2023 demand only increased by 40% YoY (these are approximate figures). You are measuring the second derivative which is decreasing from a big positive value to a smaller positive value, which is not usually described by the word "slow". Intuitively "slow" means the second derivative has become negative.

It's worst than that : the 40% are bigger that the 60% of the previous year in absolute value (100 => 160 => 224). It's not even slowing down.

So the rate of change of demand is decreasing. Decreasing rate of change is the definition slowing down. Although I agree that most people probably misinterpret the phrase as you say. (It seems other replies have had that interpretation.)

Increasing less fast is not the definition of slowing down, it's the definition of increase increasing less fast.

> Increasing less fast is not the definition of slowing down

Increasing position less fast is the definition of slowing down, as I said. Increasing speed less fast is, of course, not the definition of slowing down, it's decelerating; we agree on this.

But you are equating demand to "speed" (rate-of-change of position), and I am equating demand to "position" (not a rate-of-change). If demand is analogous to speed, then what is is measuring the rate-of-change of?

If you reduce acceleration, your speed is still increasing if you still have positive acceleration. This is still speeding up, not slowing down.

If rate-of-change of demand is acceleration, that means demand itself is speed and is measuring a rate-of-change. What is demand measuring the rate of change of?

Acceleration decreased such that it is negative. Negative acceleration is "slowing down."

> demand itself is speed

Ok, let’s substitute that into the original comment, instead of:

> demand has slowed down recently

we get:

> speed has slowed down recently

Nothing to do with the rate of change of speed, just speed itself. In other words:

In terms of _speed_, this would indicate that _speed_ was once higher and is now lower.

Let’s translate that same sentence back substituting speed with demand:

In terms of _demand_, this would indicate that _demand_ was once higher and is now lower.

That statement cannot be true as 2023 demand was the highest ever.

I think you misread my comment. Demand is not analogous to speed, it's analogous to position. I was asking how you were relating demand to speed, in your comment. It may be easier if you start using "rate-of-change of demand" instead of speed.

When we talk about supply and demand for cars, it has a time element. Units per year, units per quarter and so on. It is analogous to speed. Doing anything else would make it impossible to plan the supply chain.

Where it could be different is in places like power generation. You might talk about peak demand in Watts, and daily demand in watt-hours.

I see. Then, if demand is the rate of... demand (?), it is analogous to speed and it's not appropriate to say "slowing down", as you say.

Globally demand is up.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/global...

> LONDON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - Global sales of battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrids (PHEV) rose 20% versus a year ago as strong growth in North America and China offset lower sales in Europe, according to market research firm Rho Motion.

I think that is an odd opinion to have. The data shows otherwise: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/electric-vehicles/chart...

There are large propaganda channels masquerading as news outlets that push this idea continually as part of culture war. I would agree it's an odd opinion, but it is fairly common due to the ever present misinformation.

Or maybe it's the fact that incumbent manufacturers of internal combustion cars spend billions on advertising and publications are protecting their source of income.

The second sentence of the article states, "The find means Thailand has the third largest lithium resources, behind Bolivia and Argentina, but it is not yet clear how much can be exploited commercially."

If Thailand has 14M and there are two others with >14M then total known resources must be at least 42M tons, no?

Reserves are only defined when you also state a price. It's not a free number.

Those people are probably using different prices, and not communicating them.

What? These are denominated in tons, not dollars.

The point is that reserves are only economically viable at a given price. At $0 there are 0 reserves because no one is willing to give you lithium. At $1 mil per kg, there is basically infinite reverses because you can do things like dig up the entire earth's crust and filter all the lithium out of it.

> At $1 mil per kg, there is basically infinite reverses because you can do things like dig up the entire earth's crust and filter all the lithium out of it.

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It's even more relevant because it doesn't have to get that crazy, there's 230 BILLION tons in sea water, and it's not a crazy impossible processes to extract lithium from it given some more advances in the process

230 billion tons in sea water isn't even a single PPM, doesn't seem feasible to me.

They're already building a pilot facility to do so: https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/kaust-spinout-wil...

Lithium can be a lot more prevalent in some waters, they are already competitive commercial mining operations from briny lake beds. Utah's Salt Lake for example is 21ppm and is mined at $2/kg

But that is lakes, not seas. Lakes are extremely small compared to the seas so doesn't hold that much lithium so you can't really scale that up. To get the amount you talked about we would need to start pumping water from the depths of the seas, since most of it is there.

The red sea alone, which is what they're using, is about 0.1% of the world's water, which is 230 million tons of lithium, which is ten times the reserves we have from land. There's plenty.

gotcha - thanks!

Tons economically extractable at that price.

Reserves and resources are different measures, same doc says 98M resources.

There was a very large (20-40M tons) deposit recently discovered on the border of Oregon and Nevada. https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2023/09/22/report-of-giant-lit...

that one is near the surface and consists of clay deposits so extraction and refining should be much easier than many other deposits, such as in Australia.

Reserves are very different from resources though. In mining jargon the resource is how much you think is out there, a reserve is ore that you drilled, analysed, mapped out and shown to be profitable extractable, so a lot less.

Because turning resources into reserves is expensive only a limited amount is done before it is mined.

Not quite. Resource is how much you can show is there, reserve is how much can be extracted at a given cost.

"What you think is out there" differs from resource in that a honest answer to the former would need to involve doing a lot of statistics on the 99+% of "empty space" of earth's crust that could potentially be exploited but that has not been explored, based on the data points you have of the areas that you have explored.

While resource refers to specific deposits that someone has done work on to show they exist, not the best estimate of how much material is there to be mined.

Sorry for being nitpicky, but people on the internet constantly get this wrong. No-one maintains a number for "how much lithium (or oil, or any other material) we believe there remains to be mined", and every number that occasionally gets misused to represent that is off by multiple orders of magnitude.

The confusion comes from wrong vocabulary. There are two different words in use: resources and reserves. Resources is what ever there is in (or in some cases on) the ground. Reserves is what can be viably extracted.

World lithium resources are close to 100M tons, but usable part, reserves, is about 1/4 of it.

Notice how it is also stated in the article: “We are trying to find out how much can we use from the resources we found. It takes time,” Rudklao told The Nation.

So they don't know how big are the reserves.

Why only 100M? Shouldn't Lithium be absurdly abundant, given it's a lightweight element?

The around 100M tons is what we know to exits and we know where it exits. As you can see, more is getting located as we move on.

