9 ms·

The Supply Chain for Lithium (2020)

81 points by lai-yin 6y ago

azinman2 6y ago
There was also an active mine in CA (I forget the name), but it closed down a few years ago... not sure why. I'm guessing it's the fact that lithium requires many harsh chemicals to extract and is a very 'dirty' process. Probably why China does most of the processing -- they're far more willing to pollute their own environment than most countries currently. For independence to occur, we either need to accept the environmental wreckage, or find a better way to contain it and make it 'cleaner'.
- Animats 6y ago
  You're probably thinking of the Mountain Pass, CA rare earths mine. Molycorp finally got the process clean enough that even the Sierra Club approved. Then China cut the price on rare earths and Molycorp went bankrupt. Then China raised the price on rare earths. The Mountain Pass mine is operating again, but it's not clear who owns it now. Names involved are JHL Capital Group, QVT Financial, Shenghe Resources Holding Co. Ltd., and Fortress Value Acquisition Corp. The output has to go to China for processing because the plan to build US extraction facilities at Mountain Pass has slipped from 2020 to 2022.
  - southerntofu 6y ago
    > Molycorp finally got the process clean enough that even the Sierra Club approved. Being praised by a big NGO is in no way a marker of being "clean enough". Sierra Club (like Greenpeace) is well-known in ecologist circles to be eco-hostile and business-friendly.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      I want to (and do) spend money to lessen our impact on the environment, and I want to do more, but I've met environmentalists who unironically wish that humanity would cease to exist. I am not interested in appeasing them. I am doubly uninterested in environmental policy that encourages bad options over much-better-but-still-imperfect options.
      - caymanjim 6y ago
        Anti-nuclear environmentalists are directly responsible for our continued over-reliance on fossil fuels. Add anti-damming and anti-windfarm environmentalists into the mix, and the environmental movement is anything but.
        southerntofu 6y ago
        Fossil fuel are terrible, but nuclear energy is arguably just as terrible. Also, nuclear energy (like most pretend-green energies) does not work without considerable amounts of fossil fuels, from extraction to actual energy production. If only that, building a nuclear facility is going to take a lot of fossil fuel to power the machines, and use a lot of concrete, which requires even more fossil fuel to produce and bring over. Water and wind turbines are a little different. Their ecological impact depends on their size. The problem here is most countries insist on urbanization which concentrates energy production and therefore tends to centralize energy production away from usage, in big power stations. Producing a little electricity with turbines has a quasi-null environmental impact, and is good for local usage for a small village. You'll find that people on the countryside are opposing industry's project not because they're new and ugly, but because they have actual concerns about the damage produced by such installations. How much resources does it take to build a wind turbine? How many tons of concrete does it take to anchor so many tons of steel? How does this considerable of concrete affect the local ecosystem? People are not entirely stupid. They protest the nuclear industry and windfarms because they've seen the damage, and they understand these proposals do not bring required change. We need momentum to reduce energy/resources usage, not to produce ever more energy. If you want to understand why many people from here (France) strongly oppose nuclear power, i recommend you do some reading on Areva's many failures (engineering-wise) and on Françafrique, the french neocolonial system which ensures uranium supplies.
        caymanjim 6y ago
        You've demonstrated my point. You're pointing out some valid concerns. They're insignificant in comparison to the fossil fuel alternative. Environmentalists make perfect the enemy of good every time.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    > Then China cut the price on rare earths and Molycorp went bankrupt. Then China raised the price on rare earths. Speaking of which, China loves projection. They recently accused Australia of dumping products such as wine in order to bankrupt the local Chinese vineyards. As you can imagine, the many independent Australia wine exporters were rather perplexed by this, because they are not centrally state-controlled. In fact, such price-fixing collusion would be illegal here. Any time China accuses another country of some sort of misdeed, just assume they're thinking that everyone acts the same way they themselves do.
    - philipkglass 6y ago
