[HN Gopher] $1.5B lithium deposit discovered in Maine; excavatin...
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$1.5B lithium deposit discovered in Maine; excavating it poses a
legal challenge
Author : maxwell
Score : 206 points
Date : 2021-10-27 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.themainemonitor.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.themainemonitor.org)
| panick21_ wrote:
| There is endless amounts of lithium deposit everywhere. A lithium
| deposit is essentially worthless.
|
| What matters in lithium industry, is chemical processing. Nobody
| cares about a lithium mining company. What matters is lithium
| processing.
|
| Lithium is not like a base metal, its more like a specialty
| chemical. The output from every mine is unique, there is not
| overall standard. Each output from each mine has to be qualified
| with each major battery manufacturer.
|
| Nevada has 100s of billion of dollars worth of lithium by itself
| probably.
|
| This will almost certainty not be mined. Making money from this
| kind of rock is difficult in the first place and doing it in a
| place with little mining industry makes that even worse.
|
| Edit:
|
| If you want insight into lithium industry, I recommend 'Global
| Lithium Podcast' by a guy that has been in that business for many
| decades and has worked for all the many of the major producers.
| traveler01 wrote:
| We have a deposit here in Portugal too. Didn't know Lithium
| production had all those complications. But wouldn't mine it
| and move it away to processing be an alternative? I don't know,
| the US has a lot territory and probably lithium, wouldn't mine
| it and move it be profitable?
| goblinux wrote:
| Lithium mining isn't like gold/iron/other metal mining. It's
| more like salt harvesting. So trucking away loads of
| dirt/salt/rock/ore to a processing plant isn't viable. You
| have to process it on site which means huge ponds for
| evaporation.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8-YDMzg2bY Interesting video
| on the Lithium extraction
| rmm wrote:
| Your thinking of salars not hard rock deposits
| panick21_ wrote:
| This is not correct. Lithium Spodumene Ore is often
| transported from West Australia to China for processing.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Do processing facilities like this exist closer to Maine
| than China? If not, a new one would need to be built, so
| I think the GP is still generally correct about the local
| impacts.
| rmm wrote:
| Tianqi built a converter in Kwinana for hydroxide (I was
| part of the build). But yeah you are correct for all the
| other small mines all sell to converters in China often
| through offtake agreements.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I knew there were projects going on didn't know any of
| them were done yet.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| As I understand, Kwinana plant is done but closed for
| now. I found a Reuters article dated 2020-03-23, China's
| Tianqi postpones commissioning of Australia lithium plant
| amid liquidity problems.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/tianqilithium-australia-
| idUS...
| panick21_ wrote:
| Yes. This is what happens in Western Australia. Hard rock
| mining and selling is possible. Even then however the
| processor has to basically make the process specifically for
| the deposit.
|
| So its not as easy as just selling it to the lithium ore
| market. You need a project partner that develops the project
| with you.
|
| The only group currently processing spodumene to lithium are
| in China. Others want to make such project but I don't think
| they are online.
|
| I'm not saying this deposit is worthless, I'm just saying
| 'this much lithium is there' is really not a good way to
| evaluate the actual value of a deposit like this.
|
| Generally the location of mines like this is quite relevant,
| and a place that have bad regulation to begin with are very
| unattractive.
|
| The traditional lithium belt in the US is in North Carolina,
| lithium was mined there for decades. Starting a new mine
| there, is already incredibly difficult. Doing it in a place
| with no such history will be far more difficult.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The issue is that the further away from the mine you do your
| refining, the higher your transport costs are. All else being
| equal you'd rather transport a refined product a long way,
| rather than a product that's 90% useless other rock.
| thrower123 wrote:
| That area of Maine has absolutely no infrastructure to be able
| to do anything with such a deposit, and there's no way that the
| sclerotic government and regulatory agencies would allow you to
| build such infrastructure to process it, or even transport it
| elsewhere to where it could be processed.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| It's basically on US2. That's not very rural as far as mines,
| logging and other resource extraction goes. You don't really
| need "infrastructure" to build a resource processing facility
| since everything is global these days anyway. You need a road
| that can handle truck traffic. The days of a paper mill
| having parts made by the toolmaker across town are long gone.
| Your specialty stuff will all show up in trucks that say
| Fedex or XPO on the side and the special people who help you
| get it running will all show up in cars with the little
| Enterprise sticker on them.
| Symbiote wrote:
| There's also a railway (looks to be [1]), pretty close to
| Newry. 10 miles of railway would be a small cost for a
| large mine.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lawrence_and_Atlantic
| _Rail...
|
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Plumbago%20Mount
| a...
| thrower123 wrote:
| Route 2 out through Bethel there isn't much of a road. It's
| a winding two-lane stretch of blacktop that isn't as well
| maintained as it used to be now that all the mills in
| Berlin are gone.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| I've driven almost all of US2 in Maine at some point or
| another. A 2-lane road is sufficient for pretty much
| every industrial venture. If a 2-lane road isn't
| sufficient then the facility's driveway won't be
| sufficient either. There isn't that much traffic. There
| will be dozens of people working there and trucks coming
| and going.
|
| You don't need an upscale suburb to run this kind of
| facility. Employees won't be put off because the commute
| isn't 15min or because they can't go to a boutique
| sandwich shop during lunch break.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _If a 2-lane road isn 't sufficient then the facility's
| driveway won't be sufficient either._
|
| I'm guessing that their driveway won't be open to public
| traffic and would be built to withstand constant use by
| massively heavier trucks than are commonly seen on US2,
| so I don't think this is an apples-apples comparison.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The local roads already carry plenty of logging traffic
| that grosses 80k, for highly inclusive values of 80k
| (lol).
| mywittyname wrote:
| Kentucky is full of mountain roads with questionable
| maintenance and build quality which are used by coal and
| mining trucks all the time. They are basically one lane
| roads too.
|
| As long as the "road" is kind of flat and made of
| something slightly more sturdy than sand, these trucks
| can get through.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I bow down to your experience of driving through a few
| times, over my experience of living in the region for the
| first twenty-odd years of my life.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| What do you think the odds of someone driving all of US2
| in Maine without living there for many years are? It's
| not like it provides a very direct route between high
| traffic or popular portions of the state.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| No one is going to ship lithium ores overseas or down
| highways to a processing plant, regardless of what the
| property owner imagines. That burns a lot of diesel and
| costs a lot of money to move a product that's over 90%
| unwanted dirt. The economics aren't there. Purification on
| site is much more efficient. If they can't purify it in
| Maine they'll mine it somewhere else.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| They're gonna ship it across the street for processing
| and then that stuff is what gets trucked out of state.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I don't like your description of sclerotic, implying the
| government is dysfunctional if it doesn't allow heavy
| industry open strip mining near "a few miles northeast of the
| ski slopes of Sunday River and not far from Step Falls, where
| swimmers can wade in shallow pools formed by hundreds of feet
| of cascading granite ledge." 50 years from now when the area
| is a wasteland with polluted rivers I'm sure the residents
| who remember going swimming in natural ponds will be grateful
| for the nimbleness of their government
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Had the same reaction, essentially since the article goes
| on in length about how the Brooksville mine turned into an
| environmental disaster that cost taxpayers tens of millions
| to clean up. It's not like there's no history here.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Yeah this might be a good example of how local governments
| can prioritize long-term realities over short-term gains.
| a2tech wrote:
| Especially since as many people pointed out, Nevada has
| huge deposits of lithium in areas that are uninhabitable
| and bare desert
| panick21_ wrote:
| While true. Those are clay deposits. Nobody has yet
| managed to make commercial clay deposits an actual thing.
| So Nevada has these theoretical deposits that are large
| but nobody has managed to mine any. The same goes fro
| Clay deposits everywhere.
|
| Here we are talking about Spodumene rocket deposit. These
| are typically somewhat higher grade but they have a
| proven track record and company with knowledge on how to
| commercially make lithium hydroxide or carbonade from it.
|
| Spodumene was basically the original source for lithium,
| that we used to make nuclear weapon and later glass. This
| was for a long time almost driven out of the market by
| brine projects (mostly in South America) but the demand
| for high grade lithium hydroxide has lead to a Spodumene
| boom in West Australia.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 1. Canada has a huge mining Industry and that's right next door
| to Maine. 2. It's possible to bring in multinational consultant
| teams specialized in mining industries. A location doesn't have
| a mining industry until suddenly a big deposit is discovered
| and they do.
| bkovacev wrote:
| We have lithium and Jadarite[0] reserves in Serbia. Is
| potentially just trading the ore and/or moving the processing
| out of Serbia viable? However, with Rio Tinto investing, we're
| not looking solid environmentally.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadarite
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What matters in lithium industry, is chemical processing.
| Nobody cares about a lithium mining company. What matters is
| lithium processing_
|
| I've heard a lot about the difficulty in processing lithium
| into "battery grade" metal. Is there merit to this claim? If
| so, what's so hard about it?
| Lev1a wrote:
| From a quick search on Wikipedia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Environmental_issues :
|
| > Environmental issues
|
| > The manufacturing processes of lithium, including the
| solvent and mining waste, presents significant environmental
| and health hazards.[134][135][136] Lithium extraction can be
| fatal to aquatic life due to water pollution.[137] It is
| known to cause surface water contamination, drinking water
| contamination, respiratory problems, ecosystem degradation
| and landscape damage.[134] It also leads to unsustainable
| water consumption in arid regions (1.9 million liters per ton
| of lithium).[134] Massive byproduct generation of lithium
| extraction also presents unsolved problems, such as large
| amounts of magnesium and lime waste.[138]
|
| > In the United States, there is active competition between
| environmentally catastrophic open-pit mining, mountaintop
| removal mining and less damaging brine extraction mining in
| an effort to drastically expand domestic lithium mining
| capacity.[139] Environmental concerns include wildlife
| habitat degradation, potable water pollution including
| arsenic and antimony contamination, unsustainable water table
| reduction, and massive mining waste, including radioactive
| uranium byproduct and sulfuric acid discharge.