That link says 98M tonnes towards the end, unless I’m misreading

Right, Thailand hasn't just opened 14Mt reserves, rather resources. A reserve is a resource that you're prepared to exploit. But see also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39059076

I think it's 89M t resources (under the ground?) and the other number is what they already mined

Let's hope this isn't another BRE-X. The press release seems to imply these are inferred or probable reserves. Great news if it's true.

Important line from the article: "...but it is not yet clear how much can be exploited commercially".

This likely doesn't mean a straightforward +15M tons to the world's supply.

> so this is a big find

Plus it's far away from the environment, so recovery will be uncomplicated.

> Plus it's far away from the environment

So it's in another environment?

I see what you did there. [0]

[0]: https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

@ 1m30s

Classic Clarke & Dawe

Apparently this has been disputed:

https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/general/2727119/thai-li...

>But Jessada Denduangboripant, another lecturer with the same faculty, used his Facebook page to offer a reality check. The 14.8 million tonnes, he wrote, represents the pegmatite igneous rocks that contains around 0.45% of lithium.

This is a cumulative find in an ongoing exploration project that has identified multiple sites with various grades of lithium-bearing rock:

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/thailan...

The true quantity of lithium resources in Thailand will probably continue to be adjusted over the coming year, but it probably hasn't crossed the 10M mark.

I'm assuming it's not a giant 15M ton chunk of (highly reactive) metal in the ground, but rather they took a bucket of dirt, analyzed it, and extrapolated how much lithium is available in the ground. My question is, how much "earth" do they need to dig up and refine to extract this amount of lithium?

from what i can see the media/government minister have blown this out of proportion.

First off it looks like they identified 15M tonnes of lithium hosting rock (pegmatite) which has a grade of 0.4% of lithium in the form of spodumene (which then needs ot be processed to extract the lithium out of).

But in general, how it works is they drill a bunch of holes in the ground and analyse the cores. From that that interpolate the size/shape of the ore body and calculate an estimate of size.

The more holes they drill the greater the confidence.

There is a lot of 'art' to this science

Roughly what how much volume would 15m tons of pegmatite take up? I have no intuitive sense of scale with these things.

Rocks tend to be 5-10x denser than water, so assume 2 million cube meters. That is just 2 square kilometers 1 meter high, so not mountains or so. As a comparison, for a large iron mine they dig up many billions of tons of rock, and that is for very cheap iron, so you wouldn't need a very large operation to dig this up.

Useful tool to reason about this. Thanks!

curious how you know all this info, if you can share to the level you feel comfortable

this site says 0.4% so they would need to extract 3.5B tons of rock

https://thethaiger.com/news/national/thai-lithium-deposits-o...

Its not. Its 0.4% of the 15M Tonnes. (so much smaller)

This is most likely government minister/media hype.

double check your math

Normally an announcement like this would be based on a program of drilling. But yes there would be a lot of interpolation and I think some extrapolation.

If Thailand has it, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia probably do too.

Edit: After checking on a map, probably Myanmar/Malaysia.

Myanmar has the most bountiful gem mines in the world. I visited in 2019 and there were many shops with piles of ruby, jade, sapphire, even amber. They're already pretty specialized in mining and have little qualms about razing mining areas so would be able to take quick advantage - if their civil conflict allows.

> Myanmar has the most bountiful gem mines in the world.

I assume that's hyperbole because I couldn't find a list of top producing countries that included Myanmar, do you have a link?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar#Extractive_industries

> Myanmar produces precious stones such as rubies, sapphires, pearls, and jade. Rubies are the biggest earner; 90% of the world's rubies come from the country, whose red stones are prized for their purity and hue.

The article that is cited is from 2010, seems like overall gem production has decreased significantly since then.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1061659/myanmar-producti...

Well, it’s definitely not ideal. But if history is anything to go by, then either they themselves take it and maybe by killing each other; or someone from outside will come and do the killing for them and then take it all and also sell some freedoms while they’d be at it.

Anecdotal evidence can be misleading. I went to India and saw a literal pile, 7 ft high and maybe 10 ft in diameter of emeralds casually “stored” in a corner of a room but I don’t think India produces all that many emeralds (it’s primarily a cutting hub).

Where was this?

Somewhere in Rajasthan.

No, I think Botswana or DRC does

Myanmar is in active civil war and under sanctions https://www.state.gov/burma-sanctions/ Even if they did find it, no one would be able to use it.

The Chinese fund and own several regional warlords and resource mafias. They can probably bribe and subvert their way into any promising lithium find.

Given where the province is I would only speculate for Myanmar and Malaysia.

I admit that I didn't check closely enough on a map and now that I have, you're probably right about that.

As someone from Myanmar, this piques my interest

It's the new oil, so I would be careful. Democracy and camaraderie and all those greater good things tend to come where the cheap resources are.

Deposits appear sufficiently distributed to not cause geopolitical conflicts [1]. This is not oil. Lithium is relatively abundant, and a mineral to be reused, not energy to be consumed once through. To keep it conflict free, we must continue to discover reserves and drive down the value of the commodity. No one goes to war over say, salt, in the 21st century (at least not yet!).

[1] https://lithiumfuture.org/map.html

The 2019 Bolivian political crisis [1] came right off the heels of Evo Morales negotiating lithium trade with Russia and China. Bolivia happens to have the largest lithium reserves of any nation.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_political_cris...

This was because Evo was running again even when their constitution forbid it, basically every latin american president dream of eternal reelection.

Good context, but not a geopolitical crisis, it was an internal civil conflict.

The US/CIA has a long history of inciting coups, rigging elections, and funding far right terror organizations across Latin America for matters similar or lesser than this [1]. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this as unprovoked internal conflict. Especially given that only a year after this event, another election was held in which Luis Arce won in a landslide [2]. Luis Arce was importantly the finance minister for the Evo Morales administration [3]. There’s no evidence that popular support had ever waned for the Movement for Socialism in Bolivia. Yet Jeanine Añez was able to win in 2019 and exile Evo Morales in an election that involved, “irregularities and serious human rights abuses by security forces,” according to independent human rights organizations [4].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Bolivian_general_electi...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Arce

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/bolivia-govern...

> The US/CIA has a long history of inciting coups, rigging elections, and funding far right terror organizations across Latin America for matters similar or lesser than this [1].

More recently we've been supporting leftist elected candidates against right-wing coups.

We don't care Bolivia has lithium. We get lithium from Australia.

