from the there's-lithium-in-them-thar-hills! dept.
'We don't have enough' lithium globally to meet EV targets, mining CEO says:
Climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act put the U.S. back on track toward significant emissions reductions, potentially reducing greenhouse gas output by 40% of 2005 levels.
But one miner warned that when it comes to the transportation sector, domestic resources for lithium, the most critical mineral used for electric vehicle production, may not be sufficient enough to meet some of the most ambitious targets. The Biden administration, for instance, aims to slash the sale of gas-powered vehicles to 50% of all new purchases by 2030.
"Yes, we'll [eventually] have enough, but not by that time," Keith Phillips, CEO of Piedmont Lithium (PLL), said in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live (video above). "There's going to be a real crunch to get the material. We don't have enough in the world to turn that much [lithium] production in the world by 2035."
[...] Piedmont Lithium is looking to cash in on the demand, as one of only a handful of U.S.-based lithium miners. On Thursday, the mining company announced plans to open a lithium processing operation in Tennessee, with construction set to begin in 2023.
[...] While carmakers like General Motors (GM) have rushed to secure partnerships with domestic mining operations in anticipation of the demand, the Albemarle (ALB) Silver Peak mine in Nevada remains the only operational lithium mine with meaningful output.
[...] The White House has moved to accelerate the process by invoking the Defense Production Act to bolster the production of minerals critical to EV manufacturing, including lithium and cobalt. The IRA also established the Advanced Production Investment Tax Credit for domestic production.
[...] "Energy security is a national issue," Phillips said. "I think you'll see companies that are thinking about battery plants in different parts of the world or lithium conversion plants coming to America because this investment tax credit will be very valuable...The market opportunity is huge."
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:08AM (4 children)
Lithium occurrence on Earth [wikipedia.org]
The total mass of EV is and will be much less than that. A better title: "'We don't have enough' lithium that is cheap-as-dirt to mine globally"
Besides, other battery chemistries are under development - we'll surely reach a point when we'll let lithium behind. E.g. aluminium ion battery [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 13 2022, @05:15AM (3 children)
All true. But, like cold fusion, all of that advanced technology is just a few years down the road. It's almost like vaporware.
I hope that while they are mining lithium from sea water, they can pump some nice clean water into the world's cities? I mean, desalination is really kind of old tech, but it ain't happening on the scale we need. What makes anyone think we'll start mining lithium from sea water?
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(Score: 1, Flamebait) by c0lo on Tuesday September 13 2022, @08:51AM
The way I feel the Murican corporations, 't'll be other way around there.
That is, they'll get the main profit from selling desal to Calis (you need to live first to drive an EV, innit?) and after then will sell "pre-concentrated sea water" to the "lithium miners".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @09:50AM (1 child)
On an industrial scale, mining Li from seawater isn't particularly difficult, it just costs about twice the current market price so no one bothers.
Don't worry about it, as supplies dwindle, the price will rise and market forces will take care of it. Note that lithium is currently about $70/kg and a Tesla only has about 10 kg in it. Even tripling the price of lithium should only add about $1400 to the price of the car.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Tuesday September 13 2022, @06:17PM
I was skeptical of this, but googled around and found Lithium concentrations are on the order of 100 ppb. A test run was done in a more concentrated area (Great Salt Lake) and the electrical input cost was around $2/kg. Of course electricity isn't the only cost and seawater has much lower concentration but it sounds plausible.
I thought it would be like gold, but the concentration for that is much lower--on the order of 10 parts per *trillion*. Nobody has found an economical way to extract that, even with gold having a much higher price.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by higuita on Tuesday September 13 2022, @04:08AM (10 children)
This is exactly why Toyota started with hybrid car and end gave up of full electrical and invested in hydrogen powered cars!
They made the math and found that it would very hard to mine enough required components for full electrical cars, but that they were enough for hybrids... add fuel cell investigation and you could end replace the gasoline with hydrogen. Toyota also avoid lithium based batteries, as the hybrid charge/discharge rate is much higher and would damage a lithium battery too quickly.