|
| Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Precautions :
|
| > Lithium metal is corrosive and requires special handling to
| avoid skin contact. Breathing lithium dust or lithium
| compounds (which are often alkaline) initially irritate the
| nose and throat, while higher exposure can cause a buildup of
| fluid in the lungs, leading to pulmonary edema. The metal
| itself is a handling hazard because contact with moisture
| produces the caustic lithium hydroxide. Lithium is safely
| stored in non-reactive compounds such as naphtha.
| vondur wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's the reason why most Lithium
| production was moved to China.
| coding123 wrote:
| So all these Teslas are the roll-coalers now?
| Raidion wrote:
| Wait until you hear the downsides of petroleum
| processing, distribution, and consumption!
| pm90 wrote:
| Only if their users vaporize or ingest their batteries.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I'm not a chemist so I can't tell you what is so hard about
| it.
|
| I can only say that there are not very many companies that
| can do it and even those companies seem to struggle a fair
| bit bringing new supply to market. Many startup have for long
| time tried all kinds of ways of bringing new supply to
| market, and many have seen huge delay.
|
| Lithium was (and still is) a tiny industry and these process
| are pretty immature. Most lithium never needed to be as high
| grade as is required now.
|
| Every company seems to have a lot of its own secret sauce.
| The people that are really knowledge about the subject are
| very thinly distributed and given the growth of the industry
| I would assume there are very few veterans.
|
| You can just go out get a bunch of veterans that have done it
| many times before, buy some standard equipment and get going.
|
| Somebody in the comments here was involved in setting up such
| a project, so that person have some more insight.
| Lvl999Noob wrote:
| Not an expert, or even an enthusiast tbh, but if I were to
| guess, I would say its because Lithium is way too reactive.
| It is basically impossible to find elemental Li and the
| compounds Li forms are difficult to break (I think). So
| unless the deposit is of some particularly easily collected
| and concentrated (removing the dirt and stuff, idk the
| technical term) or very easily broken, it probably won't be
| worth it to even try to get raw Li from the ore.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Tesla's suppliers are Ganfeng Lithium, China, mined in China
| and Australia. Kidman Resources, Australia, same, processed in
| China. Pure Energy Minerals, Canada, uses Chinese processing as
| of 2018.
|
| Your Tesla's lithium was likely mined in Australia, tanker
| shipped to China, it leaves China as lithium hydroxide and may
| be final assembled into batteries in USA or Canada. Like almost
| all materials for "green" products, lithium, composites,
| aluminum, microchips, the western world has boxed themselves
| out of making these things. So China does it where they set
| their own carbon standards, and can manipulate value, pay,
| trade, subsidies.
|
| There is a ton more to the conversation when someone says _"we
| just need stricter cap and trade"_ because China knows the grip
| over everyone else they have. I rarely see people who know how
| things are made make that argument with any practical
| effectiveness, unless it ends with _"we go to war"_.
|
| EDIT: So, to the topic, does it make sense to mine in Maine and
| ship to China for processing? Is this new reserve that good?
| panick21_ wrote:
| In fact most of the hydroxide goes threw Korea or Japan
| (sometimes even both I think). There the hydroxide is made
| into cathode materials. This cathode materials are then
| shipped to Nevada, where Panasonic creates cells, hands them
| to Tesla to put into packs. Packs get put into cars.
|
| Tesla always had the vision of doing cathode processing in
| house, but I think in Nevada they never went that far (unless
| this has changed).
|
| In Austin Tesla is planning a plant to transform Spodumene
| ore into hydroxide. This ore would come from North Carolina.
| However this mine project seem to be delayed so for quite a
| while they will likely continue to buy hydroxide (they have
| to buy anyway but buy less at least).
|
| They are also planning, and are already building a cathode
| materials plant. There they would bring together nickel,
| lithium hydroxide and co to make a cathode materials.
|
| They are also already building a cell plant where they would
| use that material to make cathode and cells.
|
| They are also attempting to mine their own lithium in Nevada,
| but that will take a quite a few years to come online (if
| ever).
|
| There are quite a few companies trying to get into all of
| these markets in the US, but compared to China its still a
| small amount and they are way behind
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Seems I might've been office step doesn't leave China as
| hydroxide then.
|
| It's actually really crazy but your green vehicle battery
| has to go from Australia to China to Japan to Nevada just
| to got one more place for final assembly.
|
| Agreed on the if-ever. There is a lot my company is forced
| to do outside of the US and given the costs, we would never
| break even with buying from China, literally never.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Just to be clear, it leaves as hydroxide to Japan or
| Korea mostly.
|
| > It's actually really crazy but your green vehicle
| battery has to go from Australia to China to Japan to
| Nevada just to got one more place for final assembly.
|
| And then might get delivered back to Australia or Britain
| or whatever.
|
| This is also why one of Musk major focus on Battery Day
| was 'how far does a battery atom have to travel' is a
| major measure of success for them.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Ah, gotcha!
|
| > And then might get delivered back to Australia or
| Britain or whatever.
|
| Man, aluminum bugs me for that. Australia to China to
| Iceland to China to USA as some "fancy" case for landfill
| electronics at Walmart.
| capableweb wrote:
| But, seemingly, this one is "The richest known hard rock
| lithium deposit" so it's got to be worth something, at least
| it's newsworthy I guess.
|
| Anyway, the article is not about the operation of mining
| lithium, how to earn money on lithium or even chemical
| processing, it's about regulation about mining in Maine, the
| deposit itself just being the driver of the story. It also goes
| into describing the supply chain around lithium and some other
| goodies.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I did find it interesting that the primary source for this
| article appears to be the couple who owns the land the
| deposit is on. They would obviously have an interest in
| making this deposit seem special, especially since it seems
| like they want to pressure the state to allow them to mine
| it.
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| How do they define richest? Searching online, there's lots of
| mines with more tons of ore. This one doesn't come close to
| being within the top 10.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| "Rich" means high concentration of lithium in ore. This
| deposit does seem to be top 1 in that measure, 4.68%.
|
| For comparison, Greenbushes, THE lithium mine in West
| Australia, is 1.60%. Note that Greenbushes is actually
| famous for its high concentration. More typical is Mt
| Cattlin at 0.50%. This deposit is 3x richer than
| Greenbushes and 9x richer than Mt Cattlin, which is in fact
| astonishing as the article says.
| capableweb wrote:
| Seems to have to do with that it's "hard rock" instead of
| something else, and the purity? Not sure, not a
| chemist/geologist, but here is what they say in the article
| about it:
|
| > The Freemans and researchers at Plumbago North knew the
| crystals they found were extraordinary as soon as they
| uncovered them. To determine the concentration of lithium,
| they sent bulk samples for analysis at labs in Australia
| and Germany.
|
| > The results, said Simmons, were astonishing. The deposit
| showed an average lithium oxide content of 4.68% by weight.
| That's three times the average concentration of the world's
| top 10 hard rock lithium mines. By comparison, the world's
| second-richest hard rock lithium deposit, the Bernic Lake
| mine in Manitoba, has a lithium oxide content of 2.76% by
| weight and contains roughly eight million tons of ore.
| panick21_ wrote:
| This is actually quite significant, I must have missed
| that.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| It doesn't cost much to get a few inches of buzzword copy
| that makes people ask "why won't they just lift the
| regulations so we can have the free money?" without really
| writing anything that leaves readers better and truthfully
| informed about a topic.
|
| We've got good responses by disinterested parties who know a
| lot about lithium and mining here, and it's the single sided
| argument funded by unknown sources that is generating the
| sticky "but what if"s.
| fernowens wrote:
| It's definitely not worth the challenge. There's a lot of legal
| precautions at risk. The money at stake will not be enough for
| the hassle.
| echopurity wrote:
| HN is ideology free apart from the constant corporate disinfo,
| etc.
| neals wrote:
| So how common is lithium on earth anyway? Is it like the new oil?
| Can we make it in the lab? Will we wage war over it? Will we
| deplete it? Can we find it on the moon or Mars?
|
| *) Lithium on Mars?
| https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012arXiv1208.6311D/abstra...).
| AHabe wrote:
| Considering everything and their dog now runs on some sort of
| lithium ion battery, it very much is the new oil.
|
| I don't see why wars wouldn't be fought over it, certainly has
| been the case for oil.
| panick21_ wrote:
| War over lithium would be totally insane. Every continent has
| basically unlimited amount of lithium.
|
| Its not an energy source and the ratio of how expensive it is
| to mine and how expensive you can sell it is nowhere close to
| oil.
|
| Fighting wars over lithium deposit would be insanely dumb and
| that will never happen.
|
| Lithium is not a consumable, once you have it you keep it. We
| need it now to grow the fleet but once the fleet is replaced
| recycling will be the most economical way to get it.
| starbugs wrote:
| It is not an energy source though. So the comparison to oil
| is at least a bit flawed if you ask me.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| As a factorio player, energy storages are as important as
| energy source itself. Especially for renewables since the
| energy sources are practically unlimited (and the
| efficiencies are increasing) but very fluctuate.
|
| And if you see from other perspective, oil are both energy
| storage and energy source, which is "almost" equivalent
| with solar cells and batteries.
| starbugs wrote:
| As I said in my other reply, I think the difference is
| really ERoEI. And that's very likely an important
| difference. Because you wouldn't get an economical system
| if you're not able to get a competitive ERoEI from the
| whole system (including storage). I suspect to take oil's
| status you'd therefore have to have something that allows
| you to also cheaply get the energy, not only store it.
|
| Lithium as an input to storage is really just a small
| part of the whole picture. Like a barrel is for oil.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| It's an intermediary source and it doesn't care where that
| energy came from. The oil analogy is not that far fetched
| if you consider that both are tied to a geographic location
| where they needs to be extracted.
| starbugs wrote:
| That's likely true if you look at network effects, but
| maybe not so true if you look at energy return on energy
| invested (ERoEI). In my opinion, the latter is a big part
| of oil's status as a "universal" energy source/carrier.
