So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
Lithium is also extracted via brine, as opposed to hard rock. Most of the environmental reporting has been on the brine approaches, which currently are in high elevations of South American mountains, and the problem appears to be mostly the use of land and taking that land out of the ecosystem for economic use as drying pools. But the same problem occurs with mining, too!
means recycling of lithium batteries will be a thriving business. (i.e. big difference from recycling of say tires or plastic bottles, more like, pretty successful, recycling of aluminum, and even better than it)
No one made fortune in Li-ion recycling in all those years. Li-ion cells remained disposable.
Spodumene is dispersed among other minerals into rocks and it only forms a few percent at most of those rocks, if not only fractions of a percent.
The rocks must be crushed and spodumene must be separated from the other much more abundant minerals, by flotation or similar mineral concentration techniques, before going further to chemical processing.
So your 670 pounds must be multiplied by a factor like 100, varying from mine to mine.
Some multiplication factor must also be used for the iron ore, which is also mixed with undesirable silicates, but iron oxide may reach up to a few tens of percent of the rock, so the multiplication factor is much smaller.
> The mine sets a chemical-grade specifications benchmark of 6.0% Li2O minimum and 0.8% Fe2O3 maximum.
Spodumene is 0% iron. How much lithium does it contain on a Li2O basis? 8%, I think:
You have: lithium + aluminum + 2(silicon + 3 oxygen)
You want:
Definition: 186.089
You have: (2 lithium + oxygen) / 2 _
You want: %
* 8.0282762
/ 0.12455974
No, as it turns out. The paper linked just before that says that none of the rock is quite that lithium-rich https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/segweb/economicgeology/arti...:
> The lithium ore zones comprise mainly spodumene, apatite, and quartz, with some ore zones returning upward of 5 percent Li2O.
OTOH, that paper is from 01995, so maybe there are new findings since 30 years ago. It says the reserves there were 4% Li2O. Later in the paper, it explains:
> The hanging-wall lithium zone in the main pegmatite is generally richer (up to 5% Li2O, equivalent to 60–80% spodumene) than the footwall lithium zone
That seems to contradict adrian_b's strong statement:
> Spodumene is dispersed among other minerals into rocks and it only forms a few percent at most of those rocks, if not only fractions of a percent.
It could still be true at other mines.