Bolivia Is the Saudi Arabia of Lithium 291
tcd004 writes "You can literally scrape valuable lithium off the ground of many Bolivian salt flats. The country is poised to be the center of world lithium battery production, reaping the benefit of the metal's skyrocketing value. 'The US Geological Survey says 5.4 million tons of lithium could potentially be extracted in Bolivia, compared with 3 million in Chile, 1.1 million in China and just 410,000 in the United States. ... Ailing automakers in the United States are pinning their hopes on lithium. General Motors next year plans to roll out its Volt, a car using a lithium-ion battery along with a gas engine. Nissan, Ford and BMW, among other carmakers, have similar projects.' However, the government fears foreign countries might exploit their natural resources, so for the time being, the salt flats remain untouched."
Uyuni (Score:5, Informative)
I hired some guy with a truck to drop me off out on those salt flats once, just for the hell of it. Incredible lightning shows kept me up most nights. Spectacular place. You could walk in any direction and feel like you weren't moving. It was utterly featureless, aside from the geometric pattern on the ground. I was pretty glad that the truck actually came back a couple of days later.
On one hand, I'd be sorry to hear that the flats were being mined. On the other, Bolivians need something like this; I hope their government acts wisely and on behalf of all of their people.
I'll be watching these events with interest.
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Informative)
If you're from Virginia, have you had a chance to witness any of the mountain top removal strip mining operations [youtube.com] in West Virginia? There's an informative series on it at VBS.tv [youtube.com]. Don't worry, they don't leave the non-fertile shale rock bare after they're done. They spray a grass seed in mutant green nitrogen fertilizer shit all over it so it can look unnatural for a year before transforming back into a Martian landscape.
Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (Score:3, Informative)
Oil is an energy source. Lithium isn't. We are still deluding ourselves if we think we can burn oil to mine lithium so we can drive electric cars (on roads built and maintained by oil-powered machinery) that get their electricity from burning coal in most cases. Lithium can be recycled, but only in an oil-powered economy where cars and trucks can haul the batteries to factories where enough energy exists to recycle them.
Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a lot of concern from everyone about "peak oil".
Why is there not just as much of a concern about "peak lithium". If we really make a push to convert all cars to being electric, that's a ton of lithium required - and it's used in a lot of other applications too.
That's why solutions like hydrogen as truly alternative fuels make more sense to me that rushing to consume a metal which is truly a non-renewable resource, unlike even coal and oil (which are simply slow to produce but are produced over time).
Yes, lithium may be scarce, but you've got a deep misconception that may be coloring your view and comparison with oil. Oil is a fuel. Allowing it to burn produces energy. Lithium in car batteries is not a fuel. It's a storage device.
Comparing it to a gasoline system, you should think of it like the steel that makes up your gas tank. It stores energy, which must be produced elsewhere (like through burning oil or coal, for example). If we run out of oil, we need a new energy source. If we look to be running out of lithium, we can take worn out batteries and pull the lithium out of them to make new batteries.
Hydrogen, as you point out, is plentiful. However, it is also just another gas tank, not a fuel. Hydrogen is produced by cracking methane. Two years ago I interviewed with the company that does 90% of the hydrogen production in the world. They pointed out that per mile on the road, more CO2 is produced by hydrogen production than gasoline consumption.
Both hydrogen and lithium will be used as STORAGE for energy. Both can be reused basically unlimited times - managed well, we should never run out of either. Oil and coal, on the other hand, generate the power we can then store in lithium batteries or hydrogen, but that generation breaks the oil and coal permanently.
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:3, Informative)
They should follow Norway's example. Norway had a nationalised oil industry where all of the profits went to the country and people, and thus they're rich and can retire early with big state pensions.
Britain, exploiting the same sea bed, didn't do that, and we're all poor with naff pensions ahead of us.
Norwegian oil model (Score:5, Informative)
They could consider following the same model the Norwegian government used when oil was discovered in the sea outside Norway; create a lithium fund managed by the government, paid by taxes and exploration fees from the companies wanting to mine the lithium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Oil_Fund [wikipedia.org]. It worked for Norway, it might work for Bolivia too.
Re:Where Will the Money Go? Pollution Concerns? (Score:5, Informative)
I also hope that money goes towards improving their infrastructure and fostering internal business instead of some bullshit palace for some bullshit dictator.
President Evo Morales of Bolivia is many things, but "bullshit dictator" he is not. He was democratically elected in 2005, and won a recall election in 2008 by a two-thirds majority. The Bolivian government has been a democracy since the 1980's.
Imperialist exploitation? (Score:3, Informative)
"The previous imperialist model of exploitation of our natural resources will never be repeated in Bolivia"
No, instead we will us the new model of exploitation perfected in Latin America: corporate officials will skim 80% of the revenues and buy condos in Miami and Buenos Aires. Si muy bueno!
Re:Did not say recyclable, said renewable (Score:3, Informative)
http://gas2.org/2008/10/13/lithium-counterpoint-no-shortage-for-electric-cars/
^ that's why.
The big point of the article is this: lithium can be extracted from the ocean for as cheap as $30 / kg, and there are 238 *trillion* tons of lithium in the ocean. Considering that a lithium battery uses about ~3 pounds of lithium, we're not going to be seeing a shortage for a long, long, time.
