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As far as I know so far most of the lithium used has been from existing copper mines, where there's a lot of lithium, so that's made pinpointing it and extract
by zpeti 6y ago
As far as I know so far most of the lithium used has been from existing copper mines, where there's a lot of lithium, so that's made pinpointing it and extract it fairly cheap. I remember reading there's 5-10 years worth of lithium left in these mines.
It will be interesting to see what happens once we need to start looking for new sources again.
- baybal2 6y agoThe cathode material is pretty much the sole contributor to material cost. Plastic, anode, casing, current collector plates/terminals all make less than a quarter of the price. Main contributor to the cathode powder price is cobalt, and its unpredictable price: bad weather in Congo? Prepare to see the price increase n-fold within few weeks. Nickel comes second, to much lesser extent. LFP cells use radically different cathode chemistry from common cell types, and use no cobalt, or nickel at all, hence the low price. We dump phosphates on in the fields by gigatonnes after all.
- eru 6y agoCobalt futures are traded on the LME. So factories can lock in fixed prices for cobalt in advance.
- eigenvalue 6y agoThis is not a deep market, with daily value traded in the millions of dollar (not hundreds of millions or billions).
- eru 6y agoYou can also go to your bank and have them sell you a derivative over the counter. It won't help your average price (just the opposite), but it can take the unpredictability out.
- Tade0 6y agoThere's an abundance of lithium in the oceans, but it's heavily diluted, so currently there's no large scale process in place to obtain it. But it is possible in principle, just expensive using the technology of today.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI know nothing about what it'd take to extract elements from seawater, but I've heard people say similar things about gold and uranium. I wonder if the economics for "mining" seawater become more favorable if you try to extract multiple types at once, maybe in a pipeline. Extract the uranium, then the gold, then the lithium, etc.
- newsclues 6y agoPerhaps with desalination can produce other materials besides drinking water?
- yardie 6y agoDesalination is extremely energy intensive to get potable water. If you're using RO extraction it's 10:1. 90-95% of water is returned back to the sea. That little bit of potable water is just the bonus of compressing saltwater into saltwater.
- newsclues 6y agoYes, but there are desalination plants being constructed at great cost to provide drinking water, so why not get the available minerals etc at the same time...
- Robotbeat 6y agoLithium and uranium are basically the only two things that could be worth extracting from ocean water besides salt itself. It’s not crazy expensive to do it. And you save a bunch of money by using the brine left over from desalination. But you can find naturally occurring brines with higher lithium concentration, so why bother with ocean water? ...in other words, lithium is plentiful, and the cheapest is from places like South America where it is extracted from brines similar to how sea salt is extracted, so the process is cheap, too (which is why we don’t really do hard rock mining of lithium any more... sea salt like evaporation ponds are just much cheaper). (Another interesting source is the brines from geothermal power stations... there are some at power stations I California that are rich in lithium and there are efforts to extract it... two birds and one stone. Example: https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1066 https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1066 )
- barney54 6y agoThe vast majority of lithium does not come from copper mines, but from lithium mines such as the Salar de Atacama in Chile https://www.lithiumchile.ca/project-item/salar-de-atacama/ https://www.lithiumchile.ca/project-item/salar-de-atacama/ with evaporation and spodumene mining in Australia: https://www.albemarle.com/businesses/lithium/products/spodumene https://www.albemarle.com/businesses/lithium/products/spodum... There is a lot of lithium potential in places such as the lithium triangle in South America.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoThe next "iron ore boom" in Australia is supposed to be lithium. There's a lot of deposits waiting to be commercialised apparently. Just waiting for some other country to start building enough battery factories. Because actually making anything in Australia seems to be impossible.
- ksec 6y ago> Because actually making anything in Australia seems to be impossible. I keep hearing that. Could you expand on this bit? For those of who are are far away and have zero idea why. While I know labour cost and protection are high. I would have thought battery factory is now highly automated.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoMore a mindset than economics. Mining is what Australia does. No-one really knows how to set up a manufacturing base. Investors aren't willing to invest in it. There's no end of stories about how it's too small of a domestic market, and too far from export markets (all of which are true for lots of other countries with thriving export markets), or that the labour costs are too high (also true for Germany, which has a thriving manufacturing export industry). And everyone's rich from mining, so why bother? Same for the solar industry. If there was ever a place to build enough solar to power the planet, it's Western Australia. We could build the batteries, too, from local ingredients. But it's all too hard and too complicated and why do that when we can make enough money from just mining the lithium?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoWouldn't you be killed in this distribution part of the solar power for the world story? What form would you be shipping the energy in?
- namibj 6y agoSubmarine HVDC should work.
- pfdietz 6y agoLithium mining has little to do with copper.