[HN Gopher] Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest dep...
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Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found
Author : jseliger
Score : 631 points
Date : 2023-09-09 22:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chemistryworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chemistryworld.com)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Why do elements group together into a deposit instead of being
| evenly mixed like soup?
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| I assume that liquids at different densities form different
| layers. And maybe surface tension helps?
| pfdietz wrote:
| I would not be too surprised if there were more deposits in the
| US southwest. While the specific sequence of events for this one
| may be unique, there was tremendous volcanic activity there
| during the "Mid-Tertiary Ignimbrite Flareup". This event, from
| about 25-40 million years ago, produced enough pyroclastic
| deposits that (if evenly spread) would bury the entire
| continental US 55 meters deep. I believe the largest known
| supervolcanic eruption ever was part of this period.
| Roark66 wrote:
| How these two sentences are in any way compatible with eachother:
|
| >company will (..) separate out the small lithium-bearing grains
| from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be
| leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.
|
| And:
|
| >'If they can extract the lithium in a very low energy intensive
| way, or in a process that does not consume much acid, then this
| can be economically very significant,'
|
| Centrifuging doesn't seem to be a very low energy process
| compared with what they do in Bolivia (just let the water
| evaporate in huge shallow lakes then gather the material with
| dozers). And the acid thing is just contradictory. They plan to
| leach with sulphuric acid and hope to find a way to not use acid
| at the same time?
|
| It is very good more lithium deposits are found outside China,
| but isn't lithium one of most abundant things on earth? And isn't
| the key difficulty in economic extraction the fact established
| mines use practices that would not be allowed in places like
| US/Europe?
|
| Surely, we should start with funding r&d to come up with an
| economic and less polluting process of extraction.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Will this mean peace in Africa?
| aa_is_op wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and
| flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's
| not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| aa_is_op wrote:
| Mister HN moderator.... maybe you should read more about
| China's extensive efforts to control the rare earth mining
| market using anti-mining campaigns in countries such as the
| US and Australia.
|
| Examples:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/pro-china-propaganda-
| campaig...
|
| https://qz.com/1962580/china-is-insecure-about-its-global-
| ra...
|
| https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/06/20/can-australia-
| brea...
|
| It's not my fault autocratic regimes are flooding the
| internet with propaganda. The comment isn't "flamebait" at
| all. It's a representation of China's frustration that rare
| earth minerals exist anywhere outside its borders.
| dang wrote:
| Sorry, but it was an unsubstantive one-liner on a divisive
| topic, and those are flamebait.
| panick21_ wrote:
| As with all the 5000 news articles talking about lithium
| discovers, please remember, lithium is very common, discovering
| it is easy, there is plenty around and plenty of known location.
|
| However lithium operates more like a advanced chemical then a
| base metal. Each mine lithium mine is different and has to be
| separately qualified for each battery manufactures/car company.
|
| There are very, very few companies who have actually managed to
| produce battery grade lithium and many, many company who have
| been struggling for years to achieve it.
|
| We simply don't have a lithium problem, what is lacking is the
| expertise to actually bring deposits like this to use.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It's not so much an expertise problem but more a problem of
| having to tailor the process to the supply of lithium. We're
| talking typically low quantities of lithium mixed with a lot of
| other materials in either some kind of clay, brine, or rock. Or
| recycled lithium batteries. Those sources of lithium require
| different approaches and there are multiple companies working
| on all of those.
|
| Historically, lithium was not interesting to mine at scale
| until the invention of lithium batteries thirty years ago. And
| only about ten years ago we figured out that we needed a lot of
| lithium to power things like cars, trucks, planes and
| electricity grids.
|
| We've only been looking for lithium for a relatively short
| amount of time. Before we started looking, it was a relatively
| low value by product of mining other stuff. There's this
| perception that we have to go to places like Bolivia,
| Australia, etc. because that's where the known, easy to access
| deposits are. But as this article shows, there are probably
| loads of other places that might have rich lithium deposits.
|
| The market for refining lithium is basically expanding at the
| pace we can build refineries. It's apparently a big reason
| Tesla chose to build their own refinery in Texas because the
| rest of the industry was not moving quick enough. Supplying
| lithium to the refinery isn't the issue. There's plenty of it.
| And if you start looking, you'll find some more. Rich deposits
| like this are of course nice and rare. The high concentration
| of lithium means extracting it is relatively cheap. But you can
| get it out of ocean water, there are natural brines in various
| places that have it, clay and rock deposits all over the place.
| By mass, it's one of the more common elements on this planet.
| usrusr wrote:
| Sounds like every discovery is bad news for the environment
| because it raises the threshold for recycling even higher?
| dv_dt wrote:
| I don't see why, recycling is refinement at a high density
| in a form that is near perfect for battery use. It's
| probably more in wait of a high enough volume of input
| materials.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| So then if prices of battery-grade lithium go up enough then
| it'll incentivize new production techniques?
| judge2020 wrote:
| They already are. With increased production, the price per
| unit staying stable means you either have an extremely mature
| industry, or the existing players don't have any competition
| and can maintain insane YoY increases off of volume alone.
| panick21_ wrote:
| There are various different compound of lithium at different
| qualities that count as 'battery grade'. That is what makes
| the market so complex.
|
| But generally speaking yes, there are 100s of junior lithium
| miners and all the big miners as well engaged in lithium
| extraction.
|
| Clay is as of yet untouched in mass production of lithium
| with many companies wanting to exploit it.
|
| Maybe most common is research on DLE, lithium extraction from
| brine where the brine is simply pumped back. This also exists
| in a deep brine variant where you pump water from super deep
| reservoirs.
|
| The problem is the ev market is going gang busters and even
| established companies spend decades on getting new plants up
| and running.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Does the UK have lots of lithium in their borders? France?
| Germany?
|
| Im sympathetic to the point that its fairly common but cant we
| overstate it's abundance? As far as I know its not very evenly
| distributed and not everyone has good access to it.
| __s wrote:
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-lithium-
| resource-...
|
| Europe may've gotten the short end of the stick, but there's
| plenty
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That shows none in the vast majority of European countries.
| Im sure there is more than that diagram shows but its not
| what the diagram shows.
| panick21_ wrote:
| There are more locations in Europe then that. Britain used
| to get Lithium from Cornwall and there are companies trying
| to revive that. But Europe simply hasn't put much effort
| into finding them.
|
| If need be plenty more could found in Europe.
| bbarnett wrote:
| When I read that something is being shipped to China for
| processing, it makes me mentally add "Where there are no
| environmental laws, and processing in a very polluting
| way is OK".
|
| If you process many things in the West, you can't leave
| toxic chemicals in pools any more, to leak into ground
| water and cause cancer and other problems for people. So
| processing costs are going to be way more expensive than
| in a place where it's still OK to process+pollute and
| therefore kill and maim your citizens to make money.
|
| The West cannot compete with that.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I think people are to quick to just talk away any success
| China has as 'don't care for the environment' and 'don't
| care for people'. This might be sometimes true bit also
| more often isn't.
|
| Do you have actual evidence that lithium refining is a
| massively dirty industrial process that would cost
| multiple times more the West? Or are you speculating?
|
| Tesla is building a lithium refining plant in Texas right
| now, they didn't seem to have massive environmental
| problems and delays so far.
|
| In reality, the lead china has in these fields is more
| because of state investment policy and their drive to
| have an export car market. They saw the EV revolution as
| being able to make that happen, and it did.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| That's the thing with people promoting communism, they
| always see themselves assigned to do something similar to
| what they do now. No one ever expects to be the person
| sent to the lithium smelting plant.
| [deleted]
| redeeman wrote:
| its also funny how the most committed communists are
| those who wants others to fund it. Their exact level of
| "take home money" to spend on what they want, is the
| EXACT amount that "should be allowed". Similar to how
| bernie sanders were giving his "millionaires and
| billionaires" spiel, when he then became a millionaire
| himself, the tune changed, and his speeches became
| "billionaires!". And suddenly "you too can become a
| millionaire if you write a book"
| rgmerk wrote:
| I know it wasn't exactly your point, but the UK imports 46%
| of its food.[1] If one was going to be paranoid about import
| dependence, I think that ranks a tad higher up the list.
|
| Not every country is going to be self-sufficient in every
| natural resource, or be efficient producers of every product
| or service.
|
| [1] https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/united-
| kingd...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > If one was going to be paranoid
|
| Whether or not its paranoia is the issue so you can't
| presuppose it. Also, there is no reason you cant be
| concerned about multiple dependencies at the same time. In
| this case the topic is lithium.
| simondotau wrote:
| I'm sure the UK is reliant on imports in order to enjoy a
| full breadth of non-essential discretionary choices, and to
| sustain current levels of food waste. I think it could be
| misleading to describe that as "import dependent". If the
| UK lost all access to international trade, people would
| have to change their diets. Diets would contain more meat,
| fish, cheese, root vegetables and wheat. They'd contain
| less rice, processed food, sugar, and a narrower selection
| of fruits.
|
| I've no doubt that a sudden cataclysmic change to
| international trade would spike food prices and increase
| poverty-derived food insecurity. But I doubt there would be
| physical calorie shortages.
| eru wrote:
| > I've no doubt that a sudden cataclysmic change to
| international trade would spike food prices and increase
| poverty-derived food insecurity. But I doubt there would
| be physical calorie shortages.
|
| If there was a sudden change, there might be calorie
| shortages. However, I agree that if importing become more
| expensive over the longer run, or even if there was a
| quick change, but one that could be predicted years in
| advance, there would be no calorie shortages.
|
| However, the same is true for lithium: the UK could mine
| its own lithium, if importing become infeasible. I am not
| sure though, if it would make commercial sense even then:
| you can make batteries (and other gadgets) without
| lithium, and for many applications you can make do
| without batteries at all.
|
| Eg instead of solely driving electric cars with home-
| grown lithium batteries, on the margin I would expect
| more people to take the train.
| Symbiote wrote:
| There was already a preview of this a year or two ago,
| when there was a shortage of salad vegetables in the UK
| (Brexit + Covid + weather, I think). The government
| minister recommended eating turnips instead, as they were
| in surplus.
| foota wrote:
| This is really interesting, could you explain a little more? Is
| it that each of these mines is a different lithium compound,
| and there's no economical process to convert it to some base
| form?
| panick21_ wrote:
| Just to be clear, I'm not a chemists. This is just what I
| have learned from following this industry. Any real domain
| expert feel free to correct or expand.
|
| Lithium comes in many forms, on a high level there are 3,
| hard rock, clay and brine.
