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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
> - 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?
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?
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.
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."
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”
>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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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?
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..!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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/
> 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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
^^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.
> ^^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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is going to be the plot of a Bruckheimer/Emmerich co-production, is it? A team of scientists needs to travel into the heart of a volcano to find the lost city of Lithium, but one of them is actually a spy for a foreign power that will try to kill everyone else to prevent the secret to get out, only to be thwarted by the lone survivor, a man who was recently divorced by his wife and just wants to see his children again. He finds another (female) survivor, and together they defeat the spy mastermind and are evacuated by the US Military mere seconds before the volcano erupts.
It certainly couldn't be any worse or more idiotic than the scripts for probably every Hollywood natural disaster movie: The Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, etc.
Yeah, it wouldn't need ChatGPT and it wouldn't take a week - my initial post pretty much came to my mind fully formed because it's just every action movie trope of any 90's/00's Blockbuster. I can probably write a 90-Minute script over the course of a week if I write only during toilet breaks, the main issue is "Will there be $40M in the budget to blow up an actual Volcano?"
It's actually a pretty interesting bit of country to see, because it's rare for most of us to experience places that remote. A few years back, when visiting Steens Mountain (highly recommended) we drove the paved road from Frenchglen to the Alvord desert. We saw I think 2 other cars in an hour.
I refuse to call these people "environmentalists" until they provide a list of places they are ok with mining. What they are is just glorified NIMBYs who knee jerk oppose everything.
Lithium is pretty important in terms of electrifying our economy, which is important for the global environment and climate change - and it's got to come from somewhere.
It's also true that mines have a huge track record of getting in, digging stuff up, making money, and then leaving the mess for someone else to clean up.
> The EPA Site Assessment program conducted a Site Inspection in 1988 which recommended no further action. Upon request from the Fort McDermitt Pauite Shoshone Tribe, EPA Emergency Response conducted an additional site visit in November 2009. At that time, EPA was notified of the possibility that mine waste had been used as fill at locations within the town of McDermitt and on the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone Reservation.
In other words, they tried to get out of doing any cleanup. Then they found that "well, actually..." there was some cleanup needed.
So... it's probably still worth doing because of climate change, but it'd sure be nice to ensure it's done right, and they do right by the people who have always lived there.
I imagine the local tribes are also pretty wary of getting screwed, because that is something that has been very much par for the course throughout US history.
These proposed lithium mines are going to be tiny though, compared to other minerals. For example Thacker Pass is only planning to disturb 6000 acres, which is basically nothing. Every oil well in Texas is on 1 to 5 acres of disturbed land and there are a quarter-million of those in Texas alone. The amount of land that has been scraped flat for oil is incredible.
You only have to glance around to find other mine disturbances. They are sized proportionately to the amount of the material humans want. Copper mines are pretty impressive. Potash and borax mines are rather large. Iron mines are absolutely gigantic.
In that case environmentalists should be very much in favor of the mine. Mining in the US is much cleaner than in most other countries so mining it here is not only better for our economy, but for the environment as well.
Your example actually is proof of this. It got cleaned up. It wouldn't in most countries.
Australia (where most lithium is being mined ATM) isn’t so far behind on the cleanup side. They are a liberal democracy after all. It isn’t clear to me if they are just getting off easy because they are shipping unrefined lithium ore to China, however.
To be clear I think EVs are cleaner, but you can’t conclude that from the fact that it doesnt emit while driving. EVs just squeeze the emission event further up the supply chain where a shocking amount of people don’t see it.
Pretty sure those protestors are driving there in vehicles using mined minerals, fueling them with energy refined and extracted using mined minerals (and likely burning fossil fuels too), etc.
If that isn’t saying things should be mined, just not where they can see it, I don’t know what is.
Not OP. But as soon as they transfer money in compensation that's fair and represents the value of the land. Or, I'm happy to take a 20% cut of all resources mined from my property. They can demolish it entirely and turn it into a giant hole for all I care.
Environmentalist is a very broad label. Some folks - likely those native Americans - don't want their (ancestral) lands permanently poisoned. Theyre not necessarily weighing in on a strategy for a global energy transition. Why should they have to?
"NIMBY" might be accurate, but "knee-jerk" is unfair.
Maybe massively subsidizing cars that need insane amounts of resource extraction isn't the best solution here, and there are other ways to deal with this.
Personally I'd prefer if we didn't pave over the whole world with roads and suburbs.