While hydrogen have many problems, lithium and other important metals are hard to get and environmentally hard to manage. Sure, China, remote Chile areas are "fine" with mining lithium, but many of the new projected mines are facing hard resistance from population, you literally remove a mountain, cook and wash all that with many chemicals to extract those metals and are left with usually contaminated residues and water. Politicians in a far away capital may agree with the "easy" money, but in places with tribunals do work, many of those projects are freeze. Getting lithium and not care about the environment is lot cheaper than trying to really take care and recover everything. Most mining companies only want the cheaper options of course or else the final product will be too expensive to be sold in quantity
Notice that this is not just lithium, other many other components are required...
alternative battery techs are welcome, but most still have to be real live tested, outside the labs
So in the end, we (world) are late by at least 20 years because main powers looked to the cheap petroleum and failed to really invest in alternatives
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday September 13 2022, @04:17AM (9 children)
While hydrogen fuel cell is way more efficient than just burning it ICE-fashion, the hydrogen storage of the present makes hydrogen a poor choice for an EV (too low energy density/mass) - the battery still wins [volkswagenag.com] for now.
If Toyota finds better ways to solve the storage problem, the equation may change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @05:08AM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 13 2022, @09:00AM
Where "cheaply" means 165 MJ/22.4m^3 of methane at atmospheric pressure, at 100% efficiency - that is not including the energy to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and heat loses.
Otherwise, everything is true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Tuesday September 13 2022, @01:29PM (6 children)
Methane has a lot lower energy density than does hydrogen. OTOH, it's easier to compress and store, and doesn't burn as fiercely in an accident. There are good reasons why medium chain hydrocarbons (i.e. gas) have been popular as a fuel. Compactness and ease of storage are high on that list. What's really needed is a fluid that will absorb and release hydrogen the way blood does oxygen. Then refueling would be drain out the used fluid, and pump in saturated fluid. But the fluid would need to be able to absorb LOTS of hydrogen, and release it nearly completely. This would make more sense for a fuel cell than for an internal combustion engine. But nobody's come up with such a thing. There are some solids that will absorb and release hydrogen, though I don't know how well, but it's hard to pump them from one tank to another.
If you're going to use methane, don't bother with the "strip it down to hydrogen" step, get it directly from a bio-reactor. You'll waste a lot less energy. Remember, a bunch of "cheap step"s add up to an expensive step.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @05:48PM (5 children)
Which basically means fuck all if the hydrogen storage and transport technology you have is such that your energy losses are greater than the cost of gathering atmospheric CO2 to convert the hydrogen into methane and the losses involved in transporting that methane before use. I'd been thinking of it as a stop-gap measure until such time as better hydrogen storage technology is developed that is more efficient than applying the Sabatier reaction. The Sabatier reaction has been known since 1897; there is nothing experimental about it, so a bunch of chemical engineers could probably build an industrial plant to do this fairly easily. Not so for the pie in the sky tech of some fluid that could store hydrogen the way haemoglobin stores oxygen. I've been considering it as a means of storing energy from such places as solar or wind farms, which could crack water with excess electricity into hydrogen and oxygen, and then convert the hydrogen into methane for use at later times when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. Whether this is more efficient than current hydrogen storage/transport or battery technology is something that should be studied.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @11:12PM (2 children)
DOn't know details, but I heard from a smart friend that making NH3 (ammonia) with surplus electricity (say, giant floating wind turbines) and then burning that in ICE is another potential fuel for transportation.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday September 14 2022, @05:21PM
Ammonia is something that you don't want in a vehicle subject to crashes that empty the fuel tank. It's a deadly gas even at low concentrations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2022, @06:26AM
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 15 2022, @03:43AM (1 child)
Actually, it means a lot. It means you've got to compress the gas a lot more. It doesn't mean it won't work, but the trade-offs are such that a mobile platform, like a car, would probably need to run off liquefied gas, and methane might not be the best choice for that. Butane or propane might be better.
What would probably REALLY be better is synthetic gasoline. Start with a methane feedstock and do the opposite of cracking it. But I'm not at all sure what that would entail. I believe I've heard of it being done, but I'm not really sure what feedstock they started with. There's this: https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/08/15/219289/natural-gas-to-gasoline/ [technologyreview.com] , but note that it's about a decade old.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2022, @06:11AM