Not to mention that lithium is not a *spent* resource like oil: the total amount of lithium we'll *ever* need is pretty constant assuming we're not horrible about recycling, and the viability of recycling programs is proportional to the price, so those won't be going away any time soon.
In conclusion, someone does know if it's practical in the end to have all cars run off lithium batteries. I know, and the answer is yes.
Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (Score:1, Informative)
Lithium is recyclable, unlike energy resources. As we saw with copper up until recently, once the demand gets high enough, prices go up, and recovery of copper becomes increasingly efficient (so much so that *stealing* copper becomes a problem), and deposits that were too low in grade become economic. It would be the same for lithium.
Concern over lithium supply may be overblown for other reasons anyway [worldlithium.com].
Coal and oil are "produced over time" by geological processes at rates that are insignificant compared to the rates of consumption. At human time scales the generation of new coal and oil is therefore irrelevant. All the oil and gas that is out there at this instant is all that will matter in the next century (or millenium).
The threshold for economic recovery of energy supplies is also very different from recovery of metals. For metals, as long as the demand and price goes high enough we can continue to extract them from ever-lower concentrations (a good example of this are diamonds, which aren't intrinsically worth all that much, but are extracted at extremely high cost in money and energy because of high demand for them). For energy supplies, once the extraction process takes as much energy as the energy resource contains (or anywhere close to that), there's no point in bothering with it. Leave it in the ground and keep the energy you have -- you'll be better off.
In summary, you have the situation completely backwards in terms of the constraints or the economics of the situation. Energy will be a problem long before lithium will be. In fact, the substantial energy required for lithium extraction and processing is probably going to be a problem before the lithium supply is.
Re:Where Will the Money Go? Pollution Concerns? (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't really call lithium mining "exporting our pollution". It's pretty tame -- you take salt flat brines, selectively precipitate out the salts you want, and return the remaining salts. It's not like you're ripping off mountaintops or contaminating freshwater with lead or something.
Anyway, as with all discussions of "reserves", this whole discussion is incredibly misleading. The concept of a reserves figure also has a market price and technology level associated with it. As market prices change and technology changes, what "reserves" are available in each country changes dramatically. For example, at high oil prices, Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia. The same sort of thing is true with lithium. For example, one the Kings Valley, Nevada mine owned by Western Lithium Corp, which they're currently developing, has 50% more "reserves" at the minimum concentration they're planning to recover than the figure this articles gives for the entire United States. The entire Kings Valley was estimated back in the 70s/80s to have 11m tons LCE (lithium carbonate equivalent, the standard form for trading lithium).
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:2, Informative)
we've constrained ourselves to Latin America? that's news. i thought we had something to do with forcing Japan to trade with us in the mid 1800s by rolling a fleet into Tokyo Bay or helping the Brits hose Iran in the 1950s.
Also needed for fusion (it that ever happens) (Score:2, Informative)
Besides batteries, there will be a huge demand for Lithium if fusion ever becomes practical. It is used to capture the neutrons and also generate more He.
Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (Score:3, Informative)
Because there's A LOT of lithium. Nope THERE'S A LOT OF LITHIUM.
It can be mined _extremely_ cheap in Bolivia, literally for several dollars per 1 kg. And a car will probably need just 10-15 kg of lithium for the lifetime of its battery. Which then can be recycled. So, not many problems at all.
If you are prepared tp pay slightly higher price, say $30 per kg, then you'll have so many options, you'll have a hard time choosing which one to use.
Oh, and no-one performed geological surveys to specifically search for lithium ores (because lithium is needed only in small quantities).
Chile vs. Bolivia (Score:3, Informative)
I live in Chile.
Yea, Chile might have less but it is cheaper and safer source to get at.
1. Bolivia is a really dangerous corrupt unstable country (nearly been killed there myself), that no one is really in control of.
2. It has no access to ocean ports.
Until both of the above are solved, don't bet on Bolivia.
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:1, Informative)
African countries keep getting screwed because of the Dutch Economy factor.
Virginia has sort of the same problem (state government decides to support only one industry that is disproportionately profitable).
Bolivia will have the same problem if the money gained is not put into stimulating other economic endeavours to diversify the economy away from lithium mining.
Re:Did not say recyclable, said renewable (Score:3, Informative)
"While I did mod you up, I wanted to note that in the US the only turbo diesels I've seen have been VW or Audi (the TDI models). I think there might be others coming, but they would be BMW or Mercedes (also not cheap). I do want an A3 TDI, but it will cost more than a Prius, have comparable MPG, and cost more to fuel (diesel is normally more expensive than 87 Octane)."
News you might find interesting: Europe is full of turbodiesels now; about 65-70% of all new tourism-class sells are diesels. Just for an example, the VW group fills the whole market: from the comparatively cheap Skodas to the top of the rank Audi R8 passing through Seat and VW offers; the same goes for all other brands: BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Saab, Volvo, Renault, Citroen, Fiat, Alfa... you name it. And they are now only just a bit more expensive instead of 25/30% more it used to be. I don't think there is 87 Octane gasoline in Europe but I can say diesel is cheaper than the "standard" 95~98 Octanes used here both per volume and per mileage so I think the higher price in USA comes from lack of distribution, not production costs. And they are as driveable and comfortable than their gasoline counterparts (the days of black fumes, noise and vibrations passed away).
If this market hasn't exploded in USA yet is because gasoline is quite cheaper and due to a matter of tradition.