Resource extraction for batteries and EV will at its worst casue localized pollution. That is preferable to a high CO2 future that will make most of the global south.
This is not true, as subsidizing cars makes suburban and exurban locations cheaper. Significant land use change in this way absolutely contributes to high atmospheric CO2 as well as widespread environmental destruction.
Completely off-topic, but my 5 and 7 year old know about Kurt Cobain, Nirvana because of their song Lithium. It's played everytime the Seattle Kraken score a goal at home, and we go to lots of games as a family.
My youngest always asks to play "Lithium by Nirvana" song when it's his turn to pick.
Would be cool for the US to produce better batteries.
> ‘They seem to have hit the sweet spot where the clays are preserved close to the surface, so they won’t have to extract as much rock, yet it hasn’t been weathered away yet.’
> Benson says his company expects to begin mining in 2026. It will remove clay with water and then separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.
How economical is the refinement of lithium clays compared to stone or brine mines? Do they have similar chemical, water and mechanical refinement requirements?
It'd be much easier to stomach some level of 'necessary' cost towards ecologically re-structuring our society if people would stop pretending that that means you can simply maintain our current way of living but in a 'green' way.
For example, there is no genuinely ecological way to have our current car-based infrastructure, let alone expand it into other parts of the world, regardless of whether they're EVs or ICE.
We absolutely must wrangle with the fact that we need a society not premised on infinite growth. Anything else is inherently NOT ecological and makes any claims about things like extracting lithium for a 'green transition' nonsense.
This is the most important comment here. Everything we consider "wealth" is downstream of our ecobiological cocoon.
If one's reaction to this is "we can just develop artifical life support": suggestions that a well-functioning planetary ecology is not necessary had better come with a demonstrably viable alternative. We are nowhere close.
Even if we were, is there no value in the beings we share this planet with? Can we really justify their indiscriminate destruction? To what end?
The price of a given commodity rises due to demand increases -> people look for more of it -> people find it -> the commodity is eventually mined or otherwise exploited -> prices moderate.
It happened with oil and now it's happening with lithium.
Those companies will usually explain that those are pilot plants. They don’t have enough volume to really scale to economical production, yet. They’ll need for a lot more EVs to be on the road long enough for batteries to be damaged or fail and need to be recycled. Until recently, the number of new EVs was very low, just single digit percentage of car sales. Now that they are getting into double digits, the potential supply of batteries is starting to grow. It will just take time, now.
> I think the difference is that lithium is being created into a reusable product while oil is mostly made into a consumable, used once.
Sourcing lithium is something we've been thinking a lot about, whereas we haven't reached peak fossil fuels or scarcity. There are plenty of places to continue drilling: the US, Greenland, the Arctic Circle, Antarctica ...
The problem with fossil fuels is the carbon entering the atmosphere.
Typically we reached peak of some type of energy because the world switched to something else. Granted whales were in danger of being hunted to extinction when the world switched to oil lamps, but it isn't clear that was the reason the world switched.
It's hard to extrapolate a trend though - there was a dip caused by COVID, and global oil use has been growing since then, but it's still not back to where it was 4 years ago.
Also a lot of people think peak oil means that we suddenly won't have any gas available. No. Peak oil means all the easily extractable oil is gone, and so all future projects need to use more capital-intensive, technologically-advanced extraction techniques that cost more, and so the price of oil goes up, and then we use less of it while it's replaced by other technologies. Which is exactly what's been happening for the past ~5-15 years. U.S. is back to being the world's top oil producer, but all of it is in shale oil fields that aren't economically viable below ~$50/barrel, and so gas will never go back down to the $1/gallon it was in the 90s.
There are many different definition of 'Peak oil' but anybody that thinks this is all because of technology is just wrong.
The OPEC countries could produce far more oil far cheaper, but they don't want to. There are plenty of oil fields left. Not to mention fighting economic war against Iran and Russia, two huge producers.
The way I see it, we bootstrapped our existing tech off high energy density oil.
If it were gone, we would find it extremely difficult to repeat it all.
Now that we have built all this up, it is also our opportunity to bootstrap something far more sustainable, or we do risk a serious regression and a lot of people die.
Longer term, we use oil for far too much.
Getting off of it preserves a resource we may well find need of again.
Technology generally speaking only moves forward. Some technologies will be lost in a civilizational collapse, but the most important ones generally survive.
If another collapse happens, and without oil, people could believably bootstrap straight from electricity + batteries. There'll be endless amounts of quality scrap material and manuals. A lot of critical small scale appliances can be powered by hand-cranked motors.
