15 ms·
Steel and aluminum prices didn't rise 12x in the last 2 years [1]. It doesn't matter how much that lithium weighs on a scale. It matters how much it weighs agai
by Manuel_D 4y ago
Steel and aluminum prices didn't rise 12x in the last 2 years [1]. It doesn't matter how much that lithium weighs on a scale. It matters how much it weighs against your wallet.
1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
- jeffbee 4y agoI thought we are talking about the sizes of holes in the ground, not the cost.
- nawgz 4y agoDoesn't it seem likely the cost of the material directly relates to the size and difficulty of creating said hole in the ground?
- jeffbee 4y agoNo, that doesn't seem likely to me at all. Lithium prices are high because the industry is not very well developed and the demand is skyrocketing. Borax is co-located with lithium deposits (in some places) and is extracted by a similar process at similar scales and it costs 100x less than lithium. And for some reason nobody looks at the gigantic land scar at a borax mine and starts screaming about the environmental cost, because there's no oil billionaire astroturf fund dedicated to whining about boron.
- bombcar 4y agoOpen pit mines are huge and the biggest ones are for boring things like iron and copper: https://www.mpirecruitment.au/news/the-worlds-deepest-biggest-and-deadliest-open-pit-mines https://www.mpirecruitment.au/news/the-worlds-deepest-bigges...