|
| Hard rock was initially common, when lithium was new and was
| mined in North Carolina. It turn out it was cheaper to
| produce lithium from brines in South America. This basically
| means pumping salty water from below the earth and using the
| sun to evaproate the water [2].
|
| However since the battery revolution, Australia has been a
| leading miner of Spodumene [1]. This then shipped to China
| and turned into lithium chemicals.
|
| Clay has not yet been exploited, but many are tying (like
| Tesla showed in their presentation). Another technology much
| talked about is Direct Lithium Extraction, that simple
| extracts lithium and releases slightly less salty water back
| into the environment.
|
| From these mining operations two different chemicals are
| produced as input for battery cathode refining processes,
| lithium carbonate [3] and lithium hydroxide [4]. Different
| methods of mining and refining produce either of those. If my
| understanding is correct, most brine operations end up being
| carbonate and most hard rock operations end up as hydroxide.
| Often hydroxide is also produced from carbonate as a follow
| up process.
|
| Depending on your cathode material and your process you need
| carbonate or hydroxide of specific quality. And because the
| material performance here is so important and the battery as
| a system is so sensitive, even the slight changes in source
| material and the process can have large impacts. Even the
| slight changes in source material and the process can have
| big effects.
|
| So that means if you have a mine, you can't just mine do
| minimal refinement and then throw it on to the international
| standardized metals market the way it works for other
| materials. You need to build a highly sophisticated chemical
| processing facility that can handle your material
| specifically and produce high quality materials in a
| sufficient quantity that car makers can go threw the many
| rounds of testing that are required before a new source
| material ever makes it into a car.
|
| Since the lithium industry is comparatively so small the
| necessary expertise to do these things is not at all common.
| A few companies can do it and that's not very many people. So
| getting a team together that can pull of a major project like
| that isn't easy.
|
| Some media sources that do lot of good reporting:
|
| Global Lithium Podcast -
| https://www.globallithium.net/podcast - Opinion-ed Insider
| and Interviews
|
| The Limiting Factor -
| https://www.youtube.com/@thelimitingfactor/videos - Well
| researched videos on batteries but also lithium supply
| chains. Also some interviews with experts.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodumene
|
| [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Lithi
| um_...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_carbonate
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide
| senectus1 wrote:
| very interesting, thank you.
| natmaka wrote:
| Indeed! According to Hannah Ritchie:
|
| - The world has enough lithium for our electric vehicles,
| decades into the future.
|
| - The world is currently not producing enough of it to keep
| up with demand. This could be a major bottleneck this
| decade.
|
| https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-
| electric-v...
| eru wrote:
| > - The world has enough lithium for our electric
| vehicles, decades into the future.
|
| We are sitting on a huge pile of matter, the earth. We
| have enough of every mineral to last us more than just
| 'decades'. (Remember the 'peak phosphorus' panic a few
| years ago?)
|
| Your second point is the more interesting question: what
| are the costs of extraction? Is available supply keeping
| up?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Great research thanks
| xeromal wrote:
| Appreciate this comment. This is why I love hackernews.
| mjan22640 wrote:
| Why is buying whatever composition crudely refined at the
| various mines and turning that into a precisely controlled
| product for sale for use in batteries not viable?
| taneq wrote:
| I'd assume from the above that you'd pretty much need a
| different processing plant for each site that you're
| buying from.
| starkparker wrote:
| > So that means if you have a mine, you can't just mine do
| minimal refinement and then throw it on to the
| international standardized metals market the way it works
| for other materials. You need to build a highly
| sophisticated chemical processing facility that can handle
| your material specifically and produce high quality
| materials in a sufficient quantity that car makers can go
| threw the many rounds of testing that are required before a
| new source material ever makes it into a car.
|
| Grain of salt, but Jindalee claims 97-98% extraction rate
| on acid leeching cores at the McDermitt site on the
| northern caldera, on an inferred 21.5 million tons of
| lithium carbonate equivalent. They're expecting 1400 ppm on
| 3 Bt. Cores from Lithium Americas's inferred 19 Mt LCE find
| at Thacker Pass on the southern caldera is extracting at
| 84% on acid leeching. (For context, Clayton Valley's brine
| project converts at 85%.)
|
| Jindalee also claims they can also extract lithium
| phosphate from it and convert it to either carbonate or
| hydroxide. That's cool, but they don't really go into the
| cost of doing that, but I think the point is that it's
| supposedly a very flexible lode.
|
| > Since the lithium industry is comparatively so small the
| necessary expertise to do these things is not at all
| common. A few companies can do it and that's not very many
| people. So getting a team together that can pull of a major
| project like that isn't easy.
|
| GM and POSCO (the Korean cathode active material supplier
| for GM) are already working with Jindalee on feasibility of
| exploiting clay at scale, and GM already bought $650M of
| equity in Lithium Americas back in January for Thacker
| Pass. Probably know by February/March 2024 what the damage
| will be for processing clay, but Jindalee already expects
| to know whether they'll be shovels-in-ground by June 2024.
|
| That is a very fast turnaround for something that hasn't
| really been done before at any scale, much less 30 Mt of
| LCE-scale. Which I think is also why this article is a bit
| more focused on whether they can learn enough from _how_
| this find came about to make more finds like it. They might
| not know how to extract clay for a while, but if they can
| learn how to _find_ more similarly exploitable clay first,
| they can get more investment to catch up.
|
| Inferring >30 Mt of LCE at 1400 ppm from just two sites in
| one caldera still seems like _plenty_ of reason to fund
| figuring that out ASAP, though. Clayton Valley is like 6 Mt
| LCE; at this stage of the process, they were suggesting 1.3
| Mt LCE at 900 ppm, on a feasibility target of 400 ppm. That
| was good enough for $700M in funding.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Yes, Thacker Pass has been a known resource for a while
| and Lithium America is one of the most promising lithium
| mines in the US. I have even invested a small amount in
| them years ago.
|
| My point is just that the additional found reserves don't
| change the situation all that much. Granted if they can
| find more location along this crater that has the same
| characteristics it could be simpler to replicate the mine
| and processing.
| defrost wrote:
| In reseource development flow Jindalee's project is
| currently midway beteen _Final Technical Report_ (where
| mining engineers produce a resource estimate of shapes,
| volumes, and densities) and _Economic Feasibility Report_
| (where production engineers sketch out one or several
| methods to get material out cheaper than the market value
| of the material)
|
| See: _Preferred Lithium Extraction Process for McDermitt
| Project_ (24th March 2023)
|
| https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20230324/pdf/45mz
| rdq...
|
| It's part of the listing standards on mineral exchanges
| (such as the Canadian TSX, the Australian ASX, etc) that
| various levels of reports at various levels of accuracy
| be filed by independant third party mineral engineers.
|
| The fascicle published above is a brief four pager
| outlining to investors where on track they are for now -
| expect within 12 months or so a meaty 400+ technical
| report rehasing the work that has gone into estimation
| and additional work outling scaled up extraction plans ..
| closely followed by an IPO | Prospectus to raise money
| for capital plant equipment for the project and potential
| spawning of a new sub company and listing.
| jddj wrote:
| Nothing really beats good spodumene yet, and even that's
| pretty hard to get right at the mining stage, let alone at
| the refinement.
|
| Traditional brines are fine but need scale and time and still
| a surprising amount of process tuning.
|
| Clays, lepidolite and alternative brine methods (DLE.
| Extractive beads, etc) are efficient media for extracting
| money from the public markets but that's about all.
| tbruckner wrote:
| If that is the only efficient method for lithium
| extraction, is it fair to say that accessible lithium is
| not as abundant as people typically say?
| roenxi wrote:
| Also it is likely that, because of environmental regulations,
| it is not possible to mine the lithium economically. I haven't
| kept up, but the lack of lithium production in the US suggests
| that there are regulatory factors at play.
|
| Although apparently Australia is a big lithium producer so it
| must be possible to do in an environmentally conscious way. Or
| Australia's lithium mines have managed to fly under the radar
| of the environmentalists. It looks like Australia's lithium
| deposits are unusual being hard rock deposits, and we have it
| processed in China because I assume that part of the process is
| illegal in Australia.
| sherry-sherry wrote:
| > it must be possible to do in an environmentally conscious
| way. Or Australia's lithium mines have managed to fly under
| the radar of the environmentalists
|
| Sadly, both don't seem to be true. Australia's lithium mining
| has a higher carbon footprint than others (3.4): https://www.
| sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...
|
| We has some of the highest CO2 emissions per capita, so it's
| not much of a surprise we are doing this inefficiently too.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| > Also it is likely that, because of environmental
| regulations, it is not possible to mine the lithium
| economically. I haven't kept up, but the lack of lithium
| production in the US suggests that there are regulatory
| factors at play.
|
| That's a large assumption to make without any investigation.
| roenxi wrote:
| It would be. But I've made a lot of investigations.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| {citation needed}
| roenxi wrote:
| I've done modelling work for mine planning projects when
| people were deciding where to put a mine. Quite a lot of
| it.
|
| Lithium has been a trendy commodity for years. If the US
| doesn't have a lot of active lithium mines - which it
| does not - it is going to be because of legislative
| impediments. Probably environmental ones. There aren't a
| lot of other reasons. It is common for environmental
| restrictions as the root cause of mines not being
| started, particularly in lithium from what I gathered.
|
| You're not going to get a citation, this is literally
| just stuff I happened to know quite well a few years ago.
| peytoncasper wrote:
| How is this different from oil?
|
| The vast majority of new deposits are leveraging different
| technology to enrich yields or extract it from challenging
| environments. Seems like a common problem for resource
| extraction that gets solved with time and investment.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Its not that different from oil. Oil has the same different
| from different sources requiring different refining. But oil
| is an industry is about 100-1000x bigger. Lithium until just
| a few years ago was a absolutely tiny industry.
|
| So in oil its very worth it to build the right refining
| capacity for large resources and there are tons and tons of
| experienced people to do those things.
| Turskarama wrote:
| One of the biggest differences is that oil is all _primarily_
| the same stuff and the difficulty is pulling out impurities.
| This means it can be quite cost effective to ship it where it
| needs to go to be processed. Crude oil is considered sour for
| example if it contains 1-2% sulfur. Ores on the other hand
| are usually mostly not the actual mineral you're looking for,
| and you're lucky if you're hitting double digit percentage
| concentrations, Lithium being "high concentration" if you're
| reaching 6%. This means that you ideally need to be doing
| most of (and usually all) of the processing at or very near
| the mine. One of the only minerals we regularly ship raw ore
| of is iron, since it tends to be in relatively high
| concentrations. Some Lithium mines might ship some ore but
| this is usually only done as an initial source of revenue
| while the processing is being built.