It does not work that way. What you don't understand is the energy density multiplied by massive availability is what made the difference. There is chemistry in all of that too. We make so damn many things with fossil fuels it's hard to comprehend.
If we were to collapse, we would be left with some remnants that we would be unable to reproduce!
The tech needed for that runs on fuels we would find ourselves unable to procure.
It is especially maddening that our fossil inheritance, dipped into with wisdom and in moderation, could have been a profound and lasting gift for all future life on earth, instead of threatening its very existence. The dose makes the poison
The resource really isn’t the carbon itself but it’s stored chemical energy. Without new energy input, the carbon in CO2 will never become a hydrocarbon again.
Photosynthesis turns carbon and energy into plants immediately.
Longer term the same processes that turned algae and other life forms into oil are still happening and try as we might we aren't going to stop them, but they proceed at what is likely a pace that will take long after humans are extinct to replenish what we have used.
> Longer term the same processes that turned algae and other life forms into oil are still happening
This is unfortunately not true.
The vast majority of our fossil fuels are formed from carbon that was sequestered into cellulose in plants, before anything had evolved the ability to digest cellulose. It piled up, and eventually compressed into coal. Look up the ʾCarboniferous Period" for more details.
These reserves are no longer being formed because we have fungi that break down these materials and return the CO2 to the air.
Planet Earth will never again have oil and coal reserves of the size it did 200 years ago.
While this is true for coal, algae can still form oil. Oil is primarily formed by organic material dumped out by river deltas that are sealed by their sea drying up. That is why places like the Gulf of Mexico are so oil rich. Seabeds are pretty much organic sludge which can be sealed in by salt, and then compressed and heated into oil.
Ah I see. I didn't think either of the parent comments were talking about plastics. Is most oil turned into recycled plastics? I assumed that most oil is turned into combustible fuel, but maybe that's not true.
Seems like 8-12% is turned into plastics. Though it’s usually natural gas that is used, not oil directly. Natural gas is also used to produce fertilizer and explosives in large quantities.
Most oil is not recycled. We know how to do it for all uses, but that doesn't mean we can. The energy costs make is not useful. If we had an infinite source of free energy we know how to recycle CO2 and h2o back into hydrocarbons.
Multiply the number of MTBF cycles times the battery capacity. Every battery is consumable, every time you draw current from it, they're not tanks full of liquid, they're chemistry.
That being said they're astronomically more efficient than even an ideal carnot engine.
A completely used up battery contains the same amount of lithium, cobalt, etc it took to manufacture it. The only question is the economics around mining vs recycling.
An easier to recycle battery that had very slightly fewer charge cycles could be a net win. For scale this depot has enough lithium for ~10 billion of EV’s using Tesla’s battery chemistry and pack size as a benchmark. How expensive it is to extract is however unknown.
The materials a battery is composed of almost completly can be recycled into a new battery. So creating a new battery requires some work and energy, but not new components.
Editing for clarity is encouraged here, generally.
That was not what I was trying to say.
The math is something like:
MTBF cycles * capacity of battery = usable "life" of the battery
usage of lithium by mass in the battery * best recycling technology recovery rate = recoverable lithium per battery
((mass of lithium in battery - recoverable lithium per battery) / usable "life" of the battery) = lithium effectively used up per joule of energy used from that battery
It may be that that number is zero grams, or a few picograms, so it doesn't matter. But I don't think with current recovery rates on battery recycling that's true. So, while a failed battery has the same mass of lithium as a new battery, effectively every charge-discharge cycle "uses up" some lithium, which ultimately ends up wasted as recycling byproducts or unusable salts.
It has happened with all resources. I won’t assume your intent but you invoked oil so I do want to point out the difference.
In a battery lithium is not consumed completely after every use like oil. The lithium in a battery is used hundreds or thousands of times. When the pack is dead it can still be downcycled and eventually the individual cells recycled. With the lithium being recovered and reused.
Yes, there is or will be a “lithium rush”. But it will look a lot more like gold or aluminum than oil.
And in a lot of cases it's countries that aren't exactly stable which have the resources. A lot of currently known lithium deposits (thankfully) come from nations at least allied with the West, but there are also places like Afghanistan [1] that just reek of a repeat of the failure in managing oil countries.
