[HN Gopher] A Fossil Fuel Economy Requires 535x More Mining Than...
___________________________________________________________________
A Fossil Fuel Economy Requires 535x More Mining Than a Clean Energy
Economy
Author : epistasis
Score : 8 points
Date : 2024-02-13 22:21 UTC (40 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.distilled.earth)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.distilled.earth)
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| I doubt it.... lithium is nasty business, also.
| epistasis wrote:
| How much nastier than coal, or iron, or copper?
|
| I would say those are nasty. Nobody can ever tell me how
| lithium is supposed to be nasty, other than the media runs lots
| of articles on it without any comparison to other mining.
|
| This is a very earnest question, I'd love to find an answer to
| this, but have not found out yet, despite hours of research!
|
| (As far as your doubt, which numbers are you doubting?)
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| > (As far as your doubt, which numbers are you doubting?)
|
| 535x
| ethagnawl wrote:
| The "nastiness" also usually lumps in phony, pearl clutching
| concerns about human rights abuses, as if those issues aren't
| inherently capitalistic and present in the existing fossil
| fuel extraction, processing and use life cycle. One example
| is the "epic" Joe Rogan clip that was making the rounds late
| last year.
|
| I'm sure lithium production is "nasty" but it can almost
| certainly be done more responsibly (especially on the labor
| front) and it can also be recycled once it has been
| extracted. This narrative reeks of big oil propaganda.
| zeristor wrote:
| I'm all ears, what is nasty about Lithium.
|
| With the Salton sea works planned to start within a few yeas,
| it would appear that Lithium can be extracted from geothermal
| power station water.
|
| Let alone the gradual growth of Sodium batteries.
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| > I'm all ears, what is nasty about Lithium.
|
| production process
| foxyv wrote:
| It's a matter of scale. A Tesla has about 8kg of lithium. My
| Honda Fit has burned about 5000 gallons of gasoline over 150k
| miles. That means, in order to run my little passenger car they
| needed to mine/pump/drill about 33 thousand kilos of crude oil.
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| Have you also looked at the production process of lithium?
| Quantity used of the final product isn't everything.
|
| Actual disposal method of used batteries also could be
| considered...
|
| I might forget other factors
| legitster wrote:
| That's not quite equivalent though. It takes about 400kg of
| ore to create 1 kg of lithium. You're also not factoring in
| the resources to create/transmit the electricity for the
| Tesla which would be factored into the gas for the Fit.
| legitster wrote:
| Bad data. The 28 million tons cited for clean energy is for
| _processed_ minerals. But just a pound of cobalt could require
| literally mining tons of ore. The numbers are off by an order of
| magnitude.
| legitster wrote:
| Furthermore, having now looked at the underlying report, I am
| even _more_ skeptical.
|
| https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...
|
| Some of these 2040 scenarios are insanely optimistic - like
| global nickel and cobalt production more than doubling in a 10
| year period! And nearly all of it reliant on China.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-13 23:01 UTC)