| VortexDream wrote:
| It's fairly common. Known reserves amount to around 80 million
| tons. Yearly production is around 100k tons.
|
| I think I saw a projection for a yearly consumption of around
| 1.7m tons in 2030.
|
| I'd say the biggest issue is simply going to be environmental
| impact. This is a big reserve that can't be mined because of
| environmental regulation. That's a lot of money to just pass
| on, and I don't think that's going to hold.
| merrywhether wrote:
| Is it really that much money? It's not like that's pure
| profit; mining requires large up-front capital investment to
| even start. Break that down to 20 years (round number for
| illustration purposes only, seemingly on the quick side based
| on quick searching), and you're down to $75mm/year which
| begins to sound like a lot less money when you start adding
| the recurring costs of operation to the initial capital cost.
| Add in the state mandates for damage escrow and you're
| probably looking at a business that makes the owners wealthy,
| but otherwise produces only a handful of jobs and minimal tax
| revenue while permanently destroying some of the natural
| beauty of a state heavy on tourism that relies on that
| beauty.
|
| Put another way: if it was a lot of money they'd find a way
| to do it underground.
| sss111 wrote:
| It is the 33rd most abundant element on earth. However, as it
| is highly reactive it is never found in its pure form in
| nature, and right now, we extract it from mineral rich brine
| from lakes. This process uses a lot of water, approximately
| 500,000 gallons of water goes into extracting 1 ton of lithium,
| enough to make 190,000 smartphones.
|
| I think we'll wage war over water before we wage one over
| Lithium.
| tata71 wrote:
| Bush and Gates families already stacking waterrights and
| farmlands.
| adwn wrote:
| What happens to the water after production? Can it be
| recycled?
| panick21_ wrote:
| In the process described above its evaporated. Other
| processes that are in development pump it back into the
| underground brine (just a little less salty).
|
| What is relevant here is that this is salty brine water,
| not drinking water.
|
| And the water usage is very different for what we are
| talking about here. This is not a brine mine, but a
| spodumene rock mine. That uses far less water.
| Faaak wrote:
| The sea is the largest resource of lithium. It's just cheaper
| to dig it for now.
| Jwarder wrote:
| my understanding is that it is super common, but not very
| concentrated in the earth. As a result it makes mining more
| difficult. You don't just find a ore vein in a cave, you have
| to dig up and process tons of stone in a wider area.
| torpfactory wrote:
| There really isn't that much lithium in today's "Lithium ion"
| batteries. A few percent by weight. Much more Nickel, Cobalt,
| Aluminum, Carbon, Copper, and Iron than Lithium. Lithium metal
| anodes would push that number up but that flavor hasn't really
| solved it's lifespan problems yet.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Stating there isn't much lithium in a single cell isn't
| really meaningful; there are a lot of individual batteries,
| and the number keeps growing, so we still require a lot of
| lithium to be mined. Relatively less than other minerals, but
| still a significant amount and still destructive to the local
| area where lithium is mined.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| One difference is that it can be recovered from worn out
| lithium batteries. So at some point we could theoretically have
| enough lithium from recycled batteries that we no longer need
| to mine a significant amount of it.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Lithium is only created in stellar events (Big Bang, super
| novas). There's no natural way for it form on Earth.
|
| As a result all lithium deposits we're created during the
| formation of the planet as it coalesced out of interstellar
| dust. Consequently the distribution of Lithium around the
| planet is pretty even. There's no "hot spots" of high
| concentration, and every country has a supply proportional to
| its land mass.
|
| That, plus the relative abundance of Lithium, means it's
| unlikely that fighting a war for Lithium will ever make sense.
| Much easier and cheaper to just dig in your own backyard, than
| fight for someone's backyard that has the same dirt in it.
| saba2008 wrote:
| >there's no natural way for it form on Earth.
|
| 'Naturally forming' elements on Earth are limited to uranium
| fission products.
|
| Lithium (also aluminium, magnesium, sodium) distribution is
| due to it being light and chemically active, thus ending up
| in crust, while heavier metals (iron, nickel) end up in
| mantle and core. It takes specific geological circumstances
| to bring mantle material into crust, so there are 'hot
| spots'. Lithium is already there, so it is spread somewhat
| evenly.
| [deleted]
| bob229 wrote:
| Who cares. Humanity is already doomed. Good riddance to us all
| OliverJones wrote:
| Figuring out how to mine this safely seems like a decent project
| for the Department of Energy's ARPA-E project. It's worth an
| evaluation at any rate. https://arpa-e.energy.gov/
|
| Surely there are some National Lab boffins with expertise in
| environmental protection.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Why is everyone so keen on lithium when, to me, it's almost a
| footnote in battery components by weight? Cobalt and nickel are
| the heaviest. Cobalt is the priciest constituent...
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| As a newenglander I laughed at this headline.
|
| This is SO FAR from being a $1.5B deposit it's not event funny.
|
| That area is pretty. The idea that we would choose maine (vs the
| many other places in US with deposits) would be crazy for this
| industry I think?
|
| https://cdn3.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2...
|
| for a photo of what the processing might look like.
| supperburg wrote:
| People forget that a battery has only a dusting of lithium. A
| very small amount. People hear the name and they think it's a
| chunk of metallic lithium.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's more like 5 to 10kg, multiplied by 1.5B cars on earth it
| adds up quickly.
| ct0 wrote:
| Does that mean we will need less of them? As technology
| advances, we need more lithium.
| supperburg wrote:
| Yes. That's a lot of dustings.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's not really surprising. The use of lithium batteries to
| replace fossil fuels is really just shifting where and what
| environmental impact is produced. It's not as clean as they claim
| to be. It's like coal plants with scrubbers saying they are
| clean. They are only relatively clean, just like lithium is only
| relatively clean.
|
| At least the lithium deposit near the Salton Sea is already in an
| area that's an ecological disaster. It makes sense that Maine
| would want to protect their natural resources.
| torpfactory wrote:
| The issue is that while mines produce relatively localized
| environmental damage, climate change will produce globalized
| damage by ecosystem collapse and sea level rise. The sum total
| of this damage will be far greater than the marginal increase
| in mining required for battery production. Shifting, for sure,
| but the scale of destruction is the real question.
| dbatten wrote:
| I'm not even convinced that there will be a "marginal
| increase in mining required for battery production," nor that
| there will be an associated increase in localized
| environmental damage.
|
| Lithium mines produce localized environmental damage, _but so
| does fossil fuel extraction_. Think about environmental
| damage from mountaintop removal coal mining, fracking,
| offshore oil spills, etc.
|
| With fossil fuels, you get localized environmental damage,
| _plus_ climate change.
|
| With lithium, you get localized environmental damage, but you
| hopefully support a transition to renewables.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Does Maine allow for those other actions, like strip mining
| coal?
| thrower123 wrote:
| No, not at all. In the past year, they attempted to shut
| down one of last remaining paper mills that is keeping
| the beleaguered forestry industry alive by ordering the
| removal of a dam that alteady had had a fish ladder
| installed at great cost, because it might possibly still
| impact the spawning of a miniscule subpopulation of
| salmon.
|
| There's been enormous conflict about simply building a
| high voltage transmission line across the boondocks of
| the western mountains to bring cheap green power down
| from the Quebec Hydro dams.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > There's been enormous conflict about simply building a
| high voltage transmission line
|
| There might be less conflict if that line wasn't solely
| for the benefit of Massachusetts.
| giantg2 wrote:
| So it sounds like the arguments about local extraction of
| coal/metals/petroleum are moot for this locality, since
| extraction isn't taking place there.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Scale is a good question. However, it might not matter if the
| residents (through the state) decide they don't want their
| local area to be destroyed. For example, climate change may
| not be as _locally_ damaging as some massive strip mines.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Yes, neither option may be perfect. But just claiming that,
| therefore, they are equally bad is philistine. It's a full
| embrace of a talking point even ExxonMobile has retired.
| hurgs wrote:
| It's a very misleading statement to bluntly compare a
| consumable Ressource with a recycle metal.
|
| While it is known that lithium itself has environmental issues
| the potential reuse and benefit of pulling it out of the earth
| to make batteries will have a very long and positive outcome
| for us.
|
| And to a certain degree the initial disruption might be totally
| worth it in the long run in comparison to stuff we just burn
| away.
| sabertoothed wrote:
| Unlike coal, lithium does not get burned or used up. At least
| in principle, it can be recycled.
| supperburg wrote:
| Yes. The narrative that electrification just shifts around
| the pollution is so tired and untrue. The end to end pipeline
| of EVs is much more efficient than that of gas cars, so even
| if we start synthesizing fuels that are carbon neutral gas
| cars will lose. The only reason gas cars could ever exist is
| because of cheap and dirty fuel. The only car that makes
| sense in a sustainable system is an EV maybe with synthesized
| and carbon neutral hydrocarbon range extension for
| emergencies.
| wibagusto wrote:
| I don't think the point of contention is whether it's
| recyclable. Primary issue is: what is the local
| environmental impact of MINING lithium?
|
| For folks who don't live in Maine it's a no-brainer: sure,
| go for it! Bring the USA more domestically produced
| lithium.
|
| But... mining fucks up entire ecosystems and pollutes water
| etc... and even if companies can "promise" the operation
| will be clean, come to implementation they likely walk back
| on that and the damage is done.
| supperburg wrote:
| I don't suppose there's a mining expert who could weigh
| in?
| wibagusto wrote:
| For what it's worth you don't need a mining expert to
| know that establishing a large scale mining operation
| will fuck up the local region somewhat.
|
| At the very least, all the demolition and vehicles, fuel,
| explosives, chemicals.
|
| Shits going to leak into the rivers one way or the other.
| In addition, they would likely use up a ton of local
| water supply.
|
| It's a no-brainer. Maine is not in the middle of some
| desert.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| For what's it worth, I live in a area that has done
| extensive mining for over 1000 years with no big natural
| disaster caused by it. Today it is only operational by
| small scale in comparison, (and it never experienced the
| big chemical industious mining), but you absolutely can
| mine the earth without creating havoc.