Third worldist leftists have many dumb ideas, but among them is the idea that wars are for resources or that we're exploiting third world countries by taking their resources. It's almost the opposite - they are poor because we aren't trading with them.

Which left wing governments has the US defended against right wing coups?

Brazil and Guatemala in 2023.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/12/bernardo-are...

And Guyana against invasion by Venezuela.

> Good context, but not a geopolitical crisis, it was an internal civil conflict.

Do you think clandestine services pursue their goals by declaring war on countries?

It won't cause conflict because China will just come in and take it. Look at what they've done with the silkroads through Laos/Cambodia.

"Here, take a 'free' hydrodam on your river and we will just take some land and electricity."

Sounds like a trade to me. Predatory tho if the country is very poor and easily exploited. But as someone from a country that loves to invade others for resources I’d take predatory trading over military force any day.

You didn't dive deep enough into the literal eco/social catastrophe that the silkroad is.

It isn't military because neither of those two countries have any sort of way to defend themselves against China, but it might as well be military, because China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative

That's a whole lot better than the deal from the US, frankly.

> It won't cause conflict because China will just come in and take it...

> "Here, take a 'free' hydrodam on your river and we will just take some land and electricity."

So which is it? They will 'take it' or they will trade for it?

That's the problem with anti-chinese propaganda. It makes no sense and is full of contradictions.

What they take has been proven to be far greater value than what they gave. It isn't a fair "trade", at all.

To be fair to China, corrupt locals allowed it to happen.

> What they take has been proven to be far greater value than what they gave. It isn't a fair "trade", at all.

Sure it is. As long as it wasn't coerced.

> To be fair to China, corrupt locals allowed it to happen.

I have a feeling that any trade with china or anything that helps poor countries progress is 'corrupt' to you. But then again, you push so much ant-china shilling, I recognize you just from your username.

If china is taking so much for so little, why isn't europe or the US swooping in and offering a better deal? Perhpas because china is giving them the best deal?

> As long as it wasn't coerced.

By definition, it was coerced.

But processing the lithium and making productive tools or products out if it isn't really distributed.

Can you clarify about reuse? At least as far as batteries go, right now once it's in a battery it gets used up & then ends up in the trash [2]. There's no efficient / cost-effective way to extract lithium from spent batteries for reuse in new batteries. We might in the future but it would require some scientific advances + expensive commercialization to scale up. Even if in the future we do develop a mechanism, it could remain very expensive & not be practical until mining costs have gone up enough. Similarly, all batteries that have been consumed until that point are likely irrecoverable as they're in the waste stream & finding & collecting those batteries is unlikely to ever be economical.

[1] https://americanbatterytechnology.com/lithium-costs-a-lot-of...

[2] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42417327/li...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/11/02/redwood-...

> In 2024, a quarter million aging electric vehicles will be ready for dismantling and recycling. That could be more than a 30% jump from 2023 — and Redwood Materials, which aims to be the country's leading EV battery recycler, is ramping up its operations to prepare for the coming onslaught.

> The company created by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, which also makes components for new batteries from materials it recovers from old ones, expects some 250,000 aging Tesla Model S sedans, Nissan Leaf hatchbacks, Toyota Priuses, Prius plug-ins and other hybrids, to turn up at dismantler lots in 2024 — with more coming every year after. That’s up from between 150,000 to 200,000 this year. To ensure it gets as many of those old batteries as possible, it’s launched a web portal to quickly give auto dismantlers purchase offers and schedule trucks to haul them away for recycling.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/redwood-inks-long-term... ("Redwood inks long-term EV battery materials supply deal with Toyota")

Redwood Materials is currently operational, processing the waste stream. Ford and Volvo are also partners. They'll also accept EV packs that are damaged, defective or recalled (DDR) on an ad hoc basis if you open a ticket with their team.

https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/auto-recyclers-battery-port...

(have shipped them old Leaf and Tesla packs)

Check out Jeffrey "JB" Straubel's new company, Redwood Materials[1][2]. They recycle lithium-ion batteries. He was Tesla's former chief technology officer.

They are essentially a lithium mine that's using a very high quality ore, ground-up batteries.

There are other companies doing this as well. [3]

1. https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/

2. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/battery-recycling-redwood-mater...

3. https://li-cycle.com/technology/

> There's no efficient / cost-effective way to extract lithium from spent batteries for reuse in new batteries. We might in the future but it would require some scientific advances + expensive commercialization to scale up.

It's already 95% efficient.

No fundamental scientific advances are needed.

It's already being scaled commercially.

One example:

https://li-cycle.com/

Basically zero EV or HV batteries make it into the trash. They're recycled and already have a pretty good scrap value.

I was thinking mostly about phones, laptops, power banks etc. I couldn’t find any source online that expressed what percentage of lithium goes to different kinds of applications.

Countries can suffer Dutch disease just fine without ever seeing a single Marine.

Well, it's not like Mynamar's democracy is particularly functional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Myanmar_coup_d%27état

So... Autocracy / tyranny are better?

In the sense of "we'll bring Democracy to your country", yes. ;-)

Please do bring democracy to my country of birth, yes. And I mean it.

Right now it pretty much is held occupied by brute force. 90% of population would welcome ANY change.

I was referring to the Resource Curse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse#Democracy_and_h...

The democracy is of the sarcastic kind by the way.

it's okay, we are already doing pretty bad

Can't wait for the next genocide in the region, all in the name of freedom

Because there's not currently a genocide happening in the region?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

There is important lesson to learn from here.

Everybody who claims that there is not enough some mineral for something must consider the following. First in every moment in time there are certain number of mineral resources - these are known deposits that are not all necessarily accessible economically, but some of them are - these are reserves.

If the demand for something increases then also the price will increase, making more of the resources available as usable reserves at the new price point. At the same time it increases the incentives to find even more new resources.

More over, if there is certain amount of mineral already in circulation then it may suddenly become economically viable to recycle it, limiting the demand for new resources.

What is important to observe instead is if the increase in production can follow the increase in demand and if the resources grow at such speed that the growth can continue.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-v...

That's a good article. The issue is not finding another tonne of lithium, the issue is cranking up production. The article says 4-5 years minimum to build a mine, but sometimes it takes 10 years.

So there is a supply issue- it is the supply produced by mines. We still could be in for more lithium prices shocks in the future as happened during the pandemic because the mining production can't elastically expand or contract (financing can make shutting down a non-option) as fast as demand. Building out a recycling program is something should be able to be done more quickly than building out a mine but there may still be issues if we don't design for recycling from the beginning.