|
| The end result of this is that it's harder to take advantage
| of economies of scale where you can have a handful of
| processing facilities working on a very specific type of ore.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| So all of that Australian lithium being shipped off to
| China, is it being mostly processed in Australia first, or
| is most of the processing done in China, or something half
| half?
|
| The main reason America develops great oil tech and not
| lithium tech vs China is that the USA has lots of oil,
| while China doesn't.
| Turskarama wrote:
| A lot of it is sent as partially processed ore, but two
| major reasons for that are: 1) a lot of these mines are
| very new and 2) Australia in particular is _very bad_ at
| secondary industries. We have a long history of just
| sending our minerals and raw food ingredients overseas to
| be processed and are lacking in expertise.
|
| Here is a recent article about this:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/business/australia-
| lithiu...
| benreesman wrote:
| At some price it'll get figured out.
|
| I'm a bit on the fence about whether Zeihan is a crank or a
| prophet (and there doesn't seem to be much middle ground), but
| serious people pay green money to have him speak. If he's
| right, the difference between "expensive lithium even
| amortized" and "unreliable lithium at best even if someone has
| a gun to your head" is existential.
| stevenally wrote:
| Those who can't get lithium will just use oil. Which will be
| cheap if electrification happens.
| rini17 wrote:
| Oil is cheap due to economies of scale. There's
| unimaginably vast suply chain. When that starts to unravel,
| it might get cheaper but only temporarily.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Next time in the news: _" Huge silicon dioxide discovery in the
| desert could end semiconductor shortage soon."_
| isykt wrote:
| If the expertise is to be developed, is it better for the US to
| develop it on their own deposits, or on the deposits of a
| competing nation?
| panick21_ wrote:
| It depends on when you need those things. A new discovery
| will take 10 year minimum before it can be ready, more likely
| 20. So discoveries like this aren't gone do anything.
|
| There are some domestic companies further along in the
| process. But existing sources like South American brine and
| Australian hard rock will continue to be a huge part of the
| market.
|
| The US companies that originally mined in North Carolina are
| still around on the processing side.
|
| So its not really clear if having the mining domestically
| makes much of a difference. China is refining mostly things
| from Australia.
|
| Tesla is setting up a huge lithium refining factory on US
| soil but most of the material won't be mined in the US.
| isykt wrote:
| Is the market for lithium going to collapse in 10 years?
| I'm confused why something taking 10 years is a problem.
| oneTbrain23 wrote:
| USA lacks workers in those fields. So the problem is really
| "how to discover new twchnical expertise labor" to extract
| those lithium. It is same thing with solar and now silicon
| chips in USA.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Not really, we actually train many of the world's mining and
| petroleum experts. Many of the people around the world that
| do this stuff were trained at the various "A&M" or "...School
| of Mines".
|
| The issue is that much of the work ends up being overseas or
| all over the world. If you go to any mine site in the world,
| I guarantee you will find American trained
| Mining/Geophysics/etc engineers
|
| Source - I went to the Colorado School of Mines and most of
| my friends and acquaintances from school work in those 2
| industries.
| defrost wrote:
| Sure .. alongside Scots, Russians, South Africans,
| Australians, Norwegians, and all the _other_ non US mining
| engineers.
|
| The Canadian TSX is the global centre for listed public
| mining, Anglo-Australian mining companies dominate there.
|
| No one is going to deny the Colorado School of mines their
| little corner of the pie but they haven't hit "much of" in
| a clear majority sense by a long shot.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Agreed. I was never trying to say it's the whole pie. I'm
| replying to a parent comment that implies the US has a
| big deficit in this kind of skill and training, which
| isn't accurate.
| photonbeam wrote:
| Isn't the problem always that wages for skill is too low, so
| too few people know it
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| No, this isn't always the problem.
|
| People are not fungible resources. You can't simply turn a
| programmer from Google into a Lithium miner by paying more.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The expertise China has built up is only around 20 years
| old, so it's not like we couldn't develop it in 20 years.
| Doing so in a free market way that isn't undercut by
| Chinese suppliers, however, would be tricky (so some non
| free market mechanism is needed).
| chii wrote:
| > so it's not like we couldn't develop it in 20 years.
|
| 20 yrs is a very long time.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It's not really that long, but I guess it depends on how
| old you are (perception of passing time speeds up rapidly
| after 40).
| tw04 wrote:
| ^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital to
| our country's future. All the folks losing their minds are
| being short-sighted. While I agree in principle that the
| organizations should be paying their employees more, there's
| also the reality that China HEAVILY subsidizes their
| renewables AND has a lower base pay rate. Only one way to
| compete with that.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Lithium isn't 'renewable'.
|
| And just 'subsidizing' things isn't a replacement for
| actually playing your energy grid and energy production.
| gibolt wrote:
| Oil is 100% non-renewable. A single, relatively efficient
| ICE vehicle will use over 45,000 lbs of gasoline over its
| lifetime (excluding all the oil to extract, refine, and
| transport that gasoline).
|
| The entire oil supply chain has no chance of ever
| becoming sustainable.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| So is lithium
|
| Since I'm being down voted, I'm adding a reference:
|
| 5% of lithium batteries are currently recycled
| https://www.cas.org/resources/cas-
| insights/sustainability/li....
|
| So, not renewable
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| I can't tell if you actually believe your logic is sound
| or you're just trolling.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| A bit of both. I'm trying to say that it's not so cut and
| dry. Making lithium batteries and thr mining of lithium
| is a messy business. It's not a panacea. We need to be
| honest and realistic about the costs of doing that
| business, and often we arent.
|
| 75% of all aluminum every smelted is still in use today:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:te
| xt=....
|
| We need to get lithium to that level before we make any
| more big, environmentally hazardous mines.
| zaroth wrote:
| A chokehold on new mining of a crucial ore for renewables
| sounds like a terrible overall idea.
|
| The lifecycle of the lithium that will come from this
| hypothetical mine is probably 20 _years_ from now until
| the _first_ time the material will be recycled.
|
| The highly profitable recycling logistics will have been
| fully worked out a decade before it's needed for a new
| mine's output.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| This is reducto ad absurdum. I'm not proposing that.
|
| I'm proposing we put equal effort into both. My
| expectation is that we don't currently.
|
| 75% of all aluminum ever made is still in use. We should
| be able to do that with lithium too.
| zaroth wrote:
| I was responding to when you said "before we make any
| more big, environmentally hazardous mines".
|
| The recycling effort is highly profitable, there's little
| need to subsidize it. It will simply grow and consume all
| available supply.
|
| Large scale lithium battery storage is still truly just
| getting started. We need to be super smart with lining up
| supply for essential inputs for growth.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Then why hasn't it been keeping up? It seems that lithium
| recycling is way behind exploration and mining. Why? It's
| highly profitable as you say, are there technology
| limitations?
| gibolt wrote:
| While the 5% number may be presently accurate, it is
| mainly for tiny Lithium batteries. Those from vehicles
| are of very large + high value, and will likely end up
| well above 95% recycling rate whenever it is time for
| them to be scrapped.
|
| This also ignores the large number of those batteries
| that will be re-used in grid storage after being removed
| from a car, and eventually recycled.
| scythe wrote:
| >Since I'm being down voted, I'm adding a reference:
|
| >5% of lithium batteries are currently recycled
|
| Whether something is currently recycled and whether it
| can be recycled are two different questions. For a long
| time, copper wasn't recycled very often. Then the price
| went up, and now it's very valuable trash.
|
| Lithium is absolutely renewable. It may not be renewed,
| but it is renewable.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Let's put more effort into getting that 5% up to 100%,
| that's where the real effort and headlines should focus.
|
| 75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:te
| xt=....
|
| We need to get lithium to that level
| gibolt wrote:
| As the value goes up, companies that sort trash and
| recycling will be incentivized to separate the
| electronics, and claim the value as an extra revenue
| stream.
| hollerith wrote:
| Not true: we might learn to pull carbon from the
| atmosphere and turn it into gasoline so that instead of
| using solar and wind energy to charge electric cars, we
| use to make gasoline for ICE cars.
| danans wrote:
| Making gasoline for cars from renewable energy isn't
| going to happen. The end to end efficiency of that
| process (Hydrolysis, CO2 capture, Fischer Tropf) would
| likely measure in the single digit percentages. Charging
| a car battery (especially from local solar) can be over
| 90% efficient.
|
| When you include the very low tank to wheels efficiency
| of an ICE vehicle, the overall efficiency is even worse.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm having trouble seeing how it'd be feasible to do all
| that while expending less energy than you can get out of
| the resulting gasoline.
|
| But we demonstrably get more energy out of the useful
| life of a solar panel than we have to put in to
| manufacture it.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > I'm having trouble seeing how it'd be feasible to do
| all that while expending less energy than you can get out
| of the resulting gasoline.
|
| Use biological solar panels AKA plants.
| eru wrote:
| Producing synthetic fuels for internal combustion engines
| doesn't really makes sense for cars: electric cars are
| good enough.
|
| But it might be necessary for 'green' planes, if the
| energy density of electric batteries does not improve
| enough.
| gibolt wrote:
| Electric cars are _better_. Less moving parts
| /maintenance, quicker, 3x as efficient, can be charged
| nearly anywhere with existing infrastructure and no
| ongoing supply chain requirement (fuel delivery).
|
| Energy density is steadily increasing. Hydrogen will be a
| short-term solution for medium/long haul flights, but
| will eventually be replaced by batteries.
| [deleted]
| smsm42 wrote:
| This technology already exists.
|
| Step 1: grow trees (or any other plants, in fact)
|
| Step 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator
|
| Not the most clean or efficient technology, to be sure,
| but has been around for almost 100 years now (the second
| part, the first part a bit longer).
| hollerith wrote:
| Yeah, I meant figuring out how to do it so efficiently
| that it becomes preferable to batteries for powering
| cars. We talk like it is certain that battery-powered
| cars will win out, but I haven't seen a proof that that
| is how it must turns out if we learn to create
| nanomachines that use solar energy to suck carbon from
| air.
| gibolt wrote:
| Unfortunately, physics says battery-powered cars _have_
| won.
|
| Using solar to power a process to make a fuel before
| burning a fuel that at best (way less in reality) uses 2x
| more energy than just powering an electric motor directly
| is not sensical.
| hollerith wrote:
| And the battery makes the car 1.3 times the weight of a
| gas-powered car. Making the battery requires much more
| energy than making a gas tank. The charging
| infrastructure might prove more expensive than a network
| of gas stations. Long trips are punctuated by idle
| periods needed for the battery to charge, so the car's
| "utilization rate" is lower than a gas-powered car. All I
| am saying is that it is not 1.00 certain which technology
| will retain the lowest total cost of ownership as both
| technologies improve: battery tech is more likely to win,
| but not certain to win.