|
| It is just a lot more expensive then.
|
| Which is why most mining is done in remote, or poor
| areas, with laughable regulations, where no one dares
| complain for the jobs.
| crowbahr wrote:
| What's the local environmental impact of drilling oil?
|
| Because it's worse than lithium _and_ contributes to a
| global catastrophe that threatens billions of lives.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure, but the available options aren't limited to "mine
| lithium in Maine" and "do absolutely nothing".
| peytoncasper wrote:
| Genuinely curious, what are the alternatives to the
| three?
|
| 1. Mine lithium 2. Drill oil 3. Do nothing
|
| You have to store energy somehow, even if the entire
| world shifted to walking everywhere. Goods still need to
| traverse the world and thus far there hasn't been
| anything else with a high enough energy density to get
| close.
|
| The argument being made is that if mining lithium becomes
| more popular, its likely to lead to advancements that do
| limit its ecological impact and provide a more
| sustainable method for storing energy...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Alternatives:
|
| Mine somewhere else.
|
| Non-lithium approaches to storing energy.
| crowbahr wrote:
| If America is benefiting from the Lithium we should also
| be mining it at home. Let's not shift our negative cost
| externalities to a different nation but instead own them.
| peytoncasper wrote:
| Do you have examples of portable, non-mined or extracted
| alternatives to storing energy?
| ensiferum wrote:
| I think the only really sustainable car is the one that
| doesn't exist. Regardless whether your car is electric or
| ICU it's just a method of transportation that is wasteful
| of energy and resources and doesn't scale.
| api wrote:
| I've read numerous analyses arguing that a small to mid
| size EV releases less CO2 and other pollution than a
| similarly sized typical gas car (or even a hybrid) even if
| the electricity comes from 100% coal.
|
| Coal releases the most CO2 per unit energy. It's almost
| pure carbon after all. But to compare with a gasoline car
| you have to consider:
|
| (1) Large power plants are anywhere from 1.5X to 3X more
| thermally efficient than a small piston engine. How much
| better depends on whether the power plant is an old school
| boiler and turbine or a newer supercritical steam or
| combined cycle plant.
|
| (2) Gasoline is the highly refined and quality controlled
| end product of a long supply chain. Oil must be drilled,
| sometimes cracked (for heavy oil), shipped (often more than
| once), refined (this uses a lot of power), doped with small
| amounts of manufactured additives, then shipped at least
| one and sometimes two or three more times to a gas station.
| Every step of that supply chain uses even more energy, and
| this must be subtracted to get the overall end-to-end
| efficiency of a car engine. This makes car engine
| efficiency from oil well to tailpipe really suck. Coal
| meanwhile is often shipped only once or twice and requires
| minimal processing, usually just pulverization and then
| flue gas scrubbers at the exhaust end.
|
| (3) ICE cars require a lot more maintenance and fluids that
| have to be changed, etc., and all that has to also be
| considered in their energy footprint.
|
| EVs are superior in every single way _except range and
| recharge time_ : complexity of the vehicle, reliability,
| acceleration and driving experience, urban pollution,
| overall emissions, and end to end efficiency. They remain
| superior even in the worst case of a 100% coal fired power
| grid, and very few regions get their power from only coal.
| The range and recharge time gap is already small enough to
| make EVs practical for 90%+ of driving scenarios and the
| gap is closing. The oil age is over.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I would like to see a source for the first claim. If I
| recall correctly from my parent's expertise (energy
| domain) an efficient large power plant (~60-65%) can be ~
| 1.5 times more efficient than a modern ICE engine
| (averaged, Diesel being better than gasoline, around
| 40%). 3x would push the efficiency over 100%.
| api wrote:
| Can't find it now, but you are probably right for newer
| and well maintained ICE engines. I'm guessing that the
| 1.5X-3X range I saw includes old and badly maintained
| engines. They could also have been measuring overall fuel
| to _wheel_ efficiency and including a ~15% loss in the
| transmission and drive train and maybe also including
| average time spent idling (which doesn 't apply to EVs).
|
| Keep in mind that there are a lot of shitty cars on the
| road. A power plant's engine is going to usually be well
| tuned and maintained because small increases in
| efficiency can be worth a ton of money when you are
| generating tens of gigawatt hours per day of power. How
| often does a typical driver of a middle-aged car take it
| in to be tuned with the objective of maximizing energy
| efficiency?
|
| I bet the average gap across all cars on the road and
| including transmission loss is at least 2X.
|
| Also it's tough to argue against the second point. Look
| into how much power is used in the oil to gasoline supply
| chain, especially if the oil is coming from heavy oil
| that requires an additional cracking ("upgrading") step
| or fracked wells that require a lot of energy to drill
| and hydraulically fracture. I recall reading an analysis
| years ago arguing that the Canadian tar sands are almost
| an indirect natural gas to oil conversion operation
| rather than a net producer of energy. A huge amount of
| gas is burned to get that stuff out of the ground and
| into a form that refineries can handle. You could instead
| just burn that gas in a combined cycle power plant and
| run EVs with it and emit a lot less carbon.
|
| Thing is when you are buying any oil product you are
| really not buying energy. It's ridiculously expensive
| compared to energy from any other source. You are buying
| _conveniently stored_ energy and paying a huge markup for
| it.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Not OP but he's correct if talking about how much energy
| actually moves the car --- IC engines are indeed ~40%
| efficient but if you're measuring the energy that
| actually moves the car it's more like 23%-25% due to all
| the parasitic and drivetrain losses. So it's completely
| plausible for a power plant to be 3x that.
|
| Of course some of those losses would also apply to EVs
| but still, "wasting" 3/4 the energy of a highly refined,
| carbon intensive product is a pretty low bar.
|
| Page 53 onward: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/
| handle/2027.42/5764...
| giantg2 wrote:
| The big question in my mind, is what are we going to
| build roads out of? Most of them are still using
| petroleum products. Concrete is a CO2 emitter too. What's
| left? Is there a point to creating electric cars if we
| find out that we need to do away with the infrastructure
| they require, or did we not think that far ahead yet? I'm
| genuinely curious what options exist to deal with this.
| Ottolay wrote:
| The problem is not petroleum products themself, the
| problem is burning the petroleum products. Even if we
| move the whole energy economy away from fossil fuels
| we'll still be using oil for lubrication, plastics,
| asphalt, and a bunch of other things. That is fine.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Eventually it is a problem - they are not renewable. Are
| all the components usable for these other uses? I thought
| some distillates only worked for some uses (can the gas
| portion be used for asphalt?).
|
| I would also imagine there is immense heating from the
| road surfaces. Not to mention the fumes, chemicals used
| in the processing, and all the transportation.
| richiebful1 wrote:
| If we're not burning petroleum for heating/electricity
| anymore I imagine our reserves will be enough for
| thousands of years of roads, chemicals, synthetic
| materials, etc. By then we'll have developed
| alternatives, if not sooner
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think that's wishful thinking on the timeline and a
| very hopeful outlook for technology to save us. It also
| doesnt answer the question of if some of the byproducts
| are only useful for burning. If I remember right,
| gasoline was originally considered a byproduct.
| cesarb wrote:
| > EVs are superior in every single way except range and
| recharge time
|
| While I'm also in favor of EVs, I can see two other ways
| in which EVs are not superior: weight (every article
| about EVs I read seems to mention that they're heavier
| than the corresponding ICE vehicles; on the other hand,
| the weight _distribution_ seems to be yet another way in
| which most EVs are superior, with their low center of
| gravity), and _price_. The price seems to be the main
| barrier to EV adoption IMO, and is probably the reason
| they are so rare where I live (it 's a major metropolitan
| area, and yet so far I have seen a non-rail EV only
| once).
| VintageCool wrote:
| Battery prices have dropped 89% since 2010. BloombergNEF
| has predicted that, with battery costs continuing to
| decline, EVs will be less expensive than ICE cars by
| 2027. UBS predicts 2024.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/09/electric
| -ca...
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > The price seems to be the main barrier to EV adoption
| IMO, and is probably the reason they are so rare where I
| live (it's a major metropolitan area, and yet so far I
| have seen a non-rail EV only once).
|
| Interesting. I live near a (relatively!) affluent suburb
| of Cincinnati and I see at least one or two Teslas a
| week, depending on how much I'm driving. Our next door
| neighbors have an electric BMW (i3). And I'm not a car
| guy, so there could be a lot more than that I'm missing.
|
| Next car I buy will probably be a Tesla? Though it might
| be a few years.
|
| Of course, this doesn't disprove your point that price is
| an issue in adoption.
| api wrote:
| The weight issue is a mixed bag. It can improve handling
| in some conditions such as bad weather. Regenerative
| braking makes up for the energy cost fairly well.
|
| The cost is higher up front but lower overall. The
| comparison is also only fair if you compare similar
| cost/luxury classes of car. It's not fair to compare a
| Tesla Model S to a Honda Civic. Instead you'd compare a
| Model S cost to a mid-high end BMW, Mercedes, Audi, etc.
| You'd compare a Honda Civic to a Nissan Leaf or a Chevy
| Bolt.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm still waiting for ones not based on "loaded" trims.
| Appearently the margins are too low to support budget
| vehicles. Look at trucks. I just want/need a basic work
| truck. They're about $25k. The lowest cost I've seen for
| an electric one is about double the cost.
|
| So I agree that you have to compare similar levels/trims,
| but many times the lower trims don't exist in the EV
| market.
| danans wrote:
| > The price seems to be the main barrier to EV adoption
| IMO, and is probably the reason they are so rare where I
| live (it's a major metropolitan area, and yet so far I
| have seen a non-rail EV only once).
|
| If you live on an area with electrified rail transit
| (which is where we ought to be going) but effectively no
| EVs that's surprising. Where is this?
|
| Today, the price of EVs has dropped to within comfortable
| reach of middle to upper middle class people, who are
| most of the people who buy new cars anyways (the lower
| middle and working class are much more likely to buy
| used).