> The world doesn’t currently have the production capacity in mining operations to scale to this level. And, the problem is that the minimum time to build lithium mines is four to five years. They can be even longer – especially the lithium extracted from brine because it takes a long time to pump the saltwater out, before waiting for it to evaporate.

> Countries have already invested in some increases in capacity, but we will need much more if we’re to keep up with demand.

> This is a short-term challenge, and one that is typical of a fast-moving market. We’re playing catch-up. But, it’s a problem that we can’t afford: it could slow the decline in battery prices, and limit the number of EVs that companies can produce.

> If we want to move the EV transition forward, we need to mine more lithium. And we need to do it quickly.

when valuable resources are scarce, people have an incentive to find and produce more of those resources. As Henry George put it: "Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens" [0].

[0] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/the_gist_of_jul.htm...

that's an argument which works for capital goods (like livestock) but not for what Henry George considered to be natural opportunities of fixed supply like lithium ore (and land in general).

Henry George, if he were still alive today, would probably say that valuable raw mineral deposits like this would be more likely to be discovered and brought into productive use earlier if they were taxed. The argument being that people would have no reason to speculate on a large untapped reserve of it. There would still be an incentive to bring it into production because the earned profit would be made through extraction, processing, and distribution of the material even if the higher holding cost of the land is factored in as a cost.

Like with chickens, the Jayhawk should just learn to fuse hydrogen down to lithium.

I think the analogy doesn’t quite work. Humans produce chickens because we can do that. We find more lithium because we need it. Jayhawks can also evolve to get better at finding more chickens. And by their very nature, have been doing exactly that.

Evolution is a bit slow. How many millenia will it take the Jayhawks to figure it out? Humans can increase chicken production this year or maybe next.

For sure. That’s what makes us exceptional.

What I’m mainly pointing to is that we can’t currently just mass produce lithium. We just go around looking for it more.

https://www.cato.org/economic-development-bulletin/julian-si...

> when a particular resource becomes scarcer, its price increases, and that change incentivizes people to discover more of the resource, ration it, recycle it, or develop a substitute for it. As such, population growth and resource use do not automatically lead to higher commodity prices in the long run.

So no, we can't mass produce lithium, but a high enough price might drive someone to discover a substitute.

Sodium batteries are being researched as alternative to lithium. Same with other materials like cobalt, nickel, and graphite - there are battery versions that avoid those.

It is more than that. We also invent new technologies. Searching for resources, refining them, do the same stuff more cost-effectively, extraction from different kinds of compositions and ores with processing methodologies, recycling, changing other elements of a system to require different amounts or mixtures in a final product are all different ways to "increase yield." On the scale of decades, collectively, this is very responsive to demand and why arguments about "only so much of resource X exists" are usually highly misleading.

Does this mean other elements like cobalt are becoming the bigger bottleneck in battery production?

The US found a large lithium reserve in Nevada not long ago; or to be clear a large reserve that they can now more affordably extract. As another commenter said its not that rare, just wasn't cheap to extract before.

LFP batteries don't use cobalt.

Or nickel!

There is also the lithium in the California Salton Sea which is further along in getting into production.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/us-department-energy-an...

Pretty sure the Salton Sea in california is gonna be a big lithium mine once it dries up

Technically every non-landlocked county has a near-infinite supply of lithium. It's the extraction costs that are the problem.

Reserves take extraction cost into account.

Lithium is quite common. Problem is minign it without totally destroying local environment!

Lithium is quite common in the ground. Mines are a dime a dozen all over the world. Mining it is the easy part. All processing is done by a handful of plants in China. It needs to be shipped to China, and the products need to be shipped from China to wherever they're used. Mining it is hard on the environment, yes, but it's just a drop in the bucket compared with the part no one talks about.

Ironically, undestroyed local environment is getting quite rare.

Don't worry the Thai government won't care about the environment.

One thing I didn't see mentioned here, lithium brine extraction has some pretty serious environmental downsides. Finding all that lithium will be a win if/when its extracted and usable, actually extracting it is a different story.

I hear people complain about this, but they never place it in context with the damage from, say, iron or copper mining.

I've done lots of web searches, read lots of articles, and there's never definitive measures of harm or comparisons to what current mining does.

In a standard f150, how much damage is done from mining? How much damage comes from oil extraction compared to the one-time cost to extract lithium?

Or fossil fuels. We do a lot of damage to our planet to extract coal, gas, and oil. And that's before you consider the damage we then do by burning it. Most of that becomes redundant if we scale renewable energy production enough. The impact of Lithium mining is absolutely tiny in comparison to all that. And it kind of is really important as a resource to complete that transition.

The good news is that lithium is really common. The bad news is it's mostly not found in high concentrations. For example, ocean water contains about 180 billion tonnes of lithium. But in a concentration of 0.2 parts per million, you'd need to process about five million tonnes of ocean water to get 1 tonne of lithium. Extracting lithium and other minerals from sea water is something we can do nevertheless. It's just not very economical to do it.

But the good news is that we are aware of quite a few natural deposits with much higher concentrations of lithium in either brines or different kinds of mineral deposits. That's nature taking its course over billions of years concentrating the lithium for us. And we've barely scratched the surface (quite literally) looking for that stuff as the interest in large scale lithium mining did not exist until about 10-20 years ago.

In short, we're not going to run out of lithium. There's plenty of it. Extracting it is indeed costly and depending on how it's done can be a bit nasty. But the good news is that the damage is typically highly localized. And we have ways to mitigate that. And once extracted we can use the lithium over and over again. It's not destroyed by using it. Unlike fossil fuels.

I got a but ranty there. To get back on topic, lithium isn't a one-time cost. Batteries wear out and have to be replaced. If we assume the batteries would outlive the average vehicle, we're committing to vehicles having an expected life of say 10 years. Meaning every 10 years it has to be destroyed, recycled, and replaced.

I have a 1988 pickup that still runs great. I don't drive it regularly as my hybrid is much better on fuel, but the damage done from producing that truck was paid for decades ago and I'd be shocked if the cost of a tank or two of gas per month comes anywhere near the ecological impact of a producing a new, electric F-150 that is marginally useful for towing or hauling (my only reason for needing a pickup).

Man, so many things wrong here. First of all, many batteries run for longer then 10 years. It depends on many things but most of them will last far longer then 10 years. The most common LFP battery will last far, far longer.