      Any time China accuses another country of some sort of misdeed, just assume they're thinking that everyone acts the same way they themselves do. You can fill in "pretty much any country" for "China" when it comes to trade disputes like this. The vast majority of between-nation dumping accusations seem to be unfounded or extremely thinly founded -- e.g. US accusing China of solar "dumping" when solar equipment manufacturers get state support by tax credits or low interest loans. US states pay to attract manufacturing too [1]. China can make t-shirts and tea cups cheaper than western producers. This has been known since before China joined the WTO. Objections to China also producing sophisticated goods cheaper seem to be mostly post-hoc regret. They weren't supposed to climb the value chain like that. Our countries were supposed to keep the sophisticated production while they just make trinkets! I actually think that it is a problem that the western world has lost so much domestic productive capacity, but countering that with hollow accusations of dumping is dishonest. Countries should formally alter trade obligations to reinvigorate domestic production instead of fabricating rationalizations to match the text of old treaties. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/796344782/wisconsin-foxconn-and-the-lure-of-state-tax-incentives https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/796344782/wisconsin-foxconn-a...
- nickik 6y ago
  I'm not aware of a lithium mine in California. North Carolina was where most of the world's lithium was mined and refined. Pretty much all mines for lithium closed in the US because it was simply cheaper to get from either South America brine and then Australian spodumene mining. While the US stopped mining lithium however there is still a lot of lithium refinement in North Carolina. And more refinement capacity is already planned both there and other places in the US. The main reason it is in China is because China made EV and the supply chain a priority. However, most of the downstream refinement of the downstream for actual battery materials actually happens in Korea. So a lot of lithium is mined in West Australia, transported to China and then the Korea/Japan until it is shipped to Nevada where it turns into a battery. In the next few years you should see the whole supply-chain from mining to battery in the US.
  - SkyMarshal 6y ago
    >However, most of the downstream refinement of the downstream for actual battery materials actually happens in Korea. So a lot of lithium is mined in West Australia, transported to China and then the Korea/Japan until it is shipped to Nevada where it turns into a battery. Why does it need to stop off in China on its way to refineries in Korea/Japan/Nevada?
    - samatman 6y ago
      It leaves Australia as ore, and leaves China as enriched oxide/carbonate, but by no means of the purity needed for batteries. This leaves Korea as highly purified final product, suitable for building cells.
hristov 6y ago
Read this with a huge grain of salt. Clearpath is a conservative lobbying organization. In the end they use the article to sell several bills (most of them sponsored by republicans) even if some of the bills it touts (the ones by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) have nothing to do with lithium but are about rare earth metals instead.
- tomcam 6y ago
  I look forward to your addressing some of the information actually presented in the article.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    Oh come on don't be naive. Have you ever seen something put out about renewable energy by a "conservative thinktank" that wasn't full of shoddy reasoning or outright misinformation?
    - barney54 6y ago
      Examples please. Specifically examples in this article would be nice. If there are so many problems here, what are they?
      - jhayward 6y ago
        In todays real world, where it takes 10 times the time and effort to refute bullshit than to transmit it, your request is nothing but support for the disinformation campaign. Academic ideals of debate are not what happens now. Please adapt.
        tomcam 6y ago
        Am I to understand that the new standard is simply to judge the quality of information from its publication source alone? Would you mind giving me a list of approved sites?
wonnage 6y ago
I wonder what parallels we can draw with oil. The US resumed being a major oil producer in the last decade thanks to the fracking boom. I feel like we got a lot of propaganda about energy independence and not supporting brutal Middle East dictators (that our CIA set up). We got into a price war with the Saudis and Russia [1] and lost. With Covid killing demand this year, the US shale oil industry is on the verge of imploding. I can't see the US competing long-term with cheaper rivals in any natural resource production. We're hamstrung because the main tools for sustaining such industries (state ownership, tariffs, massive subsidies) are politically unpalatable/anticapitalist. "Energy independence" was just a cover for private industry to make a quick buck. Shale firms have not produced a profit [2], workers are being laid off left and right, but owners and investors benefitted massively from the grift [3]. 1. https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714 https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6... 2. https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-and-fall-of-shale-oil/ https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-and-f... 3. https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom-fraud-alta-mesa-enron https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom...