|
| The bigger issue is cultural - with some areas (US
| coastal states and cosmopolitan cities, cosmopolitan
| parts of Europe, etc) being far further along in the
| cultural adoption of EVs.
|
| This is changing though. On a recent trip to Michigan I
| saw a significant rise in EVs (I'm more well off areas)
| vs the not distant past and I suspect this is because
| Detroit automakers finally have solid EV offerings.
|
| EVs, like smartphones, are now aspirational goods.
| cesarb wrote:
| > If you live on an area with electrified rail transit
| (which is where we ought to be going) but effectively no
| EVs that's surprising. Where is this?
|
| Rio de Janeiro. Off the top of my head, we have Supervia
| (commuter rail, overhead catenary), Metro Rio (subway,
| third rail), Corcovado train (touristic train, AC
| overhead catenary), Santa Teresa tram (tram, overhead
| catenary), and VLT Rio (tram, APS third rail). I know
| there are some EVs (I've seen it in the news a couple of
| years ago, there were something like five EVs in the
| whole city), but I've only seen one personally once (I
| believe it was a BMW i3).
|
| The bigger issue here is IMO still price - and all EVs
| are AFAIK imported, which makes them even more expensive.
| Symbiote wrote:
| > If you live on an area with electrified rail transit
| (which is where we ought to be going) but effectively no
| EVs that's surprising. Where is this?
|
| Railway lines in poorer or second-world (ex-USSR)
| countries were sometimes electrified since it ensured the
| most flexible and reliable fuel supply: you could run
| trains not only from oil, but also coal, gas, nuclear or
| hydroelectric power. Compared to diesel, the locomotives
| are cheaper, faster, quieter, and more powerful, and the
| operating costs for trains and track are lower. The ride
| quality is better, and it still felt "modern" to make the
| upgrade in the mid-20th century.
|
| Sort by percentage electrified length on [1] and you have
| Ethiopia, Armenia, Montenegro, Georgia, Bulgaria, India,
| Poland, Azerbaijan, North Korea, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
| Morocco, Ukraine, South Africa, North Macedonia etc all
| with a significant proportion of their rail networks
| electrified.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ra
| il_tran...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Just because it's _cleaner_ doesn 't make it _clean_. My
| point is that we should be asking questions about the
| impacts so we can minimize the negative ones.
|
| For example, where is the energy coming from to charge
| those batteries? Even if we say wind or solar, those
| devices end up in landfills. Maybe we should look at making
| these devices recyclable as an integral part of the
| strategy.
| SEJeff wrote:
| Lithium Ion batteries can mostly be recycled:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/10/tesla-jb-straubel-redwood-
| ma...
| hammock wrote:
| >it can be recycled
|
| Yet here we are talking about a lithium mine, which is not
| clean.
| wil421 wrote:
| So you're saying we should continue to burn fossil fuels in
| our cars because lithium mining is dirty?
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| It's okay to point out problems with a path to the
| future. It's also okay to still take that path even
| though it's not perfect. Eyes wide open. Lesser of two
| evils.
| jcims wrote:
| I'd promote it to essential.
|
| The problem is that in open conversation like this a
| simple statement like _' Yet here we are talking about a
| lithium mine, which is not clean'_ is insufficiently
| contextualized to know where the commenter is coming
| from. Are they just trying to be transparent and
| realistic? Are they someone that has no dynamic range in
| their understanding of ecological harm? Are they long in
| petroleum and want to throw interference up at any point
| where electrification of transport comes up? Are they
| just being a contrarian troll?
| hammock wrote:
| I'm saying "lithium recycling" isn't yet such a benefit
| that we don't need to keep mining additional lithium.
|
| Not to suggest OP was doing this, but it seems a bit
| weird to start your mouth watering at the notion of "I
| can't wait to strip 11 million tons of rock out of the
| side of this mountain, melt it down and refine it, so
| that we can start being clean with it by recycling."
| _coveredInBees wrote:
| A big factor there is that demand for Lithium is growing
| drastically and we don't really have that amount of Lithium
| pre-mined and ready to be recycled in the first place.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Can you go into detail as to how specifically it is not
| clean, and how it compares to the resource extraction of
| other things like steel, aluminum, oil, etc.
| Pxtl wrote:
| If people want truly green infrastructure, the only practical
| options are nuclear power and densification -basically turn as
| many cities as possible into Paris. LRTs don't need batteries
| because they're hooked into the grid with catenary lines,
| subways have 3rd rails, bikes run on human, and e-bikes use
| only tiny batteries.
|
| And while nuclear power isn't ideal, it's the only tech that
| has fully decarbonized power grids at State level.
|
| Otherwise we need battery power on an utterly insane level.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| This was the common mantra ca. 15 yes ago on Slashdot that
| made you look extremely in-the-know, with that ineffable
| quality of genius that cynicism is often mistaken for.
|
| Have you read anything in the intervening decade-and-a-half?
| Battery and solar power prices have come down by 90%+. Wind
| by 70%. (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/05/li-io... for batteries,
| https://static.dw.com/image/56696354_7.png for the rest).
| Nuclear power is more expensive than ever, and easily 3x as
| much as the alternatives.
| Pxtl wrote:
| My point is that nowhere has successfully done it. No
| jurisdiction that I know of has completed a changeover to
| zero-carbon emissions power based on their wind/solar
| production, while there are several that have been quietly
| humming along on 100% nuclear for years.
|
| While there have been massive advancements in wind/solar,
| the only tech that has been successfully used to create the
| backbone of a zero-carbon power-grid is nuclear.
| crowbahr wrote:
| Interestingly if we have significant excess production from
| intermittent sources we can reduce our battery needs. Last I
| read the best cost/benefit ratio was something like 7x the
| energy production.
|
| That said nuclear base load makes a _lot_ more sense.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I point to nuclear power simply because it's already proven
| to work. Overbuilt wind/solar should work in theory, but
| primarily nuclear-powered grids exist right now.
| mrep wrote:
| Where did you read that? Methane which already powers 40%
| of the US electrical grid can be created and then turned
| back in electricity in a Electricity-Gas-Electricity
| process with a round trip efficiency of 30-38% [0]. There
| is no way you'd need 7x production when you can use
| surpluses to make methane or hydrogen.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
| Pxtl wrote:
| There's a whole spectrum of energy storage tech where the
| tradeoff is efficiency vs cost. At the extreme end of
| high cost with high efficiency you have magnetic energy
| storage, then slightly less-efficient but lower cost you
| have batteries, then in the middle you have things like
| synthetic methane, cracking hydrogen, and pumping water
| up-hill, and at the bottom for lowest-cost and lowest-
| efficiency you have compressed air.
|
| Finding the right balance of overbuilding supply and
| storage efficiency is going to be a long process.
| crowbahr wrote:
| The goal was to have a long term hydrogen, mid/peaker
| battery setup with the minimum cost while providing for
| the entire grid.
|
| Unfortunately I didn't take notes as to what the source
| was and I read this about a year ago. Google has been
| entirely useless as I've tried to dig it back up.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| We can't turn US cities into Paris. Turning into Paris
| requires infrastructure, like subways and the like! But
| between tariffs on things like steel, gross administrative
| incompetence, labor union shenanigans, and environmental
| review laws, the US is incapable of building such
| infrastructure.
|
| The city of Milan built a new subway line, and some of the
| cheaper subway stations cost EUR8 million. The city of New
| York added a single wheelchair ramp to Avenue H which cost
| $14 million. https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/8/17/22629915/mta-
| looks-to-ramp...
|
| Someone's going to complain "but environmental review is
| important to protect the environment!" which is why NYC's
| congestion charge is going to be delayed and litigated for
| the next 10-20 years in environmental review while cars stuck
| in traffic spew pollution into the environment.
|
| And someone's going to complain about me mentioning labor
| unions, too, and admittedly they're sometimes a small part of
| the problem (when not suing under the environmental review
| laws) but the Second Avenue Subway still had to give the
| unions a six-figure payout for using a tunnel boring machine,
| and every crane has to have someone employed as a full-time
| oiler because it's still 1910 and we're on steam power.
| European labor somehow manages to avoid these levels of
| absurdity.
|
| Not that this is necessarily the top problem. The notoriously
| free-market pro-business right-wing New York Times (cough,
| cough) brought over the guy who was in charge of Crossrail,
| and he was shocked at how many people were standing around
| the dig site doing nothing. The MTA had no idea why most of
| them were there getting paid. The MTA also has a bad habit of
| completing Phase 1 of a project, letting all the contractors
| who know anything about it go on to other projects, then
| starting again from scratch on Phase 2 a while later, so that
| there's absolutely no in-house expertise.
| saltminer wrote:
| > We can't turn US cities into Paris. Turning into Paris
| requires infrastructure, like subways and the like!
|
| Houston famously has the largest highway in the US - the
| Katy Freeway (I-10) is 20 lanes + 6 frontage lanes at its
| widest, and it is an absolute eyesore [0]. Despite the
| almost $3 billion spent to expand it to 26 lanes, traffic
| has only gotten worse because of induced demand and the
| fact that cars are a horrendously inefficient way of moving
| people since the vast majority of traffic will always be
| single-occupant. Once you need two lanes in either
| direction to "fix traffic," you will never be able to keep
| up with demand unless the area depopulates.
|
| Houstonians who rely on public transit find that their
| mobility is severely impaired. This is because our suburban
| sprawl is fundamentally incompatible with the "transit must
| be partially/wholly sustained by fares" logic which has
| been employed since the systems began to fall into public
| ownership as private operators began folding during the
| post-WW2 white-flight to the suburbs.