| scythe wrote:
| That isn't really "renewing", though. If part of the
| process involves the substance being dispersed in the
| environment and then extracted again, that's different
| from capturing waste as it's produced. Furthermore,
| you're not necessarily capturing the same carbon dioxide
| that you released, but when you recycle a battery, it's
| the same lithium. And getting the lithium from a battery
| should take less energy than mining it, while capturing
| and reducing carbon dioxide definitely requires more
| energy than pumping oil from the ground.
|
| So I don't think this analogy holds up.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Lithium isn 't 'renewable'_
|
| Neither are photons [1] nor individual gusts of wind.
| Lithium has a theoretically closeable cycle in batteries
| in a way fossil fuels do not.
|
| [1] If you want to be pedantic, the useful energy in a
| particular photon.
| gibolt wrote:
| Exactly. Batteries are being recycled at scale today with
| 98-95% material recovery rates, depending on the company.
|
| We are still early in the development cycle of recycling
| technology, which means we'll be closer to 99.x% in a
| decade when the first large wave of EV batteries (from
| the last decade) could start getting close to End of
| Life.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Batteries can be recycled at high rates of recovery, but
| most non-EV lithium batteries aren't being recycled
| (basically because they aren't sent to battery recycling
| centers given their small sizes). The anti-EV crowd then
| uses that statistic to deride EVS.
| r00fus wrote:
| But the value of nickel in say a NiMH battery makes it
| feasible to reclaim/"recycle"
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Most small batteries are sent to landfills, whether they
| have lithium or nickel. EV batteries and nickel car
| batteries are easier to recycle because there is an auto
| shop involved to collect and send the battery to a
| recycler. If you replace your NiMH 12V battery yourself
| (rather than having it done in the shop), you might be
| tempted to just throw it away in your garbage can also
| (even though you shouldn't) simply because you have no
| idea how to get it to a recycler. You are unlikely to
| change the big battery in your Tesla on your own, so that
| isn't a problem.
|
| Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem_
|
| It's also one of scale. We don't yet have enough EV
| batteries being retired to merit the recycling
| infrastructure. China is _just_ reaching the point where
| it does.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Most EV batteries that age out of car use can be
| repurposed for home/solar, so this is true. But they will
| eventually need to be recycled.
| barkingcat wrote:
| In Canada at least, when you buy a car / ev battery
| depending on the chemistry you get a coupon that you
| redeem for a significant amount of money when you take
| your old replaced battery back to the place you bought
| the new battery. The vendor will take back any
| brand/regardless of where you got the old battery from.
|
| There are people who "throw away" the coupon by not
| returning the old battery, but hey that's on them.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It is incredibly profitable to recycle an EV battery, so
| I'm not sure why the coupon is needed. The owner should
| get cash or a discount on their new battery.
| panick21_ wrote:
| My reaction was not pro-fossil fuel but rather that I
| think the use of 'renewable' as a statement of general
| positivity is idiotic.
|
| Sure there is a theoretical closable cycle in batteries,
| but guess what, the same can be said for fossil fuels.
| Just use energy to turn air and water back into fuel,
| boom cycle closed.
|
| What matters is not if something is 'renewable' but if
| its a strategically correct thing to do in regards to
| climate and energy security.
|
| Calling lithium 'renwable' is ridiculous. Its literally
| just a fixed resource on our plant like iron or copper or
| whatever.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Besides brushing off the difference in difficulty between
| refreshing our petroleum stock on the planet and
| recycling lithium, I think the point of the original use
| of "renewables" is the push toward renewable energy for
| all possible things, such as transport, and the part
| lithium currently plays in that plan.
| adrienthebo wrote:
| > Sure there is a theoretical closable cycle in
| batteries, but guess what, the same can be said for
| fossil fuels.
|
| On geological time scales involving massive deposition of
| organic material.
|
| In contrast, lithium can be recovered from batteries with
| an industrial shredder and chemical processing.
|
| Fossil fuels are non-renewable in a trivial sense but are
| grossly different in a practical sense; treating them as
| equivalent is a borderline specious argument.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Lithium isn't 'renewable'.
|
| Sure, if you want to be painfully pedantic. If you want
| to have a real conversation, lithium batteries are
| absolutely "renewable" in the sense they can be recycled,
| and some studies have shown that they actually perform
| better after being recycled.
|
| https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-
| lithium-...
| raincole wrote:
| You may say China is subsidizing their lithium industry.
| Actually, by exporting cheap lithium, they're effectively
| subsidizing all the other countries' economy, regardless of
| whether they like it or not.
| whatshisface wrote:
| When standard oil used dumping tactics it was with the
| expectation that they would be able to clean up the
| market later, and they at least, were right.
| eru wrote:
| > ^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital
| to our country's future.
|
| That seems like a silly conclusion. It might still be vital
| for your country's future to subsidise renewables, but it
| doesn't follow from the observation.
|
| If China wants to spend taxpayer money to give foreigners
| cheaper renewables (or cheaper anything), that's nice of
| them, but doesn't mean anyone should imitate them.
|
| If you have insufficient local workers for a task, and you
| are the US, you can always open the floodgates of (skilled)
| migration.
|
| Also you don't need to subsidize renewables. That's a sore
| game of trying to pick winners and introducing extra
| bureaucracy. Instead you can hit the same policy goals
| simpler by taxing fossil fuels (or carbon emissions).
| Distribute the proceeds amongst all voters, if you want it
| to be revenue neutral.
|
| With a tax, someone can react by just driving less (eg by
| moving closer to work) and benefiting from that choice.
| With a subsidy, you'd actively have to go and buy eg a
| subsidised electric car to benefit.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The world lacks workers in those fields.
| [deleted]
| dietr1ch wrote:
| I'd be surprised if the US cannot build the industry necessary
| for it, and even if that were the case, it seems that they
| could export ~raw lithium, and then buy it processed, or as
| batteries if needed meanwhile they figure things out, as the US
| doesn't really want to keep China owning critical production
| lines for the technology that's coming in the next 20+ years.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Here is the thing. Its not about what can happen in 20+
| years. Of course the US can do whatever it want's in 20 years
| with enough money. In 20 years lot of things will be very
| different.
|
| But again, there was already plenty of lithium in the US,
| this discovery changes nothing. The US already has competent
| lithium companies.
|
| The US already has good relationship with South America and
| Australia where the resources are coming from. But currently
| 90%+ of refining is in China.
|
| Controlling the 'raw' resources is mostly uninteresting in
| this case.
| bettercallsalad wrote:
| > Of course the US can do whatever it want's in 20 years
| with enough money.
|
| Are we sure US can anymore? Last I checked we couldn't
| build a high speed rail despite spending billions of
| dollars and lots of time. I would not be so optimistic.
| Even for things as crucial as defense supply chain we can't
| seem to figure out how to build things at scale.
| nickserv wrote:
| Building high speed rail is complicated because of land
| rights, the US is not China where the government can just
| order people off large swathes of land as needed.
|
| Lithium mining is more like the shale oil boom, when the
| US went from an net importer to a net exporter of fossil
| fuels, environmental damage be damned.
|
| When it's for private industry's profit, the US is quite
| competent at eliminating any oversight of environmental
| and societal concerns.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Shouldn't we be seeing wide-scale, obvious signs of
| environment destruction consider how many barrels a day
| the US produces? Maybe it is not covered well by the
| news, but do you have any sources for major environmental
| destruction?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| It's very similar to aluminum in this way. Aluminum mining
| is very different than many other minerals and metals. It's
| basically a processing thing. It's all about where you can
| get the resources to do the refining, not where the ore is.
| In the case of Aluminum its electricity. They call aluminum
| solidified electricity for a reason. That's why the biggest
| aluminum smelters in the world are where electricity is
| cheap.
|
| Same here, it's not like there is big chunks of Lithium
| just waiting to be picked up. It's a small percentage of
| dirt, and you need to process huge amounts of that dirt to
| extract it. That processing takes resources. Those
| resources are the limiting factor, not the raw ore. In the
| case of aluminum its electricity. In the case of lithium I
| gather it's also energy (to do the heating) and sulfuric
| acid, and the associated containment snd cleanup of such.
|
| Source: "After the ore is mined, it is crushed and roasted
| at 2012degF (1100degC). It is then cooled to 140degF
| (65degC), milled and roasted again, this time with sulfuric
| acid, at 482degF (250degC), a process known as acid
| leaching."
|
| https://www.sttsystems.com/industries/lithium-
| extraction/#:~....
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Interesting to hear about refining of Aluminium. It is a
| very useful metal, and if it is electricity intensive to
| define, I wonder if it would fit the use of excess
| renewable electricity. A lot of times, UK has excess wind
| power than they can pass on to any grids that they idle
| the windmills. Same with countries like Morocco that gets
| a lot of sun, but not enough transmission lines to push
| them into(for a lot of geo political reasons, building
| out transmission lines seem to be a lot complicated).
|
| If it could be as simple as "we produced this much
| aluminium from all the excess energy we had last summer!
| Go use it in residential construction, shelters, tools,
| whatever, heck even mounts for further more solar panels"
| ateng wrote:
| Even if you ignore the difficulties of start / stop the
| factories and imagine we have a new manufacturing process
| that can be restarted immediately, having idle factories
| and employees sitting around doing nothing for half a day
| would be a huge money sink
| NavinF wrote:
| No way, you can't run a factory for 1 hours a day.
| Aluminum is only "solidified electricity" under normal
| circumstances. Not when capex is 24x because the normal
| price of electricity in the UK for most of the day is ~7x
| what you'd pay in Texas (which isn't even that cheap
| globally)
| ElFitz wrote:
| I recall a big part of Iceland's economy is processing
| aluminium. Basically producing as much as, if not more
| than, the US.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/us/politics/american-
| comp...