Second, end of life means 80% capacity. But in reality that doesn't mean you have to stop using them. You can continue to use it just fine for much longer then that. And even after that most car batteries find other uses as well.

If there really is no use anymore, it can be recycled. Just as we do with metal and other materials in cars.

Also, car engines didn't start so reliable, your 1988 pickup is 80+ years after cars were invented. We already have batteries that will survived for much longer and in 80 years it will be far, far longer then now.

Yes, old cars are better then new cars. But new electric cars are better then new gas cars. And you are not gone get people to not buy new cars (threw that should be done as well).

Yes. Electric F-150 are dumb. That's because pickup trucks are dumb not because batteries are dumb.

Oh I'm well aware of the expected life of lithium cells. I have around 75kWh of lithium batteries storing capacity from solar and running my house. The batteries are a few years old as best I could tell, salvaged vehicle cells.

I wouldn't recommend expecting more than 10 years out of cells if they're used regularly. Manufacturers will happily lay out math that points to 15-20 years of regular use, or even more, with 80% capacity. Take a look at what they're willing to warranty and its usually in the range of 5-10 years.

I do expect that we can find a storage solution that would allow us to make a huge dent in fossil fuel use, though I also expect we're decades off. We likely need a different battery chemistry all together, and even if it is lithium we will spend decades trying to mine enough lithium for replacement and by then the original batteries will have aged out. Solar has a similar problem unfortunately, the materials we use today aren't mined at a rate anywhere near what would be needed to replace existing power plants and by the time we can mine materials and manufacture panels the we'll be starting over replacing the earlier panels we installed.

> And you are not gone get people to not buy new cars

This right here is the fundamental problem. We'll never see people at large give up convenience or shiny object syndrome in favor of the environmental concerns they may feel so passionate about. Reducing energy use isn't that hard, we just have to be willing to sacrifice.

Depends on if we can separate the lithium like we do for lead acid batteries.

I wonder if there are any processes left to discover or if this is it.

Oh for sure, I have no idea how similar comparisons would shake out. I can say, though, that such comparisons pretty easily lead to tragedy of the commons problems.

If we want to decrease our impact on the environment we need to stop using so much energy and so many resources, period. Chasing the next miracle cure, in this case lithium batteries for energy storage, we can easily run down that path picking up all the ecological damage of lithium mining and new manufacturing only to find that there are new problems and we're not much better off, we simply have different problems and a similar level if environmental damage as if had we stayed on the original path.

Now that doesn't mean I don't have hope for alternative energies or think we should decrease dependence on nonrenewable sources. I do like the promise of wind, solar, nuclear. etc and also think we should be killing off non-renewables as quickly as possible. I just hope we don't attempt to treat environmental impact as a zero sum game, signing off on more damage based on not exceeding the damage caused by current systems. I also hope we don't stick to a consistent growth of 2-3% in annual energy consumption, its no coincidence that number matches GDP targets and its unsustainable.

> If we want to decrease our impact on the environment we need to stop using so much energy and so many resources, period.

That is fundamentally false. Energy austerity is the road to poverty and more environmental damage. Not to mention war.

> Chasing the next miracle cure

Nobody is claiming any miracles.

> we can easily run down that path picking up all the ecological damage of lithium mining and new manufacturing only to find that there are new problems and we're not much better off, we simply have different problems and a similar level if environmental damage as if had we stayed on the original path.

Sure, but we can also do basic research on the subject. Then make reasonable choices about that. And that's what happened.

Lithium mining is not nearly the problem some of the propaganda suggest. At worsts its like other mining. Mostly its better. The total lithium amount needed is tiny even if you think all cars are going to be lithium batteries.

Lithium mining is a drop in the bucked compared to iron and friends.

> I also hope we don't stick to a consistent growth of 2-3% in annual energy consumption, its no coincidence that number matches GDP targets and its unsustainable.

Its not unsustainable actually.

What you are really arguing actually is 'why should people in India and China be rich, it would be much better if they were poor'.

Are you gone determine what is 'rich enough' and when people should stop? Is Europe to rich already?

Are you gone tell poor Americans 'sorry, you can't use more energy'.

Energy poverty isn't the solution to anything.

You're correct that lithium mining is digging holes in the dirt, much like iron ore.

That is not the problem.

The issue is concentrate processing, to get useful elements from the "dirt of interest".

That concentrate processing involves large quantities of sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide, and other fun agents and also requires long term storage of waste waters (with aforementioned acids) and storage of low-level radioactive waste.

This is the reason that Lynas was asked to leave Malaysia and why they are seeking other locations.

> Lithium mining is a drop in the bucked compared to iron and friends.

Apples, oranges, and a clear sign you're not familiar with the details of both.

FWiW I worked decades as an exploration geophysical surveyor, contributed to the seeting up, running, and sale of the world's largest commercial mineral intelligence database, visited many mining and processing operations aboout the globe.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-22/malaysians-divided-on...

    An Australian mining company has been told to "get lost" and "go back to Australia" amid an ongoing row over hundreds of thousands of tonnes of radioactive waste piling up in Malaysia.

https://www.australianmining.com.au/a-big-win-for-lynas-in-m...

https://www.australianresourcesandinvestment.com.au/2023/02/...

> That is fundamentally false. Energy austerity is the road to poverty and more environmental damage. Not to mention war.

Who said anything about austerity? Its only austerity of an authority forced reduced consumption on the people, I'm arguing that we should make that choice individually because it'd the right thing to do.

> Nobody is claiming any miracles.

Anyone claiming that wind and solar can replace fossil fuel use at the current rate of power consumption is claiming a miracle cure. Most models and targets aim for storage capacity as little as 8 hours, well below even the 3 day target that is often recommended in residential applications. A large-scale grid can't depend on a single night's worth of reserve capacity.

> Lithium mining is not nearly the problem some of the propaganda suggest. At worsts its like other mining. Mostly its better. The total lithium amount needed is tiny even if you think all cars are going to be lithium batteries.

If its similar to or only a bit better than current mining, isn't that a problem? As far as I'm aware we aren't only causing environmental damage via our use of consumable fuels, mining practices today also cause serious issues and destroy plenty of ecosystems. If you think that isn't actually a problem worth solving I'd be interested to hear more.

> What you are really arguing actually is 'why should people in India and China be rich, it would be much better if they were poor'.

> Are you gone determine what is 'rich enough' and when people should stop? Is Europe to rich already?

You seem to be responding to something I never said. I never said anything about relative wealth, only about growth targets for gross domestic product. Your GDP can grow 2% whether you are starting out poor or rich.