|
| Even if you have self-driving electric busses (no driver to
| pay), you cannot provide sprawling neighborhoods with large
| minimum lot sizes and detached single-family homes enforced
| by zoning restrictions "good" bus service simply because of
| the capital required to purchase enough vehicles to run
| into these low-density areas regularly. And it should be
| noted that sub-10 minutes is the headway you need to
| provide for people to routinely take transit over their car
| because that feels frequent enough that people don't plan
| around the bus [1]. More than 20 minutes, and you have lost
| most potential riders. But in many cities, even 15 minute
| headways are the exception, not the norm. My home county
| has a total of 5 bus lines that run once an hour and stop
| at 8 PM, so the only people who ride it are those without
| cars. The city I currently live in also has lines that run
| once an hour (despite having a population of ~850k vs
| 160k).
|
| So at this point, you might be thinking that America is
| forever doomed to repeat the abject failure of 20th-century
| urban planning. But that's not the case: Houston wasn't
| built around the car, it was destroyed and remade for the
| car. Like other American cities, if you look at photos of
| downtown from the early 1900s [2][3], the roads were much
| smaller, and things were at a human-scale. Photos from the
| 80s [4], by comparison, are filled with massive roads and
| parking lots to an almost comical extent. Of course,
| downtown Houston is nowhere near that bad today [5], but
| there is still a ton of land producing next to no tax
| revenue for the city because they are only used to store
| cars.
|
| My point is that our cities weren't always like this. We
| can fix them. Yes, it costs money, and yes, it is
| temporarily inconvenient, but we spent hundreds of
| billions, if not trillions, rebuilding our cities around
| the car, so we could easily fund comprehensive public
| transportation, road-diets, bike lanes, and highway capping
| (or even outright removal) projects by raising taxes on the
| rich and eliminating wasteful spending like that which
| regularly occurs in our defense industry. It means a
| fundamental change to the American landscape again, of
| course - the reason we even have large, sprawling
| neighborhoods that cannot be retrofitted for good public
| transit is a byproduct of previous federal policies (like
| red-lining) and zoning restrictions - but as we head
| towards a climate catastrophe, we have to do something, and
| it's cheaper to pay up now. Electric self-driving cars will
| not get us out of this mess; private industry cannot begin
| to save the environment on its own, nor is it in its best
| interest to do so.
|
| > The city of Milan built a new subway line, and some of
| the cheaper subway stations cost EUR8 million. The city of
| New York added a single wheelchair ramp to Avenue H which
| cost $14 million.
|
| This is in large part because the MTA is a state agency.
| The city has little real control over the MTA. Because the
| NY legislature is in Albany, they are entirely detached
| from the realities of city residents who have been hoping
| for change for decades. Andy Byford is a great example of
| this: he spearheaded the single greatest increase in subway
| speeds in a generation, and the SPEED team he created has
| continued to increase speeds across the system [6]. He is
| also the reason CBTC is being deployed much more widely
| across the system [7] (relative to its deployment when he
| was appointed), and anyone who has taken the 7 or L at rush
| hour has seen the effects of that: trains run so close
| together that they oftentimes have to stop and wait for the
| train in front of them to exit the station.
|
| And Cuomo ran him out of town because he realized Byford
| was the one getting good PR, rather than the media
| worshipping him. It's not often that you find people who
| genuinely care and are able to manage a juggernaut of an
| agency and make meaningful improvements while warding off
| meddling attempts from a hostile boss, and I doubt another
| one will come along for awhile.
|
| There are a lot of reasons the MTA has such high costs.
| It's basically death by a thousand cuts - many individual
| laws that, on their own, increase very little, but as a
| whole have ballooned things to an absurd degree. And
| because the state legislature doesn't take the MTA to go to
| work in Albany, they have no reason to try and improve it.
| There's also a large rural vs urban divide in the
| legislature, which ultimately makes fixing the cost overrun
| problems about as easy as making bidding on DoD contracts
| more competitive.
|
| Really, the best thing that could happen is for the MTA to
| become a multi-state agency because it already serves NY
| and CT (via MNR), and NJ gets the shortest straw despite
| having tons of commuters who would love to not have to
| drive. Regional planning is next to impossible with the
| current situation. Combine PATH and the MTA (at minimum),
| ideally NJTransit as well. Imagine being able to board a
| train at Trenton and through-run all the way to New Haven
| or Montauk. This would revolutionize passenger rail in the
| region, and because all three states would have to agree to
| such a venture, it would allow side-stepping many of the
| cuts that plague the MTA today without having to explicitly
| repeal the legislation. (Not that it would eliminate graft,
| of course - PATH has plenty - but it would reduce a lot of
| it.)
|
| But more realistically, the most likely thing would be for
| the MTA to return to city control. It would likely be much
| better since local politicians actually use the system and
| can be held directly to account without the rural vs urban
| state divide that encourages not improving the status quo,
| but would still suck for everyone across the Hudson.
|
| [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Katy-
| Freeway.jpg
|
| [1] https://spatialparalysis.xyz/blog/headway
|
| [2] https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/62636
|
| [3] https://www.houston.org/timeline
|
| [4] https://i.redd.it/tz0j51a117n31.jpg
|
| [5] https://i.imgur.com/uNL0GtY.jpeg
|
| [6] https://new.mta.info/press-release/update-mta-new-york-
| city-...
|
| [7] https://ny.curbed.com/2018/6/4/17423376/nyc-subway-
| andy-byfo...
| chasd00 wrote:
| Also don't forget, many people don't want to live in a
| crowded, noisy, dirty, disease ridden city. You can count
| me as part of that group.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
|
| edit: and I'm not saying that cities are our only option,
| I'm saying that cities are our only option if we want to
| avoid having to create and maintain an utterly staggering
| amount of batteries.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > Also don't forget, many people don't want to live in a
| crowded, noisy, dirty, disease ridden city.
|
| I dispute that cities are necessarily dirty and disease
| ridden, particularly the latter. There are models for
| cities that would work in this regard (e.g. Tokyo,
| Singapore).
|
| That said, I don't necessarily have much sympathy for the
| notion that we shouldn't rely on electric cars -- we
| should just do the simpler option of _completely
| restructuring American cities and reallocating vast
| numbers of people_. Which would be overwhelmingly,
| unfathomably expensive, as well as rely on people
| actually wanting to _move_ to the new cities. (Or forcing
| them to, I suppose.)
|
| Speaking for myself, I like having a bit of space. My
| very long term goal is to have a house or cabin in some
| decent forest, secluded and private and peaceful. City
| life just isn't appealing.
| wibagusto wrote:
| Let's hope it stays that way. But $1.5B is not a tiny sum and
| I'm willing to bet the government will bend over backwards to
| bring a bunch of "jobs" to the area at the expense of all
| environmental concerns.
| panick21_ wrote:
| You have a delusional believe in the power of lobbying.
| Establishing a mine in the US is incredibly hard. Even in
| places with existing mining, establishing a new mine is a
| major undertaking.
|
| Mines even in mining friendly places is very, very hard.
| Doing it mining unfriendly places where you have real popular
| opposition is bordering on impossible.
| tata71 wrote:
| In Maine?
|
| No shot.
| afarrell wrote:
| > at the expense of all environmental concerns
|
| Greedy lobbyists in the state capital would object to this.
| Ecotourism is seen by voters as one of Maine's largest
| industries. Much of its real estate industry and its most
| well-known brand (LL Bean) relies on it.
| wibagusto wrote:
| That's good news!
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Even its second most well known brand (Stephen King) relies
| on it indirectly.
| epistasis wrote:
| I wish that the damage of lithium mining would be specified and
| put into specific terms about what the damage is and what's
| it's doing.
|
| For example, fracking in California results in 26 acres of
| toxic storage pools that are leaking and contaminating ground
| water with specific toxic chemicals:
|
| https://grist.org/accountability/fracking-waste-california-a...
|
| However, every single story about the toxicity of battery
| production remains vague and I haven't been able to find any
| that specify what the damage is. I have found that indigenous
| people are having their land used without much permission or
| process, but the damage has never been specified.
|
| Does anybody have some specifics about what's going on?
| Presumably there must be an environmental cost but it's really
| unclear what it is, or how it compares to the regular
| destruction that we embrace from fossil fuels.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Suppose 150k mile car that averages 30mpg. That is 5,000
| gallons of fuel weighing 30,000 pounds. The amount of crude to
| make that oil varies, so actual oil you have to extract and
| ship and refine will be a bit more than that, and the
| refinement process is also dirty.
|
| So compare that 30,000 lbs of oil to the amount of lithium in a
| Tesla battery pack, which is about 138lbs. 138lbs < 30,000lbs
|
| Then figure in that those 30,000lbs of oil all go into the air
| producing not only c02 which is changing our climate, but
| particulates which are bad for our health and cognitive
| function, vs the lithium in a battery pack which can be
| recycled and/or re-used
|
| This seemm like a large net win to me.
|
| All of that said, yes, all of the resource extraction industry,
| from the iron and aluminum to the oil and lithium, has a bad
| history of responsible stewardship of the lands they exploit,
| and I support forcing them to do a better job.
| elif wrote:
| Agree. The comparison drawn by the original commenter is
| completely devoid of scale and avoids the existential nature
| of global climate change.
| rlpb wrote:
| > So compare that 30,000 lbs of oil to the amount of lithium
| in a Tesla battery pack, which is about 138lbs. 138lbs <
| 30,000lbs
|
| I think you need to account for the amount of material that
| was mined to get to that 138lb battery. My understanding is
| that it's orders of magnitudes more than what gets
| removed/disrupted for oil. I don't know the figure (and I
| welcome someone telling me) but I think it could well be in
| excess of 30,000lbs of raw material mined.
|
| There's also battery recycling to consider.
|
| I don't know which way the result swings; I'm just saying
| that it's much more complicated to figure out, and far less
| clear cut, than you suggest.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Yes a complete accounting of the net externalities of each
| would be very complicated, and I apologize that I am not
| prepared to present a 200 page research report here in the
| forum. A bit of napkin math can go a long way.
|
| How much dirt you have to dig up to get a thing isn't
| really much of a measure of impact though. If I dig up
| 50,000lbs of dirt to get 138lbs of lithium, but the dirt
| just goes back to being dirt, no problem. If on the other
| hand sulfuric acid leeching makes it an uninhabitable
| wasteland for years, problem.
|
| But yes in the end, recycling batteries is going to be the
| real big win, where all the components can be reused rather
| than mined.
| panick21_ wrote:
| That is true. However much of that stuff can basically be
| piled and is not really damaging to the environment.
| Lithium is usually only about <5% of any given rock.
|
| That is far better then blowing tons of things into the
| air. Its just a stack of crushed rocks.
| epistasis wrote:
| Or salts left over from brine extraction, which is a
| frequent method of lithium extraction (and other
| resources, too).
| goohle wrote:
| Lithium hard rock mining produces about 15 tonnes of CO2 per
| tonne of Lithium, but Lithium geothermal mining generates
| energy instead: https://cornishlithium.com/projects/lithium-in-
| geothermal-wa...