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Not Aluminum. However iron can be reduced in a low
| temperature aqueous cell. I can't think of why that
| couldn't be done intermittently. Takes about 3-4kwh per
| kg of iron produced. That probably works out to
| $150-250/ton.
|
| You can also run electric furnaces intermittently because
| they are inherently a batch process.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You can also make iron by direct reduction with hydrogen.
| IIUC, this is actually more energy efficient (with green
| hydrogen) than direct electrolytic reduction. And
| electrolysers for hydrogen are getting cheap enough that
| running them intermittently will make sense.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Most aluminum for European countries comes from recycled
| sources. It's way less energy to just smelt old soda
| cans.
|
| About 75% of all aluminum ever produced is currently is
| use, because we're so good at recycling it.
|
| We need to get lithium from 5 to 75%
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:te
| xt=....
| safety1st wrote:
| Well if we're comparing the recycling of old soda cans to
| lithium batteries... I had to throw a few old phones away
| recently. I Googled and found a mobile phone store near
| me that accepted e-waste for free, so I went a bit out of
| my way and took the phones there. I was not, however,
| given a bit of cash for every phone I returned..!
| gorlilla wrote:
| Soda can deposits are far from universal an do not result
| in free money... they simply refund the deposit that was
| paid up.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| But they do make sure more bottles amd cans get recycled.
| In practice it creates a whole ecosystem of people
| collecting amd cashing them in. If we didn't have the
| deposit, the government would have to pay for that
| cleanup
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Batteries in Norway have a very high recycling rate and
| large batteries like car starter batteries attract a
| specific tax (miljo gebyr, environment charge) that
| assists in funding the recycling operations. Everyone who
| sells batteries has to be a member of an approved
| recycling group and be willing to accept for recycling
| batteries of the same general type even if they did not
| sell them. So you can dump your old phone batteries in a
| box at any supermarket.
| eru wrote:
| > We need to get lithium from 5 to 75%
|
| As long as you store your old batteries (and other
| lithium containing gadgets), I shouldn't make too much of
| a difference if you recycle them now or in ten years?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Where and how do we store them safely?
|
| In landfills?
|
| This brings up an aside I've been wondering about for
| years, when are we going to start mining our old
| landfills?
| KingMob wrote:
| We just need more people to accidentally toss their
| bitcoin keys in the trash!
| https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/15/uk/bitcoin-trash-
| landfill...
| youngtaff wrote:
| When I was a kid there was an aluminium smelter in
| Anglesey, North Wales that ran off the base load of the
| local nuclear power station
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| Most industries that deal in refining or other heat-
| intensive processes are nearly hard to impossible to
| pause or stop. My understanding is that glassmaking
| plants, for instance, will literally solidify if they
| ever stop operation--making it an extremely rare
| occurrence. I wouldn't be surprised if aluminum refining
| is the same way--fighting entropy keeping things hot is a
| losing battle, so not very dispatchable.
| speed_spread wrote:
| I confirm that an aluminium refinery is not something you
| stop lightly. I remember something about taking two weeks
| to restart? Maybe more. Source, had family working at a
| large northern plant.
| Filligree wrote:
| Being able to restart it at all makes it better than a
| lot of industries. Many of these liquid-metal affairs
| depend on convection and inertia to keep the metal
| molten, and if it solidifies inside a pipe--well, then
| you don't have a pipe anymore; you have a bimetal pole.
|
| Or ceramic cladding for an iron pole, depending.
|
| Either way it's a rebuild, not a restart.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Totally, like magnetic induction pumps that pump molten
| iron, once the iron solidifies its a composite tube.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| That is true about float glass plants but for a
| different, very interesting reason.
|
| Float glass plants work by literally floating a thin
| sheet of molten glass on top of a giant tank of liquid
| tin. They have a swimming pool of liquid tin, float
| molten glass on top, and then push it along the tank
| length wise.
|
| The glass and tin is then gradually cooled until the
| glass is solidified. It's then cut into pieces, cooled
| and stacked.
|
| If the thing suddenly stops, or there is a hiccup of some
| kind, the thermal expansion of the glass, along with its
| extreme hardness (lack if strength) it will just shatter
| the whole mile long sheet of glass. My understanding is
| that it takes the better part of a year to recover from
| something like this.
|
| In aluminum, its basically electroplating. They basically
| electroplate the aluminum out of the ore onto the ingots.
| My understanding is that takes a few weeks to a month to
| recover from a similar incident.
| jskrablin wrote:
| Glass melting furnace never stops after it's started. If
| it cools down it's basically destroyed so yeah, they run
| uninterrupted for years. Any maintenance or fixes need to
| account for that.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| How do they account for power outages? Huge generators?
| Or is it gas fired?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| From what I've read its gas
| pfdietz wrote:
| There are electrically heated glass furnaces. They work
| by immersing electrodes in the molten glass, which is
| electrically conductive, if somewhat resistive. I imagine
| they could use gas for startup though. The use I saw for
| this was in making fiberglass from recycled glass cullet.
| eru wrote:
| If I remember right, you can stop the electricity to an
| aluminum smelting plant. But only for a while.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Right. The wall has to continue to be cooled -- if it
| reaches the temperature of the melt, it's ruined -- so
| there's always some heat loss. And if the electrolyte
| freezes you're also in trouble.
| lostboomerang wrote:
| You're not thinking big enough.
|
| Have a read about the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akosombo_Dam
|
| Then watch this documentary on the devastating effects: h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(British_TV_
| se...
|
| As Wikipedia says about the dam:
|
| "The Ghana government was compelled, by contract, to pay
| for over 50% of the cost of Akosombo's construction, but
| the country was allowed only 20% of the power generated."
| codethief wrote:
| Having been to Ghana and to Lake Volta & the Akosombo dam
| in particular, I'm somewhat torn:
|
| - Yes, it has had a severe impact on the ecosystem, and
| also on agriculture.
|
| - Yes, Ghana itself only gets about 20% of the power
| generated by the dam (or apparently a bit more in recent
| times).
|
| - OTOH, the dam gives Ghana access to at least _some_
| power - much more in fact than what 's available to any
| of its neighboring countries. I have heard people say
| that this is one of the major reasons for Ghana's
| relative economic & political stability.
| qball wrote:
| >It is a very useful metal, and if it is electricity
| intensive to define, I wonder if it would fit the use of
| excess renewable electricity.
|
| No, absolutely not. Aluminum refining, like all
| industrial processes at scale, takes a long time to get
| going and needs to run (hence be fed electricity)
| continuously, not just whenever the wind feels like
| blowing.
|
| While it is an excellent business opportunity for
| electricity that is cheap _because_ it is renewable- and
| why Canada produces more refined aluminum than any other
| Western country thanks to its electric generation being
| overwhelmingly renewable for the entire time it 's even
| _had_ a grid- it 's not something you can turn on and off
| whenever you want and not a good candidate to burn off
| excess power ("just not using as much naturally-pumped
| stored power" is not an "excess" of power by definition).
| theptip wrote:
| If you have a predictable pricing regime can you vary the
| power load on a diurnal cycle? Say, drawing more at noon
| and less at 7pm each day? If so it could still be useful
| to shape the demand curve (ie use power when solar is
| cheapest so that meeting the evening peak doesn't require
| as much overprovisioning) even though this doesn't help
| with inter-day variability of supply.
|
| The problem I've always seen with this sort of plan is
| that the refinery is extremely expensive and so you don't
| want it idle; it's cheaper to overbuild solar than to
| turn off your refinery for 25% of the day. But interested
| if this applies here, maybe the energy-intensive bits can
| be made cheaply?
| EricE wrote:
| These kinds of refineries take *weeks* to start up. There
| is no idle. Period.
| dtech wrote:
| How large is the tolerance though? Would it be feasible
| to heat things up a little more from say 9:00 - 17:00 and
| using more electricity so that you don't need to heat (as
| much) during peak demand-supply imbalance? Even a couple
| of hours can help with the duck curve.
| scrlk wrote:
| Looks like aluminium smelter demand flexibility is
| already in use, but it doesn't rely on process
| temperature variation:
|
| https://enpot.com/
|
| https://aluminiuminsider.com/trimet-aluminium-betting-
| enpots...
| theptip wrote:
| Interesting, thanks!
|
| > The "virtual battery" concept relies on installing
| adjustable heat exchangers that can maintain the energy
| balance in each electrolysis cell irrespective of
| shifting power inputs. Since aluminium production
| requires a constant energy supply, any fluctuation could
| have heavy consequences for the molten metal. The
| technology also ensures that grid power fluctuations do
| not affect the magnetic fields in the electrolysis cells.
|
| This seems to be solving the even-harder problem of
| handling on-demand/dynamic fluctuations rather than
| planning for a diurnal cycle. I wonder if there is scope
| to use a heat reservoir (molten salt or similar) as a
| buffer for these sorts of process; basically if you need
| to dump heat into a process perhaps you can shift the
| heat production but leave the process itself unchanged.
|
| Amusingly I was reading the wrong Wikipedia last night
| and it's mentioned right there too:
|
| > Particularly in Australia these smelters are used to
| control electrical network demand, and as a result power
| is supplied to the smelter at a very low price. However
| power must not be interrupted for more than 4-5 hours,
| since the pots have to be repaired at significant cost if
| the liquid metal solidifies.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting
| [deleted]
| nomel wrote:
| Here are some pdfs:
|
| How it works: https://enpot.com/assets/pdfs/enpot-how-it-
| works.pdf
|
| Energy modulation: https://enpot.com/assets/pdfs/Enpot-
| Energy-Modulation-of-Alu...
|
| First was operational since 2019. If you push past the
| "virtual battery" marketing nonsense, a summary of the
| tech is... they modulate the cooling fans for closed loop
| thermal regulation, regardless of processing rate (+/-
| 20% long, 30% short term).
|
| Talk about low hanging fruit.
| theptip wrote:
| This is particularly interesting to me because we
| currently have some unanswered questions about how viable
| renewable energy is for ~100% of generation.
|
| As we get to higher total renewable contribution,
| presumably we'd see a more dramatic price difference in
| energy at different time of day.
|
| This tech suggests to me that, as you say, there is low-
| hanging fruit that could be harvested, and which perhaps
| isn't cost-effective yet with a small diurnal energy
| cost-delta, but with a higher peak-to-trough cost
| difference might become viable to extract.
|
| It's worth noting here that seasonal variations seem
| harder to deal with, and varying the energy intensity of
| industrial processes doesn't seem helpful for that issue
| due to capex/utilization concerns.
|
| And for diurnal fluctuations, batteries are actually not
| too expensive these days.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| Ah, hacker news, from " No, absolutely not." to already
| being done in 3 comments.
| [deleted]
| nomel wrote:
| To be fair, first operational in 2019. Variable speed
| cooling fans, for heat loss regulation, are bleeding edge
| tech, in the world of aluminum.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| I just wish people would be more open minded and curious
| by default.
| ayanon823819812 wrote:
| They only are if they're incentivized: most ignore the
| rewards, those you admire who don't ignore self-motivated
| open-minded-ness and curious-ness, they must have already
| been rewarded previously for having these traits, and so
| they continue to express them.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > I wonder if it would fit the use of excess renewable
| electricity.
|
| It's exactly the opposite. The pots[1] in the smelter get
| their lifetime reduced if they have to be restarted, and
| if restarted multiple times that can be quite
| significant[2]. They can survive without power for a few
| hours, but they freeze over after a day or so which leads
| to the most damage.
|
| As such they really want stable and cheap electricity,
| like hydro.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting#Lay
| out_of_a...
|
| [2]: https://aluminiumtoday.com/content-
| images/news/Oyeweb.pdf
| DonHopkins wrote:
| But don't the crypto-bros have dibs on all the excess
| renewable energy so they can Get Rich Quick?