My argument is that we continue to use more energy at a similar rate to GDP growth. Natural resources are limited and our impact on the environment cannot follow limitless growth.

Are you proposing that we can continue to use 2-3% more energy forever in perpetuity without consequence? If so please share more about how that would work. If not, then I guess we agree it isn't sustainable and can't go on forever.

This was discovered in Phang Nga. It is full of natural beauty and has some of the most recognizable tourist spots. I wonder how those would be affected.

Earth is huge. It's diameter is almost 13,000 kilometers. The deepest mine is 4 km. There's plenty of stuff.

Lithium is not actually that rare. We are just now spending a lot of effort to find more of it.

Apparently the UK has some too and the economics of it make production viable https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cornwall-lithium

I would be interested to see any detailed locations of the finds.

Phang Nga ('Paang Nah') is a very beautiful province, with spectacular limestone mountains, tilting down to the south, to become astonishing stacks and islands in Phang Nga Bay and the Andaman Gulf. But it also includes a long west coast from Phuket up to Ranong.

There are several National Parks and scenic areas. So protection and access may both be problems for any exploitation.

However, Thailand is very corrupt, so Chinese money will find a way.

Lithium mines in australia (spodumene) are either delaying opening, or shutting down because market prices have fallen below cost of production.

There is no shortage of lithium.

Highly recommend this if you've not heard of it yet, goes into detail about lithium and some other vital raw materials :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Material-World-Substantial-Story-Fu...

"Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. They built our world, and they will transform our future."

Hmm so 300 million cars with 50 kg lithium in each. That's about four years worth of global car production. Would make a dent in oil usage certainly!

And long term the supply a new lithium needed per year will be less than that needed to meet that year's global car production. Most of the metals used in EV batteries are recyclable, they aren't consumed permanently by putting them in a battery.

An EV doesn't have 50 kg of lithium. The 70 kWh battery in my Tesla S has about 12 kg of lithium.

Hmm the the first source I found said 60 kg but now found others saying a lot less like only 6 kg.

https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-key-minerals-in-an...

The 63 kg number is lithium carbonate equivalent, not elemental lithium.

It originated from a Goldman report and they used it because lithium carbonate is what's traded.

Whenever I read articles like this about a small country that finds a rare resource I can't help but think about playing civ 5 in late game and finding out that I have a ton of uranium on my land.

Aside: The global trade community should insist countries set up sovereign wealth funds wrt exports tied to resource extraction.

Like Norway did (FTW) and Australia didn't (ruefully).

RIP Kurt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkcJEvMcnEg

Their govt should be all over that before they get leeched

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkcJEvMcnEg

Dumb question: how do they measure/know it's "15M tonnes".

Meaning, it's not like they just found one big 15M tonne solid bar of lithium.

I think there’s different ways: - take random samples from the area and statistically come up with that value - put a radar/sonar/ xray etc in a hole and get an outline of how big the deposit is.

I did not work in this field explicitly, but worked on Gaussian processes which were first used as a way to aggregate data like this from multiple sources to minimize the number of drillings required to find oil.

not a dumb question, as seen by the fact that the media/government minister etc. have blown this story out of proportion.

In reality its most likely 15M tonnes inferrred resource of 0.4% lithium content So much smaller amount of actual lithium.

They work this out by doing core drilling, and then inferring/extrapolating the size/shape of the orebody boundaries. (Im a mining engineer)

What are the chances of battery tech advancing beyond lithium before extraction of these deposit can even begin at scale?

I've been wondering the same. Battery tech seems like there are new breakthroughs weekly. Investing billions in extraction/production seems like a pretty big gamble if by the time you're operational your tech is outdated. Still, even if there is a game changing battery tech breakthrough, it would take years before it could make it to mass production and adoption.

Any updates on the nu-LK99? Two weeks of nothing since it was abuzz here.

Any such discovery in Australia is assumed to be owned by our minerals billionaires.

How more stories do we need about finding lithium and "rare" earth metals being found before people realize they're not all that rare and we can stop reporting on it as if it's special?

Rare earth metals aren't actually rare. It's a misnomer. Some of them are pretty common. It's just that they're hard to extract and refine.

Lithium is so 'not' rare that you can find it in the geothermal water in... Belgium.

https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/geothermal-developer-hita-see...

Or under the Salton Sea.

Rare is not what you think it is in that context. Wikipedia article would be instructive as to why

Oil is the standard example. I forgot what the exact peak oil production years were supposed to be, but they went something like this:

In 1880 peak oil was expected to be 1910. In 1910 it was 1940. In 1940 it became 1970. Etc.

Basically we kept finding more and more as technology and practical prospecting experience advanced.

US oil production did, in fact, peak in 1970 and declined for decades afterward. Production only started to increase again about 15 years ago with the widespread use of hydraulic fracturing.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

EDIT: To be clear, I am responding to a specific, narrow idea implied by the parent comment: that there was a prediction of peak oil in 1970, and that that prediction failed. I wanted to clarify the history. I know that global oil production continued to increase.

check out worldwide production. except for the 80s, it's been consistently increasing for at least 120 years. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...

Great news for climate change.

Yes. Think people have impression we are energy independent and Scot-free because of fracking.

Really, fracking was a second chance. A reprieve.

We'll just be behind 8-ball again if we don't take this reprieve and grow some other energy source.

Wind and solar are pretty nice and rapidly growing.

I do not really understand why we are obsessed with energy independence. It only matters if we were to ban exports which is an absurd thing to do.

Isn’t energy independence more about other countries exports? From the perspective of Germany, their reliance on Russian oil caused a high spike in cost of energy during the current Ukraine invasion. For the US, we don’t really want to be at the whim of OPEC. The 1973 Oil Crisis is a historical example of OPEC taking a religious and political stance and using their oil exports to coerce the US against Israel. Another way of looking at it is that oil production has largely been an effective monopoly for a long time by authoritarian states (many OPEC, China, Russia), many that are politically unstable (Venezuela). There are only a few oil rich countries and many of them are allied with each other so there isn’t strong competition or incentive to keep prices competitive. Many of them view the US negatively.

Exactly. Large parts of the economy require oil as feedstock or energy.

Parts that cannot be down for more than a week, or bad things happen, and which by virtual of volume have limited storage capacity (at normal consumption rates).

Consequently, US energy independence is about creating a credible detachment of the US from global market oil prices, such that countries thinking of using an oil embargo to pressure the US... don't.