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Thrilled to see Desmog cited on HN - they are doing yeoman’s work
deathanatos 6y ago
> just transporting completed battery cells from South Korea to Michigan adds a 4.1 kg CO2e/kWh footprint Some Googling says my phone has a storage capacity of 2800mAh, at 3.8V, or 10.64 Wh. Scaling the footprint, that's 43 grams CO₂e, for a device I replace every several years? A quick Google says a car is 411 grams CO₂ … per mile. The phone seems insignificant? The EV usage is probably worse, though it'd be nice if the article didn't suddenly switch to pounds. Presuming the 10k phones number is accurate, we're up to 430kg. But that's 1046 miles of travel for a normal car. If it can make that up in terms of cleaner energy usage over the life of the battery, that seems better than the current state?
- jojobas 6y ago
  They are made in SK because Koreans work for less. It's directly related to the CO2 question because lower wages translate to (almost 2-fold) lower emissions per person, despite their more industrial economy.
  - jeofken 6y ago
    Is the process of making batteries easy to move to low cost countries? I’d wager it’s in Korea because of their amazingly developed electronics industry, but it’s also true that the average American makes more. If it’s easy to move to low wage countries, there are countries in Europe with lower wages, and surely American states as well.
    - jojobas 6y ago
      Battery manufacturing is somewhat different from other electronics, but that's beside the point. They built new plants for batteries in SK and are building more because it's cheaper overall. "Cheaper" is not an abstract economic coincidence, it directly translates to "less emissions".
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  > 411 grams CO₂ … per mile At first glance I thought that that can't possibly be right. Some quick calculations for my Toyota Camry (non-hybrid): It gets about 7.8L/100 km, which is 62 miles, which is 126 mL per mile. A litre of petrol produces 2.3 kg of CO2, so that's 290 grams per mile. Shit. Cars are worse than I thought!
hugs 6y ago
Years ago I visited family in Chile, we mostly stayed in Santiago, but we took a side trip flying north to the Atacama Desert, which happens to be where the lithium mines are located. (Chile has the largest lithium reserves in the world, by far.) We were told most of the flights (737 sized aircraft) are usually full of miners on the flights. Most of the miners live in Santiago, fly up to Atacama to work for the week, then fly home at the end of the week. Even though we never saw the mines (we were sightseeing in other areas), after the trip, I got the impression that lithium mining in Chile is very big business, and if America wants a reliable source of lithium in the future, it should foster strong relations with Chile.
nimbius 6y ago
Im extremely Suspicious of this site. The 'advisors' appear to consist largely of nuclear and traditional energy leadership. Given the carbon maths put forward by other hn members this seems like a hit piece on renewables... Looking further into the site its designed to promote nuclear, gas and "clean" coal so I'm not surprised its got an axe to grind on batteries...
- lai-yin 6y ago
  The carbon maths referenced by other hn users were very interesting, but they didn't debunk anything in the article. What specifically about the article did you find misleading? I thought it was an interesting and comprehensive introduction to the challenges and opportunities in the lithium supply chain. I would also enjoy alternative resources that aren't produced by think tanks. But it seems unfair to denigrate think tanks out of hand.
mint2 6y ago
> U.S. national security is weakened if the ability to build in the United States depends on materials and exchanges far outside U.S. control. While true, this is odd. We’ve outsourced so much manufacturing that there’s a ton of different items we can’t build. We’re in the middle of a pandemic where we found we couldn’t make enough Ppe and there was literally a single American factory left for n95s. Having the materials available is important but useless if we can’t do anything ourselves with them.
PointyFluff 6y ago
Asteroid mining. We could be doing that, but Murica would rather spend it's time at the maul.
rmm 6y ago
As someone part of the mining side of the supply chain ( hard rock) happy to answer any questions
- instaheat 6y ago
  Do you think it would be helpful if there were a platform for anyone involved in this industry to communicate with one another? With the ability to register as a mining organization, recycler, auto manufacturer, consumer, etc?

