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Power Businesses

Lithium in Extinct US Volcano - More Smoke Than Fire? (bloomberg.com) 36

Posted by EditorDavid from the power-supplies dept.
On August 30th a scientific paper discussed lithium in an extinct volcano in the western United States. But would it also increase supplies of a crucial battery-making ingredient?

"The mining industry is seldom that simple," argues Bloomberg's Energy Digest newsletter: The discovery of new deposits — be it the giant Simandou iron ore mine in Guinea or diamonds in Canada's Northwest Territories — rarely turns an industry on its head, and certainly not quickly. For lithium, that's likely to be especially true. Unlike cobalt and nickel, lithium isn't geologically scarce when it comes to economically viable deposits. And while there are short-term bottlenecks as the mining world reacts to a sudden spike in demand, few see long-term shortages. In fact, the supply outlook is so compelling that all but one of the biggest miners — Rio Tinto Group, which accidentally stumbled across a big deposit — decided it's not an industry they want to be in.

Instead, much of the focus is on processing and refining the element into a grade suitable for batteries. "The news is a reminder that lithium isn't rare, but producing battery-grade quantities at scale is the true challenge," said Chris Berry, president of House Mountain Partners, an industry consultant.
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Lithium in Extinct US Volcano - More Smoke Than Fire? More

Lithium in Extinct US Volcano - More Smoke Than Fire?

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday September 17, 2023 @03:14PM (#63855766)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      We still have the problem that building an oil refinery is a massive capital investment, so it doesn't get done very often. Lithium refining is maybe similar. It doesn't really matter though since there's likely to be lots of demand for more refining capacity well into the future.

      It's much more fun to insist that electric cars are impossible because lithium is super rare and expensive and China owns all of it though.

      • We still have the problem that building an oil refinery is a massive capital investment, so it doesn't get done very often

        Or ever in some cases. In the US we built refineries to handle heavy crude oil because that’s what we used to produce but it ran out. Fracking produces light oil and is not suitable for refinement in the same facilities. So the US depends on trade to get the refined oil it needs, and is not energy independent despite producing more than it uses. There isn’t even any plan to build those refineries because they are so expensive it doesn’t make financial sense.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Nobody wants to invest ten billion dollars to build an oil refinery today, for reasons that are as obvious to oil execs as anyone else.

    • Re:Scale (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday September 18, 2023 @06:39AM (#63857104) Homepage Journal

      It amuses me when people say we can't just deploy loads of deep water wind turbines, it's too difficult. Like we didn't already deploy loads of deep water oil drilling rigs, complete with long pipelines back to the shore.

      Security? Good point, those off-shore gas pipes regularly get sabotaged by our enemies. Wait...

    • The technology (and chemical underpinnings) for refining to produce gasoline was developed over several decades before the development of significant oil drilling. From about the 1830s to the 1860s, Scotland had an industry competing with the whale-oil industry (for lighting fuel) which worked by baking hydrocrabon-rich "oil shale" and distilling and separating ("refining") the vapours that came off. As oil well drilling became slowly less hit-and-miss (let's take the 1859 "Spindletop" blowout as a marker p

  • Only a shortage of REFINED lithium and refined lithium-making capacity.

    More raw lithium doesn't do much.

  • Too many sticky fingers (Score:3)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Sunday September 17, 2023 @03:39PM (#63855826)

    Rio Tinto likely decided that there were going to be too many sticky fingers in the form of lawsuits and regulatory compliance fees to make mining it in the US viable and much worse in countries where political corruption is obvious and well publicized.

  • a strategic asset (Score:4)

    by ZipNada ( 10152669 ) on Sunday September 17, 2023 @04:07PM (#63855862)

    Lithium may not be particularly rare but we aren't mining much of it in the USA, and it seems important enough to have adequate domestic supplies.

    • Here is your citation:

      https://www.mining-technology.... [mining-technology.com]

      • That article does not back up the claim that the US invaded Afghanistan for lithium. The whole second half of the article talks about how the deposits " it may not even make a huge difference to the global supply chain anyway,”

        Also if that were the case why in the 20 years we occupied the region were there no lithium mines and refineries constructed and under the control of US affiliated corporations, much like we did for oil?

    • Lithium mining is still in the exploitative phase of development. New techniques may make it realistic to mine in the US. https://techxplore.com/news/20... [techxplore.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      And this'un is majority-owned by a Chinese company.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      "The mine is a project of Lithium Nevada, LLC - a wholly owned subsidiary of Lithium Americas Corp, whose largest shareholder is the world's largest lithium mining company, Chinese Ganfeng Lithium."

  • There is more lithium in earth's crust [wikipedia.org] than copper, cobalt, nickel or lead.