I would not be too surprised if there were more deposits in the US southwest. While the specific sequence of events for this one may be unique, there was tremendous volcanic activity there during the "Mid-Tertiary Ignimbrite Flareup". This event, from about 25-40 million years ago, produced enough pyroclastic deposits that (if evenly spread) would bury the entire continental US 55 meters deep. I believe the largest known supervolcanic eruption ever was part of this period.
How these two sentences are in any way compatible with eachother:
>company will (..) separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.
And:
>‘If they can extract the lithium in a very low energy intensive way, or in a process that does not consume much acid, then this can be economically very significant,’
Centrifuging doesn't seem to be a very low energy process compared with what they do in Bolivia (just let the water evaporate in huge shallow lakes then gather the material with dozers). And the acid thing is just contradictory. They plan to leach with sulphuric acid and hope to find a way to not use acid at the same time?
It is very good more lithium deposits are found outside China, but isn't lithium one of most abundant things on earth? And isn't the key difficulty in economic extraction the fact established mines use practices that would not be allowed in places like US/Europe?
Surely, we should start with funding r&d to come up with an economic and less polluting process of extraction.
Welcome to the world of resource and reserve calculations, where the numbers are made up and the points don't matter.
It's very easy to come up with a back of the envelope calculation to say we have this much Lithium, or this much Copper and come up with an absolute whopper of a number, the question is how much of it is recoverable and can it form part of a resource. There's a reason we (mining industry) don't let people produce these kind of numbers offhand, it's wildly speculatory and holds no basis in mining reality (yet!) - however very cool stuff and might provide a new exploration target in the future.
On the one hand: cool, less exploitation of developing nations by a few billionaires. (Downvotes. Cool. I know it is hard for some people to accept reality because they just need to worship a wealth they'll never experience, no matter who or what it obliterates.)
On the other hand: dammit, we were just getting around to cost-effectiveness of lithium recycling, but now it looks like that's another several decades off.
Dumb question. Could a really serious impact from space increase the probability of a volcano forming at the point of impact?
I’m imagining that volcanoes are a little bit like the channeling hazard when making espresso, where the shallow or disturbed area are more likely to erupt with hot liquid.
This is relevant because I have seen it said that meteors could be a source of lithium.
Oh man - there's actually a much cooler version of this scenario, which is Sudbury impact crater, which was a massive Nickel deposit that was 'enriched' by the impact crater that hit it, not by adding Nickel, but by adding heat into the system.
How does the long lifecycle of large lithium batteries affect the lithium recycling industry?
I would guess that large-scale recycling is only just coming online in the next few years.
Of course there is initial supply now, but battery production is growing exponentially (for EV and Grid) those battery lifespans are 5-10 years or longer.
There is a lot of propaganda on TikTok about how lithium mining and refining is too polluting and only the clever Chinese know how to do it at scale without polluting.
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Mister HN moderator.... maybe you should read more about China's extensive efforts to control the rare earth mining market using anti-mining campaigns in countries such as the US and Australia.
It's not my fault autocratic regimes are flooding the internet with propaganda. The comment isn't "flamebait" at all. It's a representation of China's frustration that rare earth minerals exist anywhere outside its borders.
I don't understand this criticism. You mine lithium once. You have to pull fossil fuels out of the ground constantly even after you build the car using iron you've mined out of the ground.
If you’ve driven along the gulf coast the cost of oil is obvious. Growing up it was beautiful view of glistening water under a beautiful sky. Now it’s a post industrial view of oil platforms as far as the eye can see. Where fracking happens there’s earthquakes in geologically stable areas. Etc. Lithium extraction isn’t for the light hearted, but the deposits aren’t as vastly dispersed and extraction and processing happens in a smaller foot print. (Unless you consider extracting from ocean water, but even then the industrial footprint is contained) oil extraction is sprawling and pervasive, and once a well dries up, become discarded blight.
There’s also a function of scale: the amount of lithium in a car battery is orders of magnitude less than the amount of oil a non-EV will burn over the same lifetime, and even if you’re buying fossil fuel electricity the greater efficiency means you’re still using less.
To be fair, petroleum extraction is minimally invasive. You can easily live with an oil well on your property. You can't live with a lithium mine on your property.
Not sure what you are talking about, it highly depends on the way lithium is extracted.
A lithium hard rock mine is like any other open pid mine. Its a big hole in the ground with trucks going up and down.
A brine operations is basically a bunch of huge fields of water that just sort of sit there. It needs lots of space.
New forms of DLE Deep Brine mines look very much like a petroleum extraction well (even using old holes from that). However not fully commercial yet.