81 points by lai-yin 6y ago

There was also an active mine in CA (I forget the name), but it closed down a few years ago... not sure why. I'm guessing it's the fact that lithium requires many harsh chemicals to extract and is a very 'dirty' process. Probably why China does most of the processing -- they're far more willing to pollute their own environment than most countries currently. For independence to occur, we either need to accept the environmental wreckage, or find a better way to contain it and make it 'cleaner'.

Animats 6y ago
You're probably thinking of the Mountain Pass, CA rare earths mine. Molycorp finally got the process clean enough that even the Sierra Club approved. Then China cut the price on rare earths and Molycorp went bankrupt. Then China raised the price on rare earths. The Mountain Pass mine is operating again, but it's not clear who owns it now. Names involved are JHL Capital Group, QVT Financial, Shenghe Resources Holding Co. Ltd., and Fortress Value Acquisition Corp. The output has to go to China for processing because the plan to build US extraction facilities at Mountain Pass has slipped from 2020 to 2022.
- southerntofu 6y ago
  > Molycorp finally got the process clean enough that even the Sierra Club approved. Being praised by a big NGO is in no way a marker of being "clean enough". Sierra Club (like Greenpeace) is well-known in ecologist circles to be eco-hostile and business-friendly.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    I want to (and do) spend money to lessen our impact on the environment, and I want to do more, but I've met environmentalists who unironically wish that humanity would cease to exist. I am not interested in appeasing them. I am doubly uninterested in environmental policy that encourages bad options over much-better-but-still-imperfect options.
    - caymanjim 6y ago
      Anti-nuclear environmentalists are directly responsible for our continued over-reliance on fossil fuels. Add anti-damming and anti-windfarm environmentalists into the mix, and the environmental movement is anything but.
      - southerntofu 6y ago
        Fossil fuel are terrible, but nuclear energy is arguably just as terrible. Also, nuclear energy (like most pretend-green energies) does not work without considerable amounts of fossil fuels, from extraction to actual energy production. If only that, building a nuclear facility is going to take a lot of fossil fuel to power the machines, and use a lot of concrete, which requires even more fossil fuel to produce and bring over. Water and wind turbines are a little different. Their ecological impact depends on their size. The problem here is most countries insist on urbanization which concentrates energy production and therefore tends to centralize energy production away from usage, in big power stations. Producing a little electricity with turbines has a quasi-null environmental impact, and is good for local usage for a small village. You'll find that people on the countryside are opposing industry's project not because they're new and ugly, but because they have actual concerns about the damage produced by such installations. How much resources does it take to build a wind turbine? How many tons of concrete does it take to anchor so many tons of steel? How does this considerable of concrete affect the local ecosystem? People are not entirely stupid. They protest the nuclear industry and windfarms because they've seen the damage, and they understand these proposals do not bring required change. We need momentum to reduce energy/resources usage, not to produce ever more energy. If you want to understand why many people from here (France) strongly oppose nuclear power, i recommend you do some reading on Areva's many failures (engineering-wise) and on Françafrique, the french neocolonial system which ensures uranium supplies.
        caymanjim 6y ago
        You've demonstrated my point. You're pointing out some valid concerns. They're insignificant in comparison to the fossil fuel alternative. Environmentalists make perfect the enemy of good every time.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  > Then China cut the price on rare earths and Molycorp went bankrupt. Then China raised the price on rare earths. Speaking of which, China loves projection. They recently accused Australia of dumping products such as wine in order to bankrupt the local Chinese vineyards. As you can imagine, the many independent Australia wine exporters were rather perplexed by this, because they are not centrally state-controlled. In fact, such price-fixing collusion would be illegal here. Any time China accuses another country of some sort of misdeed, just assume they're thinking that everyone acts the same way they themselves do.
  - philipkglass 6y ago
    Any time China accuses another country of some sort of misdeed, just assume they're thinking that everyone acts the same way they themselves do. You can fill in "pretty much any country" for "China" when it comes to trade disputes like this. The vast majority of between-nation dumping accusations seem to be unfounded or extremely thinly founded -- e.g. US accusing China of solar "dumping" when solar equipment manufacturers get state support by tax credits or low interest loans. US states pay to attract manufacturing too [1]. China can make t-shirts and tea cups cheaper than western producers. This has been known since before China joined the WTO. Objections to China also producing sophisticated goods cheaper seem to be mostly post-hoc regret. They weren't supposed to climb the value chain like that. Our countries were supposed to keep the sophisticated production while they just make trinkets! I actually think that it is a problem that the western world has lost so much domestic productive capacity, but countering that with hollow accusations of dumping is dishonest. Countries should formally alter trade obligations to reinvigorate domestic production instead of fabricating rationalizations to match the text of old treaties. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/796344782/wisconsin-foxconn-and-the-lure-of-state-tax-incentives https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/796344782/wisconsin-foxconn-a...
nickik 6y ago
I'm not aware of a lithium mine in California. North Carolina was where most of the world's lithium was mined and refined. Pretty much all mines for lithium closed in the US because it was simply cheaper to get from either South America brine and then Australian spodumene mining. While the US stopped mining lithium however there is still a lot of lithium refinement in North Carolina. And more refinement capacity is already planned both there and other places in the US. The main reason it is in China is because China made EV and the supply chain a priority. However, most of the downstream refinement of the downstream for actual battery materials actually happens in Korea. So a lot of lithium is mined in West Australia, transported to China and then the Korea/Japan until it is shipped to Nevada where it turns into a battery. In the next few years you should see the whole supply-chain from mining to battery in the US.
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  >However, most of the downstream refinement of the downstream for actual battery materials actually happens in Korea. So a lot of lithium is mined in West Australia, transported to China and then the Korea/Japan until it is shipped to Nevada where it turns into a battery. Why does it need to stop off in China on its way to refineries in Korea/Japan/Nevada?
  - samatman 6y ago
    It leaves Australia as ore, and leaves China as enriched oxide/carbonate, but by no means of the purity needed for batteries. This leaves Korea as highly purified final product, suitable for building cells.

