4 ms·

It hasn't even doubled in the past 10 years. At today's global lithium mining rate, it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground. Nev

by evilos 4y ago

It hasn't even doubled in the past 10 years. At today's global lithium mining rate, it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground. Nevermind 4x. And then there's the human and environmental impact of all that mining. We're just talking about a single element. There's several more that are just as constrained if not worse. Today's batteries just aren't suited for grid storage.

defrost 4y ago
> It hasn't even doubled in the past 10 years. It was set to triple, except reasons. Still, "almost tripled" is better than "hasn't even doubled". 35K metric tonnes in 2012, 38K metric tonnes in 2016, 69K metric tonnes in 2017, 95K metric tonnes in 2018, 100K in 2021. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-... [2] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/metals-mining https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
- evilos 4y ago
  That's production. We were talking about global reserves. Which hasn't even doubled in 10 years.
  - defrost 4y ago
    Why would they though? There's sufficient known and proven reserves to not put any pressure on proving known resources. Why expend the capital on techical reports and economic feasibility studies to raise resources to reserves ahead of lead time on production demand?
    - evilos 4y ago
      Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground. 1% of surveyed mineral deposits become mines. Because for the better part of a decade, the green transition plan has been to move to solar/wind plus energy storage. The obvious question is, how many machines will we need? What kind? How much will it cost? The author of this report described how he convinced his management to fund this work. He works at a Finnish government geological survey organization. He told his management, "Who do you think the EU leadership will blame when they realize that we don't have anywhere near the resources needed to complete the green transition as it is imagined today?" They haven't done the math.
      - defrost 4y ago
        The spglobal link connects to a product (global database + updating tools) that S&P acquired from it's source here in Western Australia, between here and the Toronto TSX you'll find the vast weight of companies and capital that form the bulk of global transnational mining (sans Russia and China, although they are threaded in and tracked also). > Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground. Bear in mind that "minerals being found" is when they first become "resources" (see JORC terminology which has become standard across the global mineral industry) .. when minerals have been proven (tightly estimated by volume and density) and had an Economic Feasibility Technical Report completed and filed they become "reserves" .. known amounts with a costing to extract. Also bear in mind that mines can open much faster when there is a demand .. mines generally don't open faster unless there is a demand, now that past global supply issues and ramping production of end goods upwards you'll see mines open on proven reserves and more resources being advanced toward reserve status. I agree with your general point about general EV resources (there's a looming Copper issue and with the processing of rare earths in general) .. but your argument here WRT lithium is overly simplified, there are political issues that weigh more on mid future lithium extraction more than known reserve issues.
        evilos 4y ago
        I'm just paraphrasing (likely poorly) Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux. He wrote a ~1000 page report on this. I assume he understands those definitions of reserves etc. Lithium is only one of the minerals we seem to be short of. https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        A report which contains delightfully scientific assumptions such as: - All solar panels are thin film or polysilicon from the late 2000s - All wind and solar stations are the same size as an average pulled from a single report and "number of power stations" is a metric that matters. - You need to put energy in a 4 week buffer of 6 year old NMC811 batteries which use double the lithium of a new one (along with nickel and cobalt even though noone would pay more for a battery that is worse at grid storage than LFP, and other chemistries have been scaling since before he started writing this) before putting it in a car battery, and this is more likely than just convincing most EV owners to leave their cars plugged in when parked by