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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Located in the 28-mile-long and 22-mile-wide McDermitt Caldera, the discovery of the deposit will be a massive boost to the United States' lithium reserves, which have been estimated at just one million metric tons. Most of the world's major deposits are in countries outside of North America, such as Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, China and Australia. It could also encourage more US investment in electric cars and will alleviate fears over lithium shortages – it's thought that a million metric tons of lithium will be needed by 2024.
"It could change the dynamics of lithium globally, in terms of price, security of supply and geopolitics," Belgian geologist Anouk Borst told Chemistry World. "The US would have its own supply of lithium and industries would be less scared about supply shortages."
The size of the deposit still has to be confirmed, but Lithium Americas Corporation says it expects to start mining the supply in 2026.
[...] Not everyone is celebrating the discovery, especially the Native American tribes who say the land is sacred. There are also potential dangers to native wildlife, and researchers are worried that the project will cause groundwater levels to drop to dangerous levels. Even NASA has spoken out against mining in the area. The space agency has been using Nevada's Railroad Valley lakebed since 1993 to accurately gauge the time it takes for satellite signals to travel to Earth and back, allowing it to calibrate the satellites.
(Score: 3, Touché) by ShovelOperator1 on Thursday September 14 2023, @06:31AM (7 children)
Are we going to spend it all on easily combustible batteries instead of leaving something for re-generation in future thermonuclear reactors? We have a history of wasting some nice elements this way.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2023, @08:55AM (6 children)
I'm not sure you understand the difference between chemical reactions and nuclear reactions
Chemical reactions (eg like you get in batteries) don't destroy elements.
(Score: 2) by ShovelOperator1 on Thursday September 14 2023, @05:16PM (5 children)
Of course, but it's much, much more difficult to get lithium back from distributed battery leftovers instead of processing from an easily available minerals.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2023, @05:34PM
https://www.scrapmonster.com/scrap-yard/price/lithium-ion-battery-scrap/122 [scrapmonster.com]
Lithium batteries are being recycled, but likely for other precious metals, not the lithium -- site above says average USA price paid for scrap Li batteries is something over USD$ 0.50/pound.
This company is trying to make lithium recycling cost effective, https://americanbatterytechnology.com/what-will-it-take-to-recycle-millions-of-worn-out-ev-batteries/ [americanbatterytechnology.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2023, @09:36PM (2 children)
You can extract lithium from seawater at about double the cost of extracting it from these sort of mines. Lithium availability is not a problem, just let the market sort it out. When the price is reliably that high those extraction plants will be built.
The reason they haven't already is due to investor shortsightedness. You can extract a lot of other things during the process, and if you do it right you also end up with a significant amount of fresh-water which can be valuable in the right places.
The problem is that investors don't want "this will produce a lot of things, each of which is not enough to cover the costs on it's own, but the total will." They want "this is our product, here is the cost and >100% revenue".
When the price of lithium gets high enough, the proposal will change to "this is our product, here is the cost and >100% revenue, and all these other things will be bonuses" and then the plants will get built.
(Score: 2) by ShovelOperator1 on Friday September 15 2023, @07:00AM (1 child)
I still think that we shouldn't overestimate the market ability.
I still remember collecting various things from citizens when the previously commonly available materials got more and more scarce, starting from British recycling of records during WW2, American recycling of precious metals for ?particle accelerators? during early cold war and lots of such actions in Europe.
And about market sorting it out, in some EU countries, its now more profitable to make the scrap collecting yard burn "itself" overnight than to run it. This will unfortunately go worse when the populist governments will act using people's superstitions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2023, @10:21PM
Local governments may interfere with markets, but the market for lithium is worldwide, and anywhere with access to the sea and power can build a lithium extraction plant. The ocean source of lithium is effectively infinite.
The global price of lithium is capped at about twice the current price and the supply is unlimited. Scarcity of lithium is just agenda driven crap.
Also not often mentioned in these sort of articles is that the raw cost of lithium is a small part of the cost of battery-powered things. Doubling the cost of lithium might add a couple of hundred dollars to a Tesla bill of materials.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 15 2023, @12:01PM
Only because lithium batteries don't come in formats that are easy to recycle. Change that with working recycling infrastructure, and your sentence flips the other way.