hristov 6y ago

Read this with a huge grain of salt. Clearpath is a conservative lobbying organization. In the end they use the article to sell several bills (most of them sponsored by republicans) even if some of the bills it touts (the ones by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) have nothing to do with lithium but are about rare earth metals instead.

tomcam 6y ago
I look forward to your addressing some of the information actually presented in the article.
- p1necone 6y ago
  Oh come on don't be naive. Have you ever seen something put out about renewable energy by a "conservative thinktank" that wasn't full of shoddy reasoning or outright misinformation?
  - barney54 6y ago
    Examples please. Specifically examples in this article would be nice. If there are so many problems here, what are they?
    - jhayward 6y ago
      In todays real world, where it takes 10 times the time and effort to refute bullshit than to transmit it, your request is nothing but support for the disinformation campaign. Academic ideals of debate are not what happens now. Please adapt.
      - tomcam 6y ago
        Am I to understand that the new standard is simply to judge the quality of information from its publication source alone? Would you mind giving me a list of approved sites?

wonnage 6y ago

I wonder what parallels we can draw with oil. The US resumed being a major oil producer in the last decade thanks to the fracking boom. I feel like we got a lot of propaganda about energy independence and not supporting brutal Middle East dictators (that our CIA set up). We got into a price war with the Saudis and Russia [1] and lost. With Covid killing demand this year, the US shale oil industry is on the verge of imploding. I can't see the US competing long-term with cheaper rivals in any natural resource production. We're hamstrung because the main tools for sustaining such industries (state ownership, tariffs, massive subsidies) are politically unpalatable/anticapitalist. "Energy independence" was just a cover for private industry to make a quick buck. Shale firms have not produced a profit [2], workers are being laid off left and right, but owners and investors benefitted massively from the grift [3]. 1. https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714 https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6... 2. https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-and-fall-of-shale-oil/ https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-and-f... 3. https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom-fraud-alta-mesa-enron https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom...