offering a discount. - You need to put energy in the same battery before electrolysing hydrogen with it for transport or feed stock. - Air conditioning must be able to run during cloudy days in the middle of the night in hot regions backed by the same obsolete NMC battery storage. - All heating must be backed by batteries and not thermal storage. - It's impossible to build pantographs, rail, or LEVs. - That all EVs and Electric motorbikes in india, africa, and southeast asia will be long range US/EU style with built in batteries rather than the already popular battery swap systems for bikes and LEVs. - Some incoherent mess where km/kWh is used interchangeably with kWh/km and then drivetrain and motor losses were added to get battery capacity for EVs when that was already based on their range for some reason and then multiplied by distance travelled and then thrown away. - All shipping can only run on NMC batteries or fuel cells, and refuelling or recharging at a floating platform near one of the many areas with world class solar or wind resource you pass is less likely than giving up 75% of your cargo space for battery on short trips just in case you need to do a 25000km trip. - Meeting demand during off season can be achieved with chemical storage alone, and not by curtailing loads that are added for that purpose such as electrolysers and multi-month thermal storage. - Improving electrolysers or using CSP to run them or running them in good climates and transporting ammonia is impossoble. - Burning any amount of that ammonia you made or any amount of fossil fuel gas in the turbines you already have as a last resort is impossible, even if only for a few tens of hours a year. - All storage must be battery, and using the existing hydro production for dispatch or any of the 1000s of TWh of undeveloped PHES sites is impossible. - 0% of variability in demand can be met with long distance transmission. - The 50% of the planet that lives within transmission distance of cloudless deserts cannot tap them for CSP+thermal storage that is available 8000 hours a year. And on top of that, the report completely rejects the idea that a nuclear fleet could meet the required power in any reasonable timescale on similarly shaky grounds. So even if we believe it, you're still completely wrong. Unless, of course the conclusion you're trying to push is to delay the transition for a century on the faulty premise that adding renewables achieves nothing.
wizofaus 4y ago
> it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground That doesn't strike me as particularly constrained then - it's highly unlikely known reserves won't expand in that time or that we'll find no alternatives.
- evilos 4y ago
  I think you need to reread the previous comments. The question is: do we have enough minerals to switch to a solar/wind plus batteries energy system as a species? There is a controversial report from a mining professor who says the answer is 'not even close'. https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Fortunately I don't believe we'll need to. From a previous glance of that report, scenario F is pretty close to what I'd imagined we'd likely aim for. It would've been a lot smoother and less costly if we'd started 40 years ago, but it's not shortage of minerals like lithium or cobalt that have been holding us up. If the "Big rare-earth-metals-mining" industry had anything like the clout of Big Oil/Gas/Coal, we'd probably be half way there by now.
    - evilos 4y ago
      You might want to look at figure 26.10 of Scenario F. We still hit mineral constraints. The author says outright the report is not an attempt at simulating a realistic transition because it's asking first order questions: along the lines of "do we even have enough stuff to try this?". There's no attempt to ask if this is economical or logistically possible because it is not. The author is convinced that we're all about to be much poorer because the IV drip of cheap energy that the world has enjoyed for at least 50 years is about to be ripped out. Personally, I think what's most likely to happen is that we will fail to get the world's nations to stop using fossil fuels and we will suffer the environmental consequences of that. Plus all the consequences of the resource wars that will follow. It's a shame. I think our best chance to avoid this is to rush research on mass manufacturable gen 4 nuclear reactors. We need a factory that spits these things out so we can ship them to developing nations because otherwise, they build coal plants. I have high hopes for Thorcon. They plan to use shipyards to build annually up to 200 GW of modular shippable reactors.