In reality, oil embargos obviously impose immediate and intermediate term costs on the exporters as well, so doing a painful thing that the US might be able to blunt anyway becomes less attractive.

Germany's plight is entirely owed to their own political malfeasance in shutting down their nuclear power plants. With them, they would have managed just fine without Russian oil and natural gas.

There is still a bulk of our modern economy which relies on combustion engines and oil. You are out of touch with this reality if you think Nuclear is a quick replacement for anything but basic power generation. We are generations away from electrifying everything.

But that was kind of bad luck in timing.

They started shutting down nuclear, to make switch to wind/solar, before Russia invaded. (or at least being very trusting of Russian supply, so that is error in hindsight).

You could make argument that the switch to wind/solar should have been more gradual, or with more ability to roll back. But don't think it is a good argument to not switch to wind/solar. Just about how to do it.

Nah, it was actual stupidity.

The same wind turbine in the scotland produces 3 to five times more power than in Germany

The same solar panel produces 3 times more power in Spanish winter than in German winter.

This is basic information available to anyone

https://globalwindatlas.info/

https://globalsolaratlas.info/

But fine, you decided to do energy transition inefficiently.

At least don’t switch of nuclear while you are still relying on fossil fuels!

Yes. I agree. That is better way to put it. Sure, switch to wind/solar. But at least mothball nuclear so they could be ramped back up (i'm not sure if that is possible with nuclear like with other power plants).

But yes, have a better fall back position.

Or you know. Invest your money smartly, don't actually mothball nuclear, simply build more. And then you save a huge amount of money and you have reliable energy. Crazy how that would work.

Simply take the price of a typical modern 1.5GW electric reactor from somebody like South Korea. Calculate how many you need in Germany, add up the cost. And that's not even taking into account the cost savings you could get from building a large number of the same plants.

You end up with a number significantly less then what Germany has spend over the last 25 years, will spend the next 20 and has spent on energy subsidies because of their high electricity prices.

Can you explain that thought more? The bulk of oil and natural gas don't go to electricity generation. How would more electricity generation help?

No, it's about what the US exports - because the US produces more oil than it needs domestically. We will always be at the 'whim of OPEC' as long as we are in a market-based system because OPECs actions impact global oil supplies.

'market-based' is the key here. Without competition there is no market.

In the 70's when the US was NOT producing enough.

Then OPEC had a 'monopoly' or at least an outsized influence. A large enough % of the market that they could dominate the price.

Right now we are NOT at the 'whim' because we can produce more if we need it. IF we stopped, then we would return to being at their 'whim'.

Solar, Wind, anything, is all very important for National Security. See Germany.

Export bans of politically sensitive commodities are not that uncommon.

For example, India banned onion exports this year [1] & the US has restricted oil exports before. [2]

Moreover, without officially banning exports a similar result can be achieved by mixing exports taxes with consumption subsidies.

If international oil prices got too high, like over $200, the political pressure for an oil export ban / restriction than made domestic prices $50-$100 would be hard for congress to tolerate.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/asia-feels-sting-...

[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Crude_oil_export_ban#:~:text=The%20c....

Strong US domestic energy production disempowers petro-state dictatorships such as Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia etc. whose interests and values are not aligned with ours.

Burning and bombing their countries down to the ground works pretty well too.

The sharp ramp up of US oil production happened under the "all of the above" energy policy of Obama, who famously opposed that burning and bombing.

Energy independence is vastly preferable to waging war, and may be worth making some environmental tradeoffs for — even if we would like to see cleaner alternatives to fracking in the long run.

> Energy independence is vastly preferable to waging war, and may be worth making some environmental tradeoffs

Environmental collapse will lead to wars, so this statement is self-contradicting.

In fact the sooner we run out of oil, the better - high oil prices mean that any alternative will get huge investment. France built out nuclear due to an oil price shock.

We really are in a jingoistic moment right now.

It is satire.

Soft power.

“European countries are estimated to have spent additional 792 billion euros in the last year just on the status quo system to protect consumers from the effects of the energy crisis introduced by the Russian invasion into Ukraine”

Honestly I think building solar and wind farms in Europe would do more for America’s military power than more tanks.

You have a flaw in your reasoning. More solar and wind farms in Europe make it more independent from both Russia and the US.

The EU is dependent on the US for nuclear deterrence, so the dependency relationship will continue even after they choose to use less imported US LNG.

That’s probably a long time from now though, as they are expanding LNG regasification terminals (6 projects that I’m aware of) since the pipelines from Russia became unavailable.

"independence" means we don't have to buy energy from the outside. Send money to someone, so they give us Energy. It is super important.

Think of it like this. How many oil producers do we have a problem with? That are dictators, at war, or generally bad. Every time we buy gas, we give them money. We send trillions of dollars to our enemies.

It is such an overwhelming National Security issue, that I'm frankly surprised Republicans fought renewable energy for so long. Oil isn't going to last forever. We should have been throwing resources at our own internal energy R&D. .

This is because you’ve been living a very comfortable life with no real foreign threats thanks to US hegemony and the globalization it allowed. Due to other countries growing and wanting to have a say, this can’t be expected to continue going forward and so we have to think about things from a strategic perspective and not from a purely economic one.

We have more than enough significant allied countries in the Americas that we never have to worry about energy security ever again - in the sense of literally getting enough electricity to meet domestic demand.

If it is about getting low price energy, then integration with the global system is unavoidable, no matter how many domestic export bans you enact, etc. - you will be impacted by global energy prices.

Why would you want to be dependent on other countries if you didn’t have to be?

Because comparative advantage means that we all get richer collectively? Like - the basic principle driving better living standards over the last 80 years?

Ah. I see.

You are going back to old Adam Smith.

Let places/people that can make things more efficiently, do them.

Example: Don't give subsidies to car companies in countries that aren't good at making cars, it is inefficient. Better to focus on what you are good at.

There are exceptions:

National Security. See Energy, Semi-conductors.

To protect an industry while it grows, gets up to speed. Japan didn't become industrial power house out of nothing, they were very protectionist. Now they are dominant, but they aren't dominant because they let anybody at all come in and compete. They subsidized and protected their industry until they could stand on their own.

Define “better living standards.” Obviously has been great for third world countries. But folks in the west don’t seem to happy about the situation. I don’t think the widespread availability of cheap Chinese crap offsets the downside of hollowing out the industrial base and non-college jobs.

That was caused by bad US monetary policy. You've confused cause and effect.

