China won't be pleased about that. They were predicted to control a third of the world's lithium within the next few years.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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I was just doing my Dr Evil thing thinking about how mad China is going to be about this.
Wdym? the company who owns the mine is owned by a chinese company lol. Thacker Pass Lithium Mine - Wikipedia 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.
Chinese Ganfeng holds less than 10% of it and it looks like every other big shareholder is North American or European
Who owns a company doesn't matter as much as where the resource is. Foreigners can't cut you off from your own country, and they can't sell anything without following national laws.
Which we can change if a majority want it changed.
They won't be able to actually start mining for 3-4 years, so they probably still will for a short period.
Skill issue.
America about to go to war against a volcano
Better than exploiting other countries, I suppose. But I think Lithium is a transitional battery source, and that we will move to much more efficient designs within a decade.
Not a chance.
Right now we’re using lithium-ion. In maybe a decade we’ll move to lithium-sulphide, and in perhaps 25 years we might see lithium-oxygen.
Either way, lithium is all you’ll see in commercially viable batteries for the next 50 years because lithium as an anode is as good as it gets on the Table of Elements.
Yes, you’ll see 100 reports per year about new battery tech but none of them will ever be scalable, safe enough, or cheap enough.
I mean, this kinda only applies to devices that need the highest energy density.
For situations where space isn't much of an issue, it can make more sense to use other forms of batteries that are cheaper per MWh. I agree Li-ion won't be replaced in phones etc. but for some applications that are stationary, it can make commercial sense to use something else.
We'll be moving bulk storage to molten sodium over the next 3 decades, lithium will be for high density applications, but they're working on sodium-air designs because the density is even higher than lion.
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Lithium is the most energy dense so most suitable for private transport but I think industrial and domestic storage won't be dominated by lithium in a decade or 2
You mean I won't be running my car off bacteria?!
If you want to do something like that, just get a car with a diesel engine and run biodiesel in it. No need to wait for new tech; an old '90s or early-2000s VW TDI (for example) is perfectly suitable.
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The volcanic crater is found along the Nevada-Oregon border.
The Lithium Americas Corporation “expects to begin mining in 2026. It will remove clay with water and then separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.”
All subsequent waste products will then be released into local waterways via "unfortunate accident" on a regular schedule, to maximize shareholder profits.
Sigh.
Sulfuric acid is one of the few chemicals that is bad to have around and can be controlled. The very first wet scrubbers to be designed (per WW2 tech here) were for dealing with it. Add water plus a calcium base like Diatomaceous earth and you get harmless sulfur-calcium salts. There are almost no local waterways and mining is very regulated.
Maybe be happy for once that more mining will be happening in a country that bothers to regulate environmental stuff and is closer to the consumer market.
I legitimately am, this is a win, especially since the deposit is in an entirely different economic and political sphere of influence from where all the other lithium is.
It's just so easy to assume the worst when it happens so often.
It doesn't happen often. You hear about it happening often. Observation bias. No one reads an article "everything fine at the mine". No, they read an article about a disaster from the 1970s caused by a scumbag.
A lot of freaken work and regulations has gone into make sure chemical plants don't explode and mining doesn't mess things up for decades. And no one gets credit for that. Any site this big is going to have at least monthly inspections there from the local DEP. Taking soil samples, reviewing logs, checking for the very things you mentioned like getting into waterways. Which again, desert.
The biggest environmental dangers I am betting they are going to have is a fight over city water and of course the normal greenhouse gas emissions that all of us are going to ignore.
On the bright side, that area is an endoheric basin, so at least it won't go all the way downriver to the ocean. It'll just, uh, build up in salt flats/dry lake beds instead, which obviously won't cause any problem at all.
Well, that's good news 🤣
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Now all they need is some poor immigrants to work on extracting it and they can make fat stacks
Something tells me there will be a new prison complex built in the area in the next few years
Why bring in immigrants when we have hundreds of children yearning for hard work and life building experiences.
The children yearn for the mines...
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Something else we won't benefit from. Nice. Uh. Go us.
Just imagine the shareholder value.
It could lead to more affordable Li-ion batteries.
It means we don't have to go to the Congo or through Russia, China, or others anymore. Which is a pretty big political relief because it means that we have a little bit more resource independence.
Maybe even a way we could compete on the global market if we play our cards right.
If they're smart, they'll use it to beef up our power grid for the global warming shock.
Unfortunately, I imagine @poopa_mo is right, and this is just going to beef up someone's bank account. Or rot in a warehouse.
Most Lithium comes from South America and Australia and has for some time. I do not believe that Lithium has ever had the geopolitical issues that other rare earth metals such as cobalt have had.
Yeah, the difference between lithium and oil is that oil is a consumable. If the price of oil goes up, that has an instant effect on energy/transportation costs. If the price of lithium goes up, it'll only affect the price of new batteries, and anything that's already in use is unaffected. It'll slow down investments in new projects, people might delay the purchase of a new car, etc, but it's a way smaller economic impact.
There's no good reason to use lithium for utility-scale power storage. We need it for transportation because it has the best power compared to its weight. Utility storage doesn't care as much about weight, and there are plenty of better options.
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So this means prices will go down, right? Right?
Only if demand levels off. Demand will not level off
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China owning the vast majority of raw lithium is not the world you want to live in. The world absolutely benefits from a greater spread of lithium sources.
There's also 32 million metric tons in Niland, California that can be harvested with green energy. I assume the same could be done with this deposit. Could be very good for domestic battery production and cost.
If this works out and is feasible it would be something of a game changer and would weaken some of our international dependencies
Yea a-a-a yea
I'm so happy...
‘cause today I found my friends…
They're in my head
I’m so ugly
Awesome. Now leave it there and don't let anyone touch it 😁
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