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Indeed, aluminum refining is a relatively large industry
| in Iceland for this very reason. Geothermal energy
| production in excess of what people need means you can
| devote a bunch to industry cheaply. If Nordural's website
| is to be believed, they use 25% of all electricity
| generated in Iceland: https://nordural.is/en/
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Efficiency for industrial chemistry is _massively_
| dependent on the processes being continuous. The
| processes often don't work, or work poorly, until you
| reach a stable equilibrium, which can take many hours. An
| enormous amount of effort is expended to ensure this in
| real industrial processes. Otherwise, you are just
| burning resources for negligible output.
|
| The idea that we'll do industrial chemistry with
| intermittent energy surpluses is unrealistic unless we
| are okay with yield per unit of energy being very poor
| relative to continuous processes.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Aluminium smelters already adjust their electricity
| consumption throughout the day to take advantage of
| changing power prices.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Exactly. Chemistry can be done that way, in batches.
| Chemical engineering cannot, it's not a batch process,
| it's all rate stuff.
| anovikov wrote:
| It is indeed mostly uninteresting, but it is exactly what
| naysaysers along with paid lobbyists of the oil industry
| telling us - "you are trying to replace oil which is
| sufficient, for lithium which is fundamentally insufficient
| and there is nothing you can do to make it work". Glad to
| find out for certain that this isn't true.
| mark_up wrote:
| [dead]
| conradev wrote:
| 90% of rare-earth elements, but only 60-70% of lithium and
| cobalt (which, as said in parent, are not rare):
|
| > ... with China being responsible for the refining of 90%
| of REEs and 60-70% of lithium and cobalt.
|
| https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-technology-
| perspectives-2...
| safety1st wrote:
| These dismissive "oh this big event that's just occurred is
| uninteresting" comments on HN are always so weird. Like
| just because you don't see the ramifications doesn't mean
| they don't exist, why not keep an open mind?
|
| Lithium and lithium batteries are a critical resource. If
| the US can mine the lithium, refine it, and turn it into
| batteries all domestically, that has big geopolitical
| implications.
| vel0city wrote:
| It's not really a question of if the US _can_ though, it
| 's a question of _will_. Even before this finding the US
| had known massive lithium reserves that were essentially
| just sitting there idle. The US refining a larger chunk
| of the market is just a question of if we want to do it
| or continue outsourcing that. The US definitely have
| competent people (or still has access to, convincing
| international people to work here) able to build and
| operate the refining side of it. There 's loads of
| capital available to build the refineries. The US just
| has to choose to do it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| eru wrote:
| It's easy to set up lithium extraction. The problem is
| setting up commercially viable lithium extraction.
|
| Yes, the US can lose lots of money building a lithium
| industry. But what would be the point?
| scottwitlin wrote:
| This mine is owned by a company controlled by a Chinese
| company. The US should be cautious about subsidizing
| foreign companies who are under control of competing
| powers.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| Sometimes it might make sense to subsidize an industry
| that's vital to national interest the way we subsidize corn
| and many other things.
| davidw wrote:
| I've actually driven through the "town" of McDermitt, on the
| border. It is in the middle of f'ing nowhere. It's not terribly
| far from one of the original "McFarthest spots" (
| http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon...
| ).
|
| Some environmentalists and local native Americans aren't terribly
| happy about the idea: https://apnews.com/article/nevada-lithium-
| mine-court-appeal-...
|
| It's actually a pretty interesting bit of country to see, because
| it's rare for most of us to experience places that remote. A few
| years back, when visiting Steens Mountain (highly recommended) we
| drove the paved road from Frenchglen to the Alvord desert. We saw
| I think 2 other cars in an hour.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I refuse to call these people "environmentalists" until they
| provide a list of places they are ok with mining. What they are
| is just glorified NIMBYs who knee jerk oppose everything.
| davidw wrote:
| Lithium is pretty important in terms of electrifying our
| economy, which is important for the global environment and
| climate change - and it's got to come from somewhere.
|
| It's also true that mines have a huge track record of getting
| in, digging stuff up, making money, and then leaving the mess
| for someone else to clean up.
|
| If you look at the satellite map of the area, you see the
| former Cordero mercury mine: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.
| 9221322,-117.8162339,7151m/d...
|
| There's a whole report on it here:
| https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=7029
|
| > The EPA Site Assessment program conducted a Site Inspection
| in 1988 which recommended no further action. Upon request
| from the Fort McDermitt Pauite Shoshone Tribe, EPA Emergency
| Response conducted an additional site visit in November 2009.
| At that time, EPA was notified of the possibility that mine
| waste had been used as fill at locations within the town of
| McDermitt and on the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone
| Reservation.
|
| In other words, they tried to get out of doing any cleanup.
| Then they found that "well, actually..." there was some
| cleanup needed.
|
| So... it's probably still worth doing because of climate
| change, but it'd sure be nice to ensure it's done right, and
| they do right by the people who have always lived there. I
| imagine the local tribes are also pretty wary of getting
| screwed, because that is something that has been very much
| par for the course throughout US history.
| fallingknife wrote:
| In that case environmentalists should be very much in favor
| of the mine. Mining in the US is much cleaner than in most
| other countries so mining it here is not only better for
| our economy, but for the environment as well.
|
| Your example actually is proof of this. It got cleaned up.
| It wouldn't in most countries.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Australia (where most lithium is being mined ATM) isn't
| so far behind on the cleanup side. They are a liberal
| democracy after all. It isn't clear to me if they are
| just getting off easy because they are shipping unrefined
| lithium ore to China, however.
| jeffbee wrote:
| These proposed lithium mines are going to be tiny though,
| compared to other minerals. For example Thacker Pass is
| only planning to disturb 6000 acres, which is basically
| nothing. Every oil well in Texas is on 1 to 5 acres of
| disturbed land and there are a quarter-million of those in
| Texas alone. The amount of land that has been scraped flat
| for oil is incredible.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@28.0170789,-98.9525815,39702m/
| d...
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@32.2481804,-102.7177912,13375m
| /...
|
| You only have to glance around to find other mine
| disturbances. They are sized proportionately to the amount
| of the material humans want. Copper mines are pretty
| impressive. Potash and borax mines are rather large. Iron
| mines are absolutely gigantic.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's not the hole that ruins the environment. It's what
| comes out of it.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Lithium, which is required to diversify into renewable
| energy.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If only the only thing that came out of a mine was what
| the company took away with them.
|
| :(
| locallost wrote:
| They published a list, your home is on it. When can we start
| drilling?
| zo1 wrote:
| Not OP. But as soon as they transfer money in compensation
| that's fair and represents the value of the land. Or, I'm
| happy to take a 20% cut of all resources mined from my
| property. They can demolish it entirely and turn it into a
| giant hole for all I care.
| davidw wrote:
| > as they transfer money in compensation that's fair and
| represents the value of the land
|
| I mean, if I'm a native American, I am not going to have
| a whole lot of faith in that process...
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Agree, nobody wants to know or see how the sausage is made,
| they just want the sausage.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Assumption that EVs are cleaner in a nutshell.
|
| To be clear I think EVs are cleaner, but you can't conclude
| that from the fact that it doesnt emit while driving. EVs
| just squeeze the emission event further up the supply chain
| where a shocking amount of people don't see it.
| edude03 wrote:
| They're more efficient than burning oil and we currently
| "mine" for oil so I don't see how that's not true
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Its already holding up different lithum mines in Nevada
| https://apnews.com/article/business-nevada-plants-climate-
| an...
| 0xDEF wrote:
| This is insane. These "environmentalists" really want the
| world to become uninhabitable.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| Maybe massively subsidizing cars that need insane amounts
| of resource extraction isn't the best solution here, and
| there are other ways to deal with this.
|
| Personally I'd prefer if we didn't pave over the whole
| world with roads and suburbs.
| [deleted]
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Resource extraction for batteries and EV will at its
| worst casue localized pollution. That is preferable to a
| high CO2 future that will make most of the global south.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| This is not true, as subsidizing cars makes suburban and
| exurban locations cheaper. Significant land use change in
| this way absolutely contributes to high atmospheric CO2
| as well as widespread environmental destruction.
| midasuni wrote:
| NIMBYS say that things should be built/mined, just not near
| them.
| lazide wrote:
| Pretty sure those protestors are driving there in vehicles
| using mined minerals, fueling them with energy refined and
| extracted using mined minerals (and likely burning fossil
| fuels too), etc.
|
| If that isn't saying things should be mined, just not where
| they can see it, I don't know what is.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Yes yes, those pesky native Americans are TOTAL NIMBY's.
|
| /s
|
| And there's such a prestine track record of resource
| extraction by trillion-dollar conglomerates.
|
| /s/s
|
| I think the knee jerking is yours.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| There is a lot of propaganda on TikTok about how lithium mining
| and refining is too polluting and only the clever Chinese know
| how to do it at scale without polluting.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Cant wait for Elon to come spread some democracy to US!
| iwasanewt wrote:
| Quite improbable, it seems [1]
|
| [1](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1700805058370113934?t=D
| 0...)
| balls187 wrote:
| Completely off-topic, but my 5 and 7 year old know about Kurt
| Cobain, Nirvana because of their song Lithium. It's played
| everytime the Seattle Kraken score a goal at home, and we go to
| lots of games as a family.
|
| My youngest always asks to play "Lithium by Nirvana" song when
| it's his turn to pick.
|
| Would be cool for the US to produce better batteries.
| josh_today wrote:
| [dead]
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| A lot of different battery techs are being worked on. Lithium
| might wind up being left behind in five years.
| simondotau wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36834046
| jokoon wrote:
| Dear battery technology claimant,
|
| Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary
| battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior
| to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the
| corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your
| technology will likely fail, because:
|
| [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
|
| [ ] it will be too expensive for users.
|
| [ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
|
| [ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
|
| [ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
|
| [ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently
| portable.
|
| [ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
|
| [ ] its charge rate is too slow.
|
| [ ] its materials are too toxic.
|
| [ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
|
| [ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
|
| [ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
|
| [ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
|
| [ ] your claims are lies.