(Americans hate inflation so much they preferred the Volcker recession in the 70s, which is what caused the deindustrialization, which is what caused things to move to Asia.)

volcker recession was in the 80s

Production is not the same as existence

Every year global we discover fewer additional oil reserves than what we are currently burning.

Not that it matters. If we burn what we’ve already discovered, we’ll already be completely fucked from a greenhouse gas perspective.

We were heading into an ice age, which would be just as bad for humans. The issue is that we built a bunch of things that depend on the current climate, but the climate has been changing for a long time and will keep changing. We need to adapt to it or find a way to adapt it.

The holocene is an incredibly small period compared to the age of the Earth. Nature doesn't gaf, it'll cycle in and out and we'll have to adapt.

It's not the direction, it's the velocity.

Not taking the extreme and unprecedented rate of temperature change into account is either ignorance or disingenuity.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

It's probable that very few species will be able to adapt to such an abrupt change.

Adaptation happens when it's forced to happen.

They also happen when they're not forced to (competition), and sometimes they don't happen when they're forced to (extinction).

Yes, but there is always the second half of “adapt or die” to consider

Yes, that's how evolution works. Those with a survival advantage succeed. Mother Nature doesn't hand out consolation prizes.

It sounds like you're advocating we don't compete and instead just die/go extinct

This literally doesn’t mean anything

The rate at which the temperature is changing is probably at historic highs, but both the current temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations are close to historic lows.

See [1], that xkcd is picking a really biased starting point by using the last ice age as a baseline. Ice ages themselves being extreme abnormalities from the general historic trend.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-Temperature-and-C...

That xkcd is not demonstrating the amount of warming, it is demonstrating the velocity of warming. Historic temperatures on a time scale of millions of years are completely irrelevant to the current discussion of climate change, unless you think we have a chance to evolve into dinosaurs in the next few centuries (/s).

The temperature and CO2 concentrations are also unusually low for the Cenozoic Era. That's the post-Dinosaur era (if we're not including avians): https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Dynamics-of-global-surfa...

The rise of mammals happened almost immediately after the extinction of dinosaurs, when the average surface temperature was around 10°C hotter than today.

I had hoped that my point was clear without too much elaboration, and that you were joining this discussion in good faith.

My understanding: At the moment, climate projections are that within the next few centuries we will reach temperatures not seen since the eocene. The mammals of the eocene were quite small, because larger mammals had trouble surviving the hot climate. While the broad categories of animals that still exist today also existed back then, in aggregate they looked very different from today. Given current trends, the majority of animals of today will be unable to adapt to the new climate, and will die off.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, and then also follow that up with correcting the scientific consensus of experts who are forecasting drastic and damaging changes to the earth caused by humans.

You no longer believe that we're conversing in good faith?

> At the moment, climate projections are that within the next few centuries we will reach temperatures not seen since the eocene.

That seems about right, see e.g.: https://www.marum.de/en/Dr.-thomas-westerhold/CENOGRID.html

> The mammals of the eocene were quite small, because larger mammals had trouble surviving the hot climate.

What makes you think mammal size was limited by the temperature differences we're discussing?

I think the predominant theory is that the asteroid impact killed off the larger ones, and it took a while for larger mammals to evolve. See e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7645244/

In any case, even if the Earth as a whole was much warmer on average that just means that you'd get the average temperatures that now occur closer to the equator (where some of the largest land mammals presently live) closer to the poles.

So higher average surface temperatures shouldn't preclude the existence of larger mammals.

> Given current trends, the majority of animals of today will be unable to adapt to the new climate, and will die off.

I think this has less to do with climate change per-se, and more to do with the widespread ecological destruction that's followed industrialization, and the reduction in wild habitats.

Although there's surely some species that'll go extinct mainly due to temperature changes, e.g. ones confined to a small atoll that'll get overrun by sea levels rising.

Based on the context of your first comment I thought you were trying to argue that the environment isn't really in trouble. If you agree that humans are negatively impacting the environment, that's good enough for me :)

This is a very common misconception. Production is all that matters and existence is completely irrelevant independently. Production factors in existence and future expected existence. For example if any oil rich nation thinks oil going to run out they will hoard it for future so they can make money.

But some get pedantic and ask "But isnt number of Oil molecules in earth finite?"

Such pedantism can be easily blowm away by responding with pedantism. Oil molecules on "earth" might be finite but in universe they are infinite. Even if the molecules are finite atoms of Carbon and Hydrogen are vastly infinite in universe. We already know how to merge these atoms to form hydrocarbons.

These arguments then get into the saner territory of "but isnt it too expensive to bring water from Jupiter and turn it into Oil on moon and then ship it to earth?", yes it is compared to fracking but fracking was considered too expensive compared to drilling which was considered too expensive compared to using mined coal etc.

Ignore existence and focus on "production". As far as production is concerned we are not going to run out of oil ever. Unless we stop "needing" it.

While the resources are out there it's very feasible that we could become locked into a scenario where it is out of reach. I don't particularly care for letting the cost stop us from taking it from outside Earth, but the prerequisite for doing so is having enough energy available to accomplish the goal. Which is a path we could easily close off for ourselves.

Nothing you have said contradicts what I have said. I said the same thing.

Productions; what about reserves?

World peak oil production was expected to happen in the late 1980's, but what happened then was new subterranean imaging techniques to find oil, horizontal drilling to get at tricky oil, and new electrolytes (zeolytes) to refine crude, basically doubled the amount of petroleum we could possibly produce, and increasing the amount of crude we could get to if we wanted.

That said, even with process efficiency improvements like electrolytic cracking, the number of useful Calories we extract per Calorie of input has declined over time. More and more of the fossil fuels we produce are going into producing the next unit of fuel, which is a little harder to retrieve than the ones from last month.

yes but this happens in every commodity and serves to the earlier point

what happens is that because the price goes up and the margins potentially increase, more investment is tolerable for more expensive extraction methods

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39058847. Nothing wrong with it but it's a bit of a tangent.)

The cultural significance of the resource wars in the middle east has been immense. I wonder if the modern imperial powers will wage new wars for resources in east Asia in the future.

15 million tonnes of Lithium...

That reminds me. Isn't Thailand a monarchy? How long until US government decides to restore democracy there?

While all y'all are muttering about EVs and batteries, psychiatrists and phrmacists alike are salivating at how they can expand diagnoses of bipolar disorder and drug patients with lithium carbonate medication. That's the primary aim of these discoveries.

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