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>50-70% That’s incredible. I presume this is because no one has been looking for large reserves of lithium until recently.
by trianglem 6y ago
>50-70%
That’s incredible. I presume this is because no one has been looking for large reserves of lithium until recently.
- samatman 6y agoEasy lithium is in salars aka salt flats. They serve like a natural chromatography column, and some of the strata contain double-digit amounts of the ion (by molar mass, not weight, lithium is quite light). There's no salar like Salar de Uyuni, so no, it isn't a simple matter of looking harder. There's plenty of lithium-bearing rock, for some value of 'plenty', but this is both expensive, and entails grinding and leaching ore, which is enormously more environmentally destructive and energy intensive.