| skymast wrote:
| [dead]
| rcdwealth wrote:
| [dead]
| jseliger wrote:
| The price of a given commodity rises due to demand increases ->
| people look for more of it -> people find it -> the commodity is
| eventually mined or otherwise exploited -> prices moderate.
|
| It happened with oil and now it's happening with lithium.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| See also Aluminium.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/alumi...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| And in a lot of cases it's countries that aren't exactly stable
| which have the resources. A lot of currently known lithium
| deposits (thankfully) come from nations at least allied with
| the West, but there are also places like Afghanistan [1] that
| just reek of a repeat of the failure in managing oil countries.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ev-
| lit...
| jbm wrote:
| > of the failure in managing oil countries
|
| It's always fun when we go masks off on HN.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The West propped up a ton of dictators and looked sideways
| as radical Islamists got ever more and more power.
|
| Yes I'd call that a failure in management.
| mulmen wrote:
| It has happened with all resources. I won't assume your intent
| but you invoked oil so I do want to point out the difference.
|
| In a battery lithium is not consumed completely after every use
| like oil. The lithium in a battery is used hundreds or
| thousands of times. When the pack is dead it can still be
| downcycled and eventually the individual cells recycled. With
| the lithium being recovered and reused.
|
| Yes, there is or will be a "lithium rush". But it will look a
| lot more like gold or aluminum than oil.
| mabbo wrote:
| I think the difference is that lithium is being created into a
| reusable product while oil is mostly made into a consumable,
| used once.
|
| A good battery lasts years, maybe decades. And in theory it can
| then be recycled.
| echelon wrote:
| > I think the difference is that lithium is being created
| into a reusable product while oil is mostly made into a
| consumable, used once.
|
| Sourcing lithium is something we've been thinking a lot
| about, whereas we haven't reached peak fossil fuels or
| scarcity. There are plenty of places to continue drilling:
| the US, Greenland, the Arctic Circle, Antarctica ...
|
| The problem with fossil fuels is the carbon entering the
| atmosphere.
| nerdponx wrote:
| To be fair, "peak oil" was a big scare at one point.
| ddingus wrote:
| That should continue to be a scare.
|
| It is likely we are or have peaked.
|
| The way I see it, we bootstrapped our existing tech off
| high energy density oil.
|
| If it were gone, we would find it extremely difficult to
| repeat it all.
|
| Now that we have built all this up, it is also our
| opportunity to bootstrap something far more sustainable,
| or we do risk a serious regression and a lot of people
| die.
|
| Longer term, we use oil for far too much.
|
| Getting off of it preserves a resource we may well find
| need of again.
| walleeee wrote:
| It is especially maddening that our fossil inheritance,
| dipped into with wisdom and in moderation, _could_ have
| been a profound and lasting gift for all future life on
| earth, instead of threatening its very existence. The
| dose makes the poison
| anonylizard wrote:
| Technology generally speaking only moves forward. Some
| technologies will be lost in a civilizational collapse,
| but the most important ones generally survive.
|
| If another collapse happens, and without oil, people
| could believably bootstrap straight from electricity +
| batteries. There'll be endless amounts of quality scrap
| material and manuals. A lot of critical small scale
| appliances can be powered by hand-cranked motors.
| ddingus wrote:
| It does not work that way. What you don't understand is
| the energy density multiplied by massive availability is
| what made the difference. There is chemistry in all of
| that too. We make so damn many things with fossil fuels
| it's hard to comprehend.
|
| If we were to collapse, we would be left with some
| remnants that we would be unable to reproduce!
|
| The tech needed for that runs on fuels we would find
| ourselves unable to procure.
|
| That's coping, not building or bootstrapping.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Arguably we reached peak oil in 2019:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-
| produc...
|
| It's hard to extrapolate a trend though - there was a dip
| caused by COVID, and global oil use has been growing
| since then, but it's still not back to where it was 4
| years ago.
|
| Also a lot of people think peak oil means that we
| suddenly won't have any gas available. No. Peak oil means
| all the easily extractable oil is gone, and so all future
| projects need to use more capital-intensive,
| technologically-advanced extraction techniques that cost
| more, and so the price of oil goes up, and then we use
| less of it while it's replaced by other technologies.
| Which is exactly what's been happening for the past ~5-15
| years. U.S. is back to being the world's top oil
| producer, but all of it is in shale oil fields that
| aren't economically viable below ~$50/barrel, and so gas
| will never go back down to the $1/gallon it was in the
| 90s.
| panick21_ wrote:
| There are many different definition of 'Peak oil' but
| anybody that thinks this is all because of technology is
| just wrong.
|
| The OPEC countries could produce far more oil far
| cheaper, but they don't want to. There are plenty of oil
| fields left. Not to mention fighting economic war against
| Iran and Russia, two huge producers.
| bluGill wrote:
| Typically we reached peak of some type of energy because
| the world switched to something else. Granted whales were
| in danger of being hunted to extinction when the world
| switched to oil lamps, but it isn't clear that was the
| reason the world switched.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Multiply the number of MTBF cycles times the battery
| capacity. Every battery is consumable, every time you draw
| current from it, they're not tanks full of liquid, they're
| chemistry.
|
| That being said they're astronomically more efficient than
| even an ideal carnot engine.
| xorbax wrote:
| I wasn't aware that using a battery destroyed the lithium
| fallingknife wrote:
| Only if it's a fusion battery!
| xorbax wrote:
| The best part is that OP edited his comment to make it
| seem like he _didn 't_ argue that an exhausted battery
| consumed lithium
|
| Fun!
| Retric wrote:
| A completely used up battery contains the same amount of
| lithium, cobalt, etc it took to manufacture it. The only
| question is the economics around mining vs recycling.
|
| An easier to recycle battery that had very slightly fewer
| charge cycles could be a net win. For scale this depot has
| enough lithium for ~10 billion of EV's using Tesla's
| battery chemistry and pack size as a benchmark. How
| expensive it is to extract is however unknown.
| _ph_ wrote:
| The materials a battery is composed of almost completly can
| be recycled into a new battery. So creating a new battery
| requires some work and energy, but not new components.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Not only in theory, but quite practically. The technology
| exists, but awaits the time when there are a lot of old
| batteries to recycle.
| dharmab wrote:
| Awaits? There are battery recycling plants running
| profitably right now that recover 95% of lithium.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Those companies will usually explain that those are pilot
| plants. They don't have enough volume to really scale to
| economical production, yet. They'll need for a lot more
| EVs to be on the road long enough for batteries to be
| damaged or fail and need to be recycled. Until recently,
| the number of new EVs was very low, just single digit
| percentage of car sales. Now that they are getting into
| double digits, the potential supply of batteries is
| starting to grow. It will just take time, now.
| bliteben wrote:
| the CO2 doesn't escape the atmosphere, it just doesn't
| recycle itself in a timeframe you are looking for
| dexwiz wrote:
| The resource really isn't the carbon itself but it's stored
| chemical energy. Without new energy input, the carbon in
| CO2 will never become a hydrocarbon again.
| moralestapia wrote:
| This, and this is also why most "carbon recycling" tech
| is DOA as you cannot go backwards (cheaply) on
| thermodynamics.
| bliteben wrote:
| turns out that happens without human intervention
| sanderjd wrote:
| I don't think so? Or, could you say what mechanism you're
| thinking of here?
| bliteben wrote:
| Photosynthesis turns carbon and energy into plants
| immediately.
|
| Longer term the same processes that turned algae and
| other life forms into oil are still happening and try as
| we might we aren't going to stop them, but they proceed
| at what is likely a pace that will take long after humans
| are extinct to replenish what we have used.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > Longer term the same processes that turned algae and
| other life forms into oil are still happening
|
| This is unfortunately not true.
|
| The vast majority of our fossil fuels are formed from
| carbon that was sequestered into cellulose in plants,
| before anything had evolved the ability to digest
| cellulose. It piled up, and eventually compressed into
| coal. Look up the `Carboniferous Period" for more
| details.
|
| These reserves are no longer being formed because we have
| fungi that break down these materials and return the CO2
| to the air.
|
| Planet Earth will never again have oil and coal reserves
| of the size it did 200 years ago.
| alexvoda wrote:
| I was just about to reply the same but I think what you
| said is true for coal but not necessarily so for oil.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Ah I see what you were trying to get at. Seems a bit
| beside the point, but sure.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Hydrocarbons can be recycled
| sanderjd wrote:
| Tell me more.
| bluGill wrote:
| Plastics can be recycled. We also know how to put them in
| various other reactors to make synthetic hydrocarbons.
|
| The above processes are costly, but we know how to do it.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Ah I see. I didn't think either of the parent comments
| were talking about plastics. Is most oil turned into
| recycled plastics? I assumed that most oil is turned into
| combustible fuel, but maybe that's not true.
| lazide wrote:
| Seems like 8-12% is turned into plastics. Though it's
| usually natural gas that is used, not oil directly.
| Natural gas is also used to produce fertilizer and
| explosives in large quantities.
| sanderjd wrote:
| But I think fertilizer and explosives are also not
| recyclable.
| lazide wrote:
| That depends on your definition I guess. They both do add
| a lot of nitrogen (and some carbon) to the atmosphere
| when 'used'.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm struggling to figure out what definition of
| "recyclable" fits what you said. What definition are you
| thinking of?
| lazide wrote:
| I'm guessing I misread what you wrote and got the sense
| backwards.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most oil is not recycled. We know how to do it for all
| uses, but that doesn't mean we can. The energy costs make
| is not useful. If we had an infinite source of free
| energy we know how to recycle CO2 and h2o back into
| hydrocarbons.
| momirlan wrote:
| funny thing is, technology is advancing so fast that lithium
| might not even be a factor in new batteries.
| foreverobama wrote:
| [dead]
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Dumb question. Could a really serious impact from space increase
| the probability of a volcano forming at the point of impact?
|
| I'm imagining that volcanoes are a little bit like the channeling
| hazard when making espresso, where the shallow or disturbed area
| are more likely to erupt with hot liquid.
|
| This is relevant because I have seen it said that meteors could
| be a source of lithium.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Mixed feelings.
|
| On the one hand: cool, less exploitation of developing nations by
| a few billionaires. (Downvotes. Cool. I know it is hard for some
| people to accept reality because they just need to worship a
| wealth they'll never experience, no matter who or what it
| obliterates.)
|
| On the other hand: dammit, we were just getting around to cost-
| effectiveness of lithium recycling, but now it looks like that's
| another several decades off.
| sdsd wrote:
| [flagged]
| panick21_ wrote:
| That's maybe because you have distorted view of the worth of
| 'discovering lithium' is.