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Leave it. Let's not strip the planet of every natural resource.
| The environment has suffered enough damage.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Should we stop all farming and mining? Should we never mine
| anything new?
|
| And btw we are not 'strip' planet, we are simply moving things
| from one place on the planet to another.
|
| Does the earth have some sort of inherent will that lithium
| should stay where it is?
|
| If only we could kill all humans then finally the planet could
| heal.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Has the IQ of hacker news fallen over time? Half the people in
| this thread think we can have 8 billion humans and make zero
| demands on the environment.
| someguydave wrote:
| That choice is akin to saying: allow China to use the cheapest
| methods to extract ores in Africa.
| sss111 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better for the planet if we move away from
| fossil fuels, and Lithium could help us in that process.
| alistairSH wrote:
| That depends. How much of the earth's surface needs to be
| mined to obtain enough lithium and other minerals to supply
| the world with batteries? And what will we use to charge he
| batteries?
| redmaverick wrote:
| Will the people of Maine get any pay off from this when the Govt.
| makes their money?
| alistairSH wrote:
| Doubtful. The government probably won't even get much. The
| lion's share of benefit will go to some mining corporation's
| stockholders and executives.
| burnt_toast wrote:
| As a resident I'm curious to how this will play out. I have no
| strong opinions either way but I feel like it's going to be a
| long legal battle.
|
| The current ongoing thing here is that the power company wants to
| build a power corridor to transport electricity from Canada to
| Mass. The power company has gone through questionable means to do
| this and the locals are rightfully unhappy about it. It's hard to
| not hear about it right now.
| AreYouSirius wrote:
| MUSK makes tweet and he generates 2 billion, who gives a ...
| about 1,5 billion USD of something you have to work for ?
| datameta wrote:
| > By 2030, the International Energy Agency estimates that supply
| from existing mines and projects under construction will produce
| only half the amount of lithium and cobalt necessary to meet
| international needs.
|
| The mining has to be does somewhere at some point... barring a
| breakthrough in alternative battery chemistry in the next half
| decade. Not saying it _needs_ to be in this mine, but the
| countries that do currently supply the world with lithium are
| securing a greater economic foothold. Of course I 'd wish for
| every nation to be all honky-dory with each other but there are
| regimes whose optimization function is absolute domestic power
| and international domination.
|
| _Please_ refrain from pointing out the tired old truth that the
| US was or is such a country.
| mdasen wrote:
| I think that logically, it doesn't make sense for Maine to change
| its laws to allow this to move forward. It's worth $1.5B and
| there are about 1.5M people in Maine. That's $1,000 per resident.
| Given that there are costs to extract the metal from the ground,
| let's say that 20% of that $1.5B could be profit (which I'm
| guessing is a very high estimate). That means $200 per Maine
| resident. Given that Maine doesn't own the land/mineral rights,
| let's say they can put a 30% tax on those profits. $60 per
| resident.
|
| Realistically, $1.5B worth of lithium is a tiny amount of value
| for a US state. If I were Maine, I'd say no at $1.5B. You're
| probably going to get less than $60 per Maine resident - and
| that's a one-off $60, not even an annual $60.
|
| The article keeps talking about how we need lithium. Ultimately,
| we don't seem to need it that much given how cheap it is. If I
| were Maine, I'd say "not now". If Lithium prices go up 100-1,000x
| in the future, then reevaluate. $6,000-$60,000 per Maine resident
| might be a useful amount of money. $60 isn't.
|
| At current prices, any environmental damage is likely to cost
| more than the taxes on the profits would cover. $90M in taxes
| (30% of a 20% profit margin) won't clean up a lot.
|
| I'm not saying that it's a global optimum for Maine to leave this
| lithium in the earth. I'm just noting that there isn't a lot of
| incentive for Maine to extract it. The article talks about other
| countries with less strict labor and environmental rules. That is
| true, but why should Maine risk its environment for such little
| money?
|
| Why should Maine risk environmental damage for $60 per person?
| $90M in tax revenue is nothing compared to the cost to clean up
| environmental disasters. It's costing over $6M to clean up a
| single park in my town, never mind the type of environmental
| damage that might be caused by mining 11M tons of lithium. It
| seems like it would be foolish for Maine to alter the laws to
| allow the mining to take place at current prices.
| the-alchemist wrote:
| Excellent analysis. People forget the economics of things from
| the state / people's perspective.
|
| Also, a certain number of people, very small but not zero, will
| get sick and die. All of those nasty diseases that come from
| any mine operation, especially something nasty like lithium.
|
| Those sick people will go on Maine's disability / unemployment
| insurance / LTC / Medicaid / Medicare's system. Some of those
| people will live decades with cancer, their medical care paid
| for by the state (as it should).
|
| At current prices, like you said, it might literally cost Maine
| more to open the mine than to leave the lithium in the ground,
| especially once you factor in environmental cleanup and
| healthcare costs.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Another viewpoint to consider this is how long will it take to
| exploit this? 20 years, that is 75M in revenue per year, 30
| years 50M and 50 years would be 30M. Not actually that high
| revenue numbers. 20% as profit from those, which sound
| optimistic would be 15, 10 or 6 million a year. Now tax those
| and on scale of state it isn't very big once again...
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I don't disagree with your analysis, but it's important to
| remember that most states think of the 80% of that $1.5B that
| isn't profit as going to their citizens in the form of local
| spending.
| volkl48 wrote:
| For a bit of context:
|
| This happens to be in the same vicinity as the most popular
| ski resort in the state, and a number of other popular
| outdoor attractions.
|
| It's not quite your average rural economy that's desperate
| for any sort of new business/jobs/investment.
|
| ------
|
| A mine has to be weighed against the risk it represents to
| their existing economy - both in actual impacts of
| environmental disasters, and reputational if there's any
| negative stories coming out about it.
|
| Tourists don't want to go have their destination wedding in
| the town that's in the news regularly because of X or Y
| pollution, even if they can't see it and it's not a risk to
| them on their visit.
| masklinn wrote:
| Also for an other reference, Maine's GSP is 52 billions, so
| that's a week and a half of it, as a one-shot.
| dboshardy wrote:
| You're assuming they're not thinking about it as a potential
| lobbying payday for the policy-makers themselves.
| aww_dang wrote:
| https://bangordailynews.com/2018/03/02/news/lobster-supply-c...
|
| >The estimated $1 billion impact is on top of the income that
| lobstermen earn when they bring their catch to shore and sell
| it, which in 2017 was $433 million statewide.
|
| According to this study Maine nets 1.5B per year from lobsters
| alone.
| vvoaterr wrote:
| Why won't they just lift the regulations, so we can have the free
| money? --Maine
| op00to wrote:
| It's only worth 1.5B if you can extract it as an open pit mine,
| which is terrifically terrible for the environment. Waving that
| number around is nonsense because it ignores the societal and
| environmental costs of open pit mining.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>The company extracted roughly 800,000 tons of copper and zinc
| before flooding the area, turning it into Goose Pond.
|
| >>The former mine is now a Superfund site, and a 2013 study by
| researchers at Dartmouth College found widespread evidence of
| toxic metals in nearby sediment, water and fish. Cleanup costs,
| borne by taxpayers, are estimated between $23 million and $45
| million.
|
| Yup, that company successfully extracted the value and
| externalized the costs onto the taxpayers - they got the benefit
| and we hold the bag of crap.
|
| Which is precisely why the laws were passed in the first place,
| because this was not an exception, but standard procedure.
|
| If they want to relent and allow standard mining, then they need
| to _require_ an up-front bond of the appropriate amount to fund
| the cleanup, on the scale of $100 million.
|
| Anything short of that is utterly foolish (it's not like we're
| ignorant of standard mining practices).
|
| <sarc>I'm sure the financial genius MBAs can figure it out (along
| with how to still screw the general public plebes). </sarc>
| netcan wrote:
| Something about the economics of lithium, and other recently
| important minerals confuses me.
|
| How is a $1.5bn deposit, a major, significant source? That's
| would be about 10 days worth of oil. The whole global lithium
| market is just $3bn-$4bn pa. The rare earth market is about
| $2.5bn annually. Seems super low, relative to
| headlines/concerns/etc.
|
| How are these materials simultaneously of such importance, and
| also so economically minor. What am I missing here?
| philipkglass wrote:
| These elements are critical but tiny parts of a number of
| products. Downstream users and even governments make a lot of
| noise about ensuring affordable supplies, but major
| multinational miners are slow and cautious about developing new
| projects. The total addressable market isn't that large. Miners
| aren't interested in over-supplying these commodities as a
| favor to manufacturers of batteries, magnets, or light bulbs.
| Especially for rare earth elements, market demand is so limited
| that one new major producer could significantly reduce market
| prices.
| netcan wrote:
| Why doesn't someone just "solve this problem with money." I
| realize this is a simplification, but any number of actors
| could affordably silo a massive stockpile and make the risk
| of supply deficits go away entirely.
|
| Some of the politicians bringing this stuff up as major
| future risks could personally afford to seriously mitigated
| on their personal accounts.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The United States used to stockpile raw materials for
| military use. A lot of that ended after the Cold War did
| because it was considered inefficient. (And it probably
| was; efficiency and resiliency are at odds here.)