However I would also say that petroleum extraction on a large scale, specially in the ocean has lots of bad effects. And the gas from those mines will escape for decades.
As other have pointed out, the amount of lithium that needs to be extracted is much smaller than the amount of oil that is already being extracted.
An EV battery will use around 8-16kg of lithium that should last for the life of the car. Then the battery can be recycled. Current recycling programs can recover around 95% of the lithium. Over time, the demand for lithium will reach a much lower volume than oil.
It's always a good idea to just flat out compare the mass of alternatives.
A tank of gasoline weighs more than the lithium in an EV battery. The entire battery weighs as much as 10 tanks of gas. And 20 some kg of lithium is way less than the 1000kg of steel that goes into making a car.
And then you can look at the many, many kilograms of gasoline that would be extracted to fuel an ICEV vs the 20kg of lithium used for the life of an EV.
In some places, where it is still possible to use classic wells to pump oil. But in most locations, these have become rare. That we still can extract way too much oil is due to technologies like fracking, oil sands and what else. So claiming petroleum extraction is minimal invasive is a gross misrepresentation.
Probably no more than is used finding, drilling, extracting new petroleum wells. Especially as we seem to have already gotten to a lot of the 'easily' accessible crude oil, and are drilling in Arctic and Deep Sea environments.
Seems like a sunlight rich area such as the Nevada high desert is about as energy friendly as one could imagine. The main requirements seem to be water, sulfuric acid, and (of course) power.
These type of questions are not serious. This person already knows it's just a tiny fraction of what a non-EV vehicle will burn throughout its lifetime.
I think the answer for "able to be" is 100%. I think the question is how economical we can make it to separate it from the rest of the materials and then process it into a new battery.
I'm sure we'll never be able to get back 100% cost effectively, but I'm sure someday people will be working on driving it as close to that as they can.
The article made this extraction sound pretty trivial compared to other lithium deposits. The clay is close to the surface and won’t require significant mining.
> ‘They seem to have hit the sweet spot where the clays are preserved close to the surface, so they won’t have to extract as much rock, yet it hasn’t been weathered away yet.’
> Benson says his company expects to begin mining in 2026. It will remove clay with water and then separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.
Because lithium extraction such a tiny aspect of everything, and replacing a huge and evil oil industry that has terrible effects on everything is like comparing an apple to an F-150.
One is so clearly worse that its not even really worth debating. And that's why very often the 'but what about lithium effect on the environment' is often broad up by car and oil lobbyist to gaslight people. That is the reason the person got downvoted.
But if want to know, lithium mining is a worse basically like mining any other hard rocket, cooper or whatever. There are some issues with brine mining but they are minor and very localized. As with all mining there is issues with local representation.
You should understand that there is a lot of astroturfing going on now with comments starting that EVs and batteries are terribly toxic and will be an huge environmental disaster. Those people never seem to acknowledge the counter arguments. Batteries use only a small amount of lithium (8-16kg per vehicle). There is some toxicity to lithium mining but it is not a particularly toxic element and the effects are localized. Once produced, the lithium in batteries can be recycled efficiently. We are not going to need millions of lithium mines.
The amount needed is a couple of orders of magnitude less than the amount of drilling sites needed for the toxic oil that we are current extracting and burning and that cannot be recycled in any meaningful way.
We are concerned for the environment and need to make trade offs to get the best outcome for the environment. So far, the small amount of lithium mines seems like a good trade off against large numbers of oil drills.
You are concern trolling. The negative effects of lithium mining and refining is completely trivial compared to the increasingly uninhabitable planet that more CO2 emissions will lead to.
This is trivial [1, first image in article]? It looks like an Open Pit Coal Mine. I'm sure you'd appreciate if your local forest or parkland was turned into this.
I suppose we have different definitions of trivial.
Sounds like you enjoy polluted water, diseased wildlife, etc.
Personally, I care about the health of the humans, wildlife, and ecosystems.
"Concern Trolling" ...Get outside. Touch some grass and trees. I think you spend too much time online...
Memories are essentially stories we tell ourselves about the world. They’re not real records of events, they’re condensed down into a narrative. Stories are how we understand the world. It’s hard to fault you for picking up on the meme of Manifest Destiny; at least you’re self aware about it.
Sometimes I tell myself I may as well change some bad memories to be better. If I manage to accomplish that, I can change the past. Because the only record of some of these events is in my own brain. I am the arbiter.
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.