|
| You hear: "Valueable resource found under Biden's watch'
|
| I hear: "Another lithium resource that want be exploited
| discovered"
| labster wrote:
| Memories are essentially stories we tell ourselves about the
| world. They're not real records of events, they're condensed
| down into a narrative. Stories are how we understand the world.
| It's hard to fault you for picking up on the meme of Manifest
| Destiny; at least you're self aware about it.
| labrador wrote:
| I realized recently that my memories aren't true stories.
| They feel true, but a lot of context is missing that would
| make them closer to the truth.
| qup wrote:
| Sometimes I tell myself I may as well change some bad
| memories to be better. If I manage to accomplish that, I can
| change the past. Because the only record of some of these
| events is in my own brain. I am the arbiter.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| This is going to be the plot of a Bruckheimer/Emmerich co-
| production, is it? A team of scientists needs to travel into the
| heart of a volcano to find the lost city of Lithium, but one of
| them is actually a spy for a foreign power that will try to kill
| everyone else to prevent the secret to get out, only to be
| thwarted by the lone survivor, a man who was recently divorced by
| his wife and just wants to see his children again. He finds
| another (female) survivor, and together they defeat the spy
| mastermind and are evacuated by the US Military mere seconds
| before the volcano erupts.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I'd be surprised only if this _didn't_ happen.
| vermasque wrote:
| Sounds a lot like Michael Crichton's Congo
| Blammar wrote:
| You should work with ChatGPT4 to generate a movie script for
| Roland! Shouldn't take more than a week!
| tmpX7dMeXU wrote:
| _CCR plays in the background_
| UberFly wrote:
| Time to buy real estate in McDermitt Nevada I guess.
| tmountain wrote:
| I've heard a lot about the potential of the Salton Sea regarding
| producing the "world's greenest lithium". I wonder how this
| compares.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| (The volcano is dormant)
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Not dormant, extinct. Calderas in that area tend to be ancient
| ancestors of the current Yellowstone caldera.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| "This is an ex-volcano."
| jj999 wrote:
| (list 'The 'volcano 'is 'dormant)
| runjake wrote:
| The"US Volcano" == McDermitt caldera on the Oregon/Nevada border.
| zaroth wrote:
| How does the long lifecycle of large lithium batteries affect the
| lithium recycling industry?
|
| I would guess that large-scale recycling is only just coming
| online in the next few years.
|
| Of course there is initial supply now, but battery production is
| growing exponentially (for EV and Grid) those battery lifespans
| are 5-10 years or longer.
| almost_usual wrote:
| > 'They seem to have hit the sweet spot where the clays are
| preserved close to the surface, so they won't have to extract as
| much rock, yet it hasn't been weathered away yet.'
|
| > Benson says his company expects to begin mining in 2026. It
| will remove clay with water and then separate out the small
| lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The
| clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract
| lithium.
| greggsy wrote:
| This sounds very similar to uranium refinement.
|
| How economical is the refinement of lithium clays compared to
| stone or brine mines? Do they have similar chemical, water and
| mechanical refinement requirements?
| [deleted]
| corethree wrote:
| If all cars in the world had lithium batteries how long would
| lithium last?
| neycoda wrote:
| Wouldn't it be cool to harness volcanos and Earth's magma layer
| to recycle our junk and craft materials we use?
| ChatGTP wrote:
| [flagged]
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I don't understand this criticism. You mine lithium once. You
| have to pull fossil fuels out of the ground constantly even
| after you build the car using iron you've mined out of the
| ground.
| nerdponx wrote:
| How much of the lithium in a typical electric car battery is
| able to be extracted and put into another battery?
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think the answer for "able to be" is 100%. I think the
| question is how economical we can make it to separate it
| from the rest of the materials and then process it into a
| new battery.
|
| I'm sure we'll never be able to get back 100% cost
| effectively, but I'm sure someday people will be working on
| driving it as close to that as they can.
| wyager wrote:
| To be fair, petroleum extraction is minimally invasive. You
| can easily live with an oil well on your property. You can't
| live with a lithium mine on your property.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why not? The process doesn't look that bad.
| Tagbert wrote:
| As other have pointed out, the amount of lithium that needs
| to be extracted is much smaller than the amount of oil that
| is already being extracted.
|
| An EV battery will use around 8-16kg of lithium that should
| last for the life of the car. Then the battery can be
| recycled. Current recycling programs can recover around 95%
| of the lithium. Over time, the demand for lithium will
| reach a much lower volume than oil.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| It's always a good idea to just flat out compare the mass
| of alternatives.
|
| A tank of gasoline weighs more than the lithium in an EV
| battery. The entire battery weighs as much as 10 tanks of
| gas. And 20 some kg of lithium is way less than the
| 1000kg of steel that goes into making a car.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Not sure what you are talking about, it highly depends on
| the way lithium is extracted.
|
| A lithium hard rock mine is like any other open pid mine.
| Its a big hole in the ground with trucks going up and down.
|
| A brine operations is basically a bunch of huge fields of
| water that just sort of sit there. It needs lots of space.
|
| New forms of DLE Deep Brine mines look very much like a
| petroleum extraction well (even using old holes from that).
| However not fully commercial yet.
|
| However I would also say that petroleum extraction on a
| large scale, specially in the ocean has lots of bad
| effects. And the gas from those mines will escape for
| decades.
| _ph_ wrote:
| In some places, where it is still possible to use classic
| wells to pump oil. But in most locations, these have become
| rare. That we still can extract way too much oil is due to
| technologies like fracking, oil sands and what else. So
| claiming petroleum extraction is minimal invasive is a
| gross misrepresentation.
| acdha wrote:
| There's also a function of scale: the amount of lithium in a
| car battery is orders of magnitude less than the amount of
| oil a non-EV will burn over the same lifetime, and even if
| you're buying fossil fuel electricity the greater efficiency
| means you're still using less.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| And how much fossil fuels are required to pull the lithium
| out of the ground?
|
| I don't have the answer I'm just helping you understand the
| criticism
| panick21_ wrote:
| It very much depends. There are many different ways of
| mining lithium.
|
| An Australian hard rock mine will use the same amount of
| fossil fuel as any other hard rock mine.
|
| Brine operations don't use much but the lithium still has
| to be transported from a desert.
|
| Future technology such as DLE (Direct Lithium Extraction)
| have to potential to require basically no fossil fuels at
| all.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| These type of questions are not serious. This person
| already knows it's just a tiny fraction of what a non-EV
| vehicle will burn throughout its lifetime.
|
| Just downvote, flag, and move on.
| devnulll wrote:
| Seems like a sunlight rich area such as the Nevada high
| desert is about as energy friendly as one could imagine.
| The main requirements seem to be water, sulfuric acid, and
| (of course) power.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| People are weird, I think fossil fuel is idiotic too.
| dessimus wrote:
| Probably no more than is used finding, drilling, extracting
| new petroleum wells. Especially as we seem to have already
| gotten to a lot of the 'easily' accessible crude oil, and
| are drilling in Arctic and Deep Sea environments.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| If you've driven along the gulf coast the cost of oil is
| obvious. Growing up it was beautiful view of glistening water
| under a beautiful sky. Now it's a post industrial view of oil
| platforms as far as the eye can see. Where fracking happens
| there's earthquakes in geologically stable areas. Etc.
| Lithium extraction isn't for the light hearted, but the
| deposits aren't as vastly dispersed and extraction and
| processing happens in a smaller foot print. (Unless you
| consider extracting from ocean water, but even then the
| industrial footprint is contained) oil extraction is
| sprawling and pervasive, and once a well dries up, become
| discarded blight.
| lifechoseme123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| panick21_ wrote:
| Because lithium extraction such a tiny aspect of everything,
| and replacing a huge and evil oil industry that has terrible
| effects on everything is like comparing an apple to an F-150.
|
| One is so clearly worse that its not even really worth
| debating. And that's why very often the 'but what about
| lithium effect on the environment' is often broad up by car
| and oil lobbyist to gaslight people. That is the reason the
| person got downvoted.
|
| But if want to know, lithium mining is a worse basically like
| mining any other hard rocket, cooper or whatever. There are
| some issues with brine mining but they are minor and very
| localized. As with all mining there is issues with local
| representation.
| terrybingus wrote:
| [flagged]
| lifechoseme123 wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying!! The Oil vs. Lithium industry
| competition issue makes sense.
| Tagbert wrote:
| You should understand that there is a lot of astroturfing
| going on now with comments starting that EVs and batteries
| are terribly toxic and will be an huge environmental
| disaster. Those people never seem to acknowledge the counter
| arguments. Batteries use only a small amount of lithium
| (8-16kg per vehicle). There is some toxicity to lithium
| mining but it is not a particularly toxic element and the
| effects are localized. Once produced, the lithium in
| batteries can be recycled efficiently. We are not going to
| need millions of lithium mines.
|
| The amount needed is a couple of orders of magnitude less
| than the amount of drilling sites needed for the toxic oil
| that we are current extracting and burning and that cannot be
| recycled in any meaningful way.
|
| We are concerned for the environment and need to make trade
| offs to get the best outcome for the environment. So far, the
| small amount of lithium mines seems like a good trade off
| against large numbers of oil drills.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| You are concern trolling. The negative effects of lithium
| mining and refining is completely trivial compared to the
| increasingly uninhabitable planet that more CO2 emissions
| will lead to.
| lifechoseme123 wrote:
| Have you seen a Mine before?
|
| This is trivial [1, first image in article]? It looks like
| an Open Pit Coal Mine. I'm sure you'd appreciate if your
| local forest or parkland was turned into this.
|
| I suppose we have different definitions of trivial.
|
| Sounds like you enjoy polluted water, diseased wildlife,
| etc.
|
| Personally, I care about the health of the humans,
| wildlife, and ecosystems.
|
| "Concern Trolling" ...Get outside. Touch some grass and
| trees. I think you spend too much time online...
|
| [1] https://qz.com/2156463/why-elon-musk-wants-tesla-to-
| start-mi...
| almost_usual wrote:
| The article made this extraction sound pretty trivial compared
| to other lithium deposits. The clay is close to the surface and
| won't require significant mining.
|
| > 'They seem to have hit the sweet spot where the clays are
| preserved close to the surface, so they won't have to extract
| as much rock, yet it hasn't been weathered away yet.'
|
| > Benson says his company expects to begin mining in 2026. It
| will remove clay with water and then separate out the small
| lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging.
| The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to
| extract lithium.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Unfortunately, OSHA will prevent dumpster-diving for that
| lithium.
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