| Strom wrote:
| > _How are these materials simultaneously of such importance,
| and also so economically minor. What am I missing here?_
|
| My guess is the amount of skill required to get these
| materials. Miners can be paid pennies and they'll still do the
| work. Something similar to how garbage takeaway is of very high
| importance, but economically pretty minor.
| netcan wrote:
| Waste management is a multi-trillion dollar industry.
| Strom wrote:
| Come on now. That's changing the goal posts. Natural
| resource extraction is also a multi-trillion dollar
| industry.
| netcan wrote:
| I'm not seeing the analogy. The lithium market is
| surprisingly small for the same reasons that plastics
| are...?
|
| I concede the point that small individual parts of the
| overall waste economy are prominent problems... but
| where's the way back to lithium.
|
| Lithium is cheap enough that Elon could buy all of it
| with just his bitcoin. He's a guy with a use for lithium.
| Why not solve all possible scarcity concerns with the
| jingle of a purse. More realistishly... Unless there's
| something I'm missing, I can't see how a lithium price
| spike could affect the price of an electric car
| noticeably.
|
| That doesn't scream scarcity.
| Strom wrote:
| My analogy wasn't about any special processing or any
| special segment of garbage. It was a more basic
| comparison that we as a western society depend heavily on
| regular garbage takeaway (because we consume so much
| single use crap) but the people who take away our garbage
| aren't paid much and get looked down upon on top of that.
| So it's an important part of society that is severely
| underpriced compared to the value it provides. One of the
| primary reasons it can be so underpriced is because the
| workforce can be trivially trained (relatively speaking)
| and there seems to always be enough people interested in
| working.
|
| From your comment that the lithium market is so small,
| yet always talked about as criticial - I guessed that
| perhaps that's because it's similarly easy to find and
| train lithium miners.
|
| As for Elon and lithium, I remember recently watching
| some interview or talk that he gave, where he mentioned
| that he doesn't consider lithium a problem at all
| precicely because it is so abundant in the US.
|
| So yes, to me it seems as well that there is no scarcity
| to fear. There might be a temporary shortage, but it can
| be solved rather quickly with money.
| exabrial wrote:
| This is sort of disheartening... Maine _would_ allow the mining
| if it were properly handled, but because it 's cheaper to do in
| third world countries, companies will do it there. Electric has a
| very dirty side :/
| smarx007 wrote:
| The key bit:
|
| "Yet lithium is a metal, and state regulations passed in 2017
| prohibit mining for metals in open pits of more than three acres,
| which would be the only way to cost-effectively extract lithium
| at Plumbago North. "I don't know of any underground and manganese
| or lithium mines in the world," said Dr. John Slack, a geologist
| who co-authored a separate upcoming paper on critical minerals in
| Maine. "Because those metals have a relatively low cost, in terms
| of their concentration per ton or per ounce, you need to excavate
| large volumes of rock cheaply in order to economically and
| profitably produce the metal you're interested in.""
|
| Basically, Maine demands that whatever mining is done, is done
| underground, like coal. But open carrier mining is cheaper. If
| all this lithium is so important, someone will find a way to mine
| it properly underground, I guess.
| JacobDotVI wrote:
| I find this more relevant:
|
| "But [the lithium] reserves also would not present the same
| type of potential environmental issues as ... other base metal
| sulfide deposits in Maine, such as Bald Mountain. That's
| because the Plumbago North deposit does not occur in, or
| contain, sulfide-rich rocks, said Slack and Simmons. Mining for
| lithium there would instead be similar to quarrying for granite
| or gravel."
|
| Are rock queries outlawed? I don't believe so. Thus, is this a
| lithium rock query or a lithium mineral mine?
| Loughla wrote:
| 3 acres, I'm assuming, is the issue. That's not really that
| big. It's actually really quite small.
|
| The only open pit mine I'm familiar with is measured in the
| literal thousands of acres. Hell, the local gravel pit that
| supplies the VERY rural area I live in is over 70 acres.
| JacobDotVI wrote:
| I think this is part of that distinction. Likely a gravel
| pit would _not_ be considered "mineral mining" and so would
| be permitted at a size greater than 3 acres.
| tantalor wrote:
| If all this lithium is so important, someone will find a way to
| change the law.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| See fracking. Unfortunately, it was so profitable they
| irreversably poisoned the ground water to do it.
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| It's only important at the right price.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > "The call to restrict open pit mining -- that's the open sore
| in the face of the Earth argument," said Dr. Martin Yates,
| laboratory manager and instructor at the School of Earth and
| Climate Sciences at the University of Maine. "Once you've opened
| a hole like that, it's not really going to grow back."
|
| Maine is full of holes in the ground where granite was extracted.
| I can totally understand why some of the population wants to
| strictly regulate mining.
|
| I went camping in Maine a few years ago, and the campground had
| visible artifacts from mining. The people running the campground
| told us that "everyone" goes swimming in deep flooded granite
| pits.
|
| The campground itself had a flooded granite pit near the
| bathroom. It had a paddle boat that I used, but swimming was
| prohibited because of "insurance" and supposed abandoned mining
| equipment in the bottom of the pit. There was also an abandoned
| pump visible at the top of the pit.
|
| When we walked around, there was surface granite clearly stripped
| away as well.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| > I can totally understand why some of the population wants to
| strictly regulate mining.
|
| Regulating resource extraction out of existence is popular in
| southeast Maine where the economy runs off of tourism and
| retirement savings from people in Massachusetts for a variety
| of reasons that biol down to ideology and no skin in the game.
| theshadowknows wrote:
| Is it me being jaded or is a billion or two dollars not really
| that much money anymore? I mean sure, if someone were to give me
| a billion dollars I'd be excited (pending dealing with taxes
| etc). But I mean..theres what a couple thousand people with
| personal fortunes that could buy the entire deposit several times
| over, and even more companies that could do it...maybe it'd be a
| great windfall to the local economy? But if Maine is anything
| like North Carolina then the majority of the money will get
| earmarked for future infrastructure projects and then get slowly
| siphoned off by the politicians over a few years so it won't
| really matter.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Billion dollar is lot even for a value of a company.
|
| On other hand with deposits it's nothing. Reasonably
| considering the needed investment for exploitation from
| equipment, planning, permissions, workers etc. I really feel
| that currently it is nowhere near enough to justify
| exploitation. Big mines are not cheap to build or operate. I
| doubt 1,5B of material is enough to justify initial investment.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| You're not jaded, the scale seems small in comparison to things
| like the Ring of Fire in northern Ontario or even just Sudbury
| on its own, where the value of mineral deposits are pitched in
| the 100s of billions.
| someguydave wrote:
| nothing really matters
| [deleted]
| csours wrote:
| Not just you. That was my first thought too. Reminds me of the
| x-googler's post about "can't count that low"
| ehnto wrote:
| We're exposed to billionaires and things priced in the billions
| all the time through news and media, but we forget that it's
| still an exceptional amount of money for a very, very limited
| few. Like how Instagram shows you all the exceptionally lucky
| people on holidays and with expensive cars and incredible
| beauty, so you get to feel like it's ubiquitous and you're just
| missing out. But the truth is that almost everyone just goes to
| work everyday, looking normal, driving normal cars, even the
| influencers.
| mywittyname wrote:
| A billion dollars is a lot of money.
|
| A billion dollars worth of minerals is not a lot of minerals.
| It would be worth extracting if it were something readily
| shipped and processed like gold or crude. But from what I
| understand of lithium processing, just the equipment along
| might ring up in the hundreds of millions, and you still have
| to pay to get it extracted, processed, etc.
| loufe wrote:
| A couple comments already mentioned it but $1.5B is not a huge
| number for the mining industry. Many mines in the US/Can bring in
| that amount in revenue on a yearly basis.
| xor99 wrote:
| Lithium batteries seem to blow up a lot or a lot more than they
| should. People say that this doesn't matter for the best made
| batteries, which is fair in those cases, but judging safety
| relative to an ideal is not wise.
|
| Its also absolutely terrible for the local environment to mine
| it. That should be well known by now (e.g. effects in Bolivia /
| Chile).
|
| I'm more interested to see where Catl and Faradion or others go
| with sodium ion technology. Zinc and potassium are also good
| candidates too. For now, the lithium show continues though
| unfortunately.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Compared to ICE cars, EV car fires are not that common. There
| are a couple of hundred people that die in ICE vehicle related
| fires and around 170000 cars that catch fire every year in the
| US. Check here for a breakdown of ways that can happen:
| https://www.consumernotice.org/personal-injury/vehicle-safet...
|
| Here's a beautiful quote for you: "There are more than 19
| vehicle fires every hour in the United States. They account for
| 1 in every 8 calls that fire departments respond to."
|
| That puts the handful of burning EVs that catch the news once
| in a while a bit in perspective. It does happen but not that
| often. Even if you consider there are about 20x more ICE
| vehicles sold in the US, it's still quite a lot in comparison.
|
| Anyway, lithium battery fires are comparatively slow so mostly
| people just get out of the vehicle. Basically, you stop the
| car, get out and call the firemen. Petrol tanks going boom is
| less common than Hollywood movies make it seem but still, they
| occasionally do blow up with people still inside the car. Not a
| good place to be when a few gallons of fuel is combusting.
| Hence a couple hundred casualties every year.
| xor99 wrote:
| Point taken on EVs! My only experience is using them for
| robot builds and it may be the quality of the battery thats
| at issue.
|
| In comparison to fossil fuels lithium is obviously way better
| but I think long term I would prefer to use sodium based
| batteries due to their abundance, ease of manufacture, and
| potential lower extraction-related pollution. Explosion
| related concerns are not the best counter argument.
| xor99 wrote:
| Think about how much easier it would be to extract sodium. If
| half the effort went into making those batteries better the
| lithium scramble could have a chance of ending. Zinc bromine is
| another good option which would be relatively ok in terms of
| availability.
| bluecalm wrote:
| I am clueless about it but isn't $1.5B deposit a really small one
| in grand scheme of things (that is how much is going to be needed
| in coming years)?
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