  • Energy In, Energy Out (Score:3)

    by Stonefish ( 210962 ) on Sunday September 17, 2023 @05:00PM (#63855952)

    To be used in a battery Lithium must be very cheap to extract in huge amounts, we aren't trying to make high value components, we want to make cheap batteries to replace fossil fuels.
    Fossil fuels are cheap because they mostly self refine, you drill a hole and it just comes out, you just dig coal up, wash it and burn it. Gas flows up mostly pure with some CO2 in it.
    Hard rock deposits are more expensive to mine than soft rock, a good hard rock lithium deposit has about 7% lithium so for every load of lithium you're separating away 14 loads of waste. Also your separation technique isn't 100% so there's some loss there as well.
    Brines are different, you need lots of water and lots of energy to first dissolve and then to separate what you want. Brining creates lots of liquid waste pools which are environmentally difficult. Also the amount of water required impacts the environment.
    Hard rock is exactly that, hard. Think how much energy is required to smash boulders and grind it to a fine enough paste to separate the stuff you want from the stuff you don't, it's a lot of energy. This is much harder than fossil fuels.
    Also this grinding and digging equipment needs to run 24x7 because the capital costs are so high, so you can't power it with intermittent solar and wind, so you need to burn gas or coal for the 16 hours a day when the sun isn't shining.

    People who think that we're going to have batteries for everything need a wake up call. Batteries made from lithium will remain relatively expensive simply because mining and processing is energy intensive. As we constrain fossil fuels they will become more expensive.

    So either we use something like nuclear plants near mining to camps to provide lots of energy or we change batteries to something like sodium which is easier to extract in volume.

     

    • Pointless comparison to fossil fuel, which goes up in smoke the first and only time it is used. You might as well argue that aluminium is pie-in-the-sky.

      • Pointless comparison to fossil fuel, which goes up in smoke the first and only time it is used. You might as well argue that aluminium is pie-in-the-sky.

        Exactly. The lithium in the batteries is far easier and economical to recover even with todays processing than throwing it away and mining fresh. It’s valuable to recycle like aluminum is. Understanding how to process ore is the key, aluminum was as or more expensive than gold up until the 19th century before electrolytic reduction processing made it viable to produce.

        • Even without recycling, the lithium in a battery is re-used every time the battery is recharged. A Tesla uses between 11 and 165 lbs [politifact.com] of lithium depending on the model (they vary by chemistry and capacity). Tesla says they'll last 300,000 to 500,000 miles. But let's say 12 years and 150K miles on average.

          In contrast, 120 lbs of gasoline (20 gallons) will last not 150K miles, but more like 300-500 miles, i.e. 0.5K miles. Less by a factor of 300.

          Anyways per my link above half the world's supply of lith

          • Saltwater is a bit disingenuous, it’s geothermal brines and it’s processing is not without many of the pitfalls of conventional mining. That said I guess I never knew people were dumb enough to think the metals in a battery disappear after use.

          • Even without recycling, the lithium in a battery is re-used every time the battery is recharged. A Tesla uses between 11 and 165 lbs [politifact.com] of lithium depending on the model (they vary by chemistry and capacity). Tesla says they'll last 300,000 to 500,000 miles. But let's say 12 years and 150K miles on average.
            In contrast, 120 lbs of gasoline (20 gallons) will last not 150K miles, but more like 300-500 miles, i.e. 0.5K miles. Less by a factor of 300.

            You are comparing different things. The battery is more like the fuel tank of an ICE vehicle, and the electricity needed to recharge it is the gasoline you put in the tank.

            Half the world's supply of Lithium comes from geothermal brines. This has nothing to do with lithium in actual seawater (i.e.: oceans), which is so diluted that the laws of thermodynamics basically say that it will never be economically nor energetically efficient to do it, outside of a lab [electrek.co].

    • As far as I know, there are only three commercially viable ways to power things. You can plug them into electric outlets and use really long cords. This is nice if you aren't going very far because it makes the actual equipment in use lighter. However you are limited in range to the practical length of the cord. Also, depending on what you are doing, the cord itself can be an inconvenience and may add setup/break down time for each usage.

      You can have an internal combustion engine. Convenient because i

  • There were lithium deposits to be found in North America the issue was that mining them is a lot more expensive because you can't ignore local environmental laws or local labor laws. So for the same reason that we import steel we were importing lithium. There's been a lot of changes and there are national security concerns so we're starting to look at it locally even with the costs.
  • And lose all your money buying the equivalent of boomer shit coins run by old school stock promoters (scammers) on a shitty unregulated Canadian penny stock exchange.

  • New Lithium Mine in NC (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I live about 20 minutes from the site of a new Lithium mine in NC. The government foreclosed on a drive-in theater, campground, and nature park to give the land to Albemarle along with tax abatements and other benefits. They haven't even turned up any Lithium yet and already it's 24/7 billowing black smoke from heavy vehicles and constant noise. Between that and skyrocketing mortgage rates, my home value has halved and I can't even move away.

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