selimthegrim 6y ago
Thrilled to see Desmog cited on HN - they are doing yeoman’s work

deathanatos 6y ago

> just transporting completed battery cells from South Korea to Michigan adds a 4.1 kg CO2e/kWh footprint Some Googling says my phone has a storage capacity of 2800mAh, at 3.8V, or 10.64 Wh. Scaling the footprint, that's 43 grams CO₂e, for a device I replace every several years? A quick Google says a car is 411 grams CO₂ … per mile. The phone seems insignificant? The EV usage is probably worse, though it'd be nice if the article didn't suddenly switch to pounds. Presuming the 10k phones number is accurate, we're up to 430kg. But that's 1046 miles of travel for a normal car. If it can make that up in terms of cleaner energy usage over the life of the battery, that seems better than the current state?

jojobas 6y ago
They are made in SK because Koreans work for less. It's directly related to the CO2 question because lower wages translate to (almost 2-fold) lower emissions per person, despite their more industrial economy.
- jeofken 6y ago
  Is the process of making batteries easy to move to low cost countries? I’d wager it’s in Korea because of their amazingly developed electronics industry, but it’s also true that the average American makes more. If it’s easy to move to low wage countries, there are countries in Europe with lower wages, and surely American states as well.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    Battery manufacturing is somewhat different from other electronics, but that's beside the point. They built new plants for batteries in SK and are building more because it's cheaper overall. "Cheaper" is not an abstract economic coincidence, it directly translates to "less emissions".
jiggawatts 6y ago
> 411 grams CO₂ … per mile At first glance I thought that that can't possibly be right. Some quick calculations for my Toyota Camry (non-hybrid): It gets about 7.8L/100 km, which is 62 miles, which is 126 mL per mile. A litre of petrol produces 2.3 kg of CO2, so that's 290 grams per mile. Shit. Cars are worse than I thought!

hugs 6y ago

Years ago I visited family in Chile, we mostly stayed in Santiago, but we took a side trip flying north to the Atacama Desert, which happens to be where the lithium mines are located. (Chile has the largest lithium reserves in the world, by far.) We were told most of the flights (737 sized aircraft) are usually full of miners on the flights. Most of the miners live in Santiago, fly up to Atacama to work for the week, then fly home at the end of the week. Even though we never saw the mines (we were sightseeing in other areas), after the trip, I got the impression that lithium mining in Chile is very big business, and if America wants a reliable source of lithium in the future, it should foster strong relations with Chile.

nimbius 6y ago

Im extremely Suspicious of this site. The 'advisors' appear to consist largely of nuclear and traditional energy leadership. Given the carbon maths put forward by other hn members this seems like a hit piece on renewables... Looking further into the site its designed to promote nuclear, gas and "clean" coal so I'm not surprised its got an axe to grind on batteries...

lai-yin 6y ago
The carbon maths referenced by other hn users were very interesting, but they didn't debunk anything in the article. What specifically about the article did you find misleading? I thought it was an interesting and comprehensive introduction to the challenges and opportunities in the lithium supply chain. I would also enjoy alternative resources that aren't produced by think tanks. But it seems unfair to denigrate think tanks out of hand.

mint2 6y ago

> U.S. national security is weakened if the ability to build in the United States depends on materials and exchanges far outside U.S. control. While true, this is odd. We’ve outsourced so much manufacturing that there’s a ton of different items we can’t build. We’re in the middle of a pandemic where we found we couldn’t make enough Ppe and there was literally a single American factory left for n95s. Having the materials available is important but useless if we can’t do anything ourselves with them.

PointyFluff 6y ago

Asteroid mining. We could be doing that, but Murica would rather spend it's time at the maul.

rmm 6y ago

As someone part of the mining side of the supply chain ( hard rock) happy to answer any questions

instaheat 6y ago
Do you think it would be helpful if there were a platform for anyone involved in this industry to communicate with one another? With the ability to register as a mining organization, recycler, auto manufacturer, consumer, etc?