by evilos 4y ago

defrost 4y ago

> It hasn't even doubled in the past 10 years. It was set to triple, except reasons. Still, "almost tripled" is better than "hasn't even doubled". 35K metric tonnes in 2012, 38K metric tonnes in 2016, 69K metric tonnes in 2017, 95K metric tonnes in 2018, 100K in 2021. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-... [2] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/metals-mining https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

evilos 4y ago
That's production. We were talking about global reserves. Which hasn't even doubled in 10 years.
- defrost 4y ago
  Why would they though? There's sufficient known and proven reserves to not put any pressure on proving known resources. Why expend the capital on techical reports and economic feasibility studies to raise resources to reserves ahead of lead time on production demand?
  - evilos 4y ago
    Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground. 1% of surveyed mineral deposits become mines. Because for the better part of a decade, the green transition plan has been to move to solar/wind plus energy storage. The obvious question is, how many machines will we need? What kind? How much will it cost? The author of this report described how he convinced his management to fund this work. He works at a Finnish government geological survey organization. He told his management, "Who do you think the EU leadership will blame when they realize that we don't have anywhere near the resources needed to complete the green transition as it is imagined today?" They haven't done the math.
    - defrost 4y ago
      The spglobal link connects to a product (global database + updating tools) that S&P acquired from it's source here in Western Australia, between here and the Toronto TSX you'll find the vast weight of companies and capital that form the bulk of global transnational mining (sans Russia and China, although they are threaded in and tracked also). > Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground. Bear in mind that "minerals being found" is when they first become "resources" (see JORC terminology which has become standard across the global mineral industry) .. when minerals have been proven (tightly estimated by volume and density) and had an Economic Feasibility Technical Report completed and filed they become "reserves" .. known amounts with a costing to extract. Also bear in mind that mines can open much faster when there is a demand .. mines generally don't open faster unless there is a demand, now that past global supply issues and ramping production of end goods upwards you'll see mines open on proven reserves and more resources being advanced toward reserve status. I agree with your general point about general EV resources (there's a looming Copper issue and with the processing of rare earths in general) .. but your argument here WRT lithium is overly simplified, there are political issues that weigh more on mid future lithium extraction more than known reserve issues.
      - evilos 4y ago
        I'm just paraphrasing (likely poorly) Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux. He wrote a ~1000 page report on this. I assume he understands those definitions of reserves etc. Lithium is only one of the minerals we seem to be short of. https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        A report which contains delightfully scientific assumptions such as: - All solar panels are thin film or polysilicon from the late 2000s - All wind and solar stations are the same size as an average pulled from a single report and "number of power stations" is a metric that matters. - You need to put energy in a 4 week buffer of 6 year old NMC811 batteries which use double the lithium of a new one (along with nickel and cobalt even though noone would pay more for a battery that is worse at grid storage than LFP, and other chemistries have been scaling since before he started writing this) before putting it in a car battery, and this is more likely than just convincing most EV owners to leave their cars plugged in when parked by offering a discount. - You need to put energy in the same battery before electrolysing hydrogen with it for transport or feed stock. - Air conditioning must be able to run during cloudy days in the middle of the night in hot regions backed by the same obsolete NMC battery storage. - All heating must be backed by batteries and not thermal storage. - It's impossible to build pantographs, rail, or LEVs. - That all EVs and Electric motorbikes in india, africa, and southeast asia will be long range US/EU style with built in batteries rather than the already popular battery swap systems for bikes and LEVs. - Some incoherent mess where km/kWh is used interchangeably with kWh/km and then drivetrain and motor losses were added to get battery capacity for EVs when that was already based on their range for some reason and then multiplied by distance travelled and then thrown away. - All shipping can only run on NMC batteries or fuel cells, and refuelling or recharging at a floating platform near one of the many areas with world class solar or wind resource you pass is less likely than giving up 75% of your cargo space for battery on short trips just in case you need to do a 25000km trip. - Meeting demand during off season can be achieved with chemical storage alone, and not by curtailing loads that are added for that purpose such as electrolysers and multi-month thermal storage. - Improving electrolysers or using CSP to run them or running them in good climates and transporting ammonia is impossoble. - Burning any amount of that ammonia you made or any amount of fossil fuel gas in the turbines you already have as a last resort is impossible, even if only for a few tens of hours a year. - All storage must be battery, and using the existing hydro production for dispatch or any of the 1000s of TWh of undeveloped PHES sites is impossible. - 0% of variability in demand can be met with long distance transmission. - The 50% of the planet that lives within transmission distance of cloudless deserts cannot tap them for CSP+thermal storage that is available 8000 hours a year. And on top of that, the report completely rejects the idea that a nuclear fleet could meet the required power in any reasonable timescale on similarly shaky grounds. So even if we believe it, you're still completely wrong. Unless, of course the conclusion you're trying to push is to delay the transition for a century on the faulty premise that adding renewables achieves nothing.

wizofaus 4y ago

> it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground That doesn't strike me as particularly constrained then - it's highly unlikely known reserves won't expand in that time or that we'll find no alternatives.

evilos 4y ago
I think you need to reread the previous comments. The question is: do we have enough minerals to switch to a solar/wind plus batteries energy system as a species? There is a controversial report from a mining professor who says the answer is 'not even close'. https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Fortunately I don't believe we'll need to. From a previous glance of that report, scenario F is pretty close to what I'd imagined we'd likely aim for. It would've been a lot smoother and less costly if we'd started 40 years ago, but it's not shortage of minerals like lithium or cobalt that have been holding us up. If the "Big rare-earth-metals-mining" industry had anything like the clout of Big Oil/Gas/Coal, we'd probably be half way there by now.
  - evilos 4y ago
    You might want to look at figure 26.10 of Scenario F. We still hit mineral constraints. The author says outright the report is not an attempt at simulating a realistic transition because it's asking first order questions: along the lines of "do we even have enough stuff to try this?". There's no attempt to ask if this is economical or logistically possible because it is not. The author is convinced that we're all about to be much poorer because the IV drip of cheap energy that the world has enjoyed for at least 50 years is about to be ripped out. Personally, I think what's most likely to happen is that we will fail to get the world's nations to stop using fossil fuels and we will suffer the environmental consequences of that. Plus all the consequences of the resource wars that will follow. It's a shame. I think our best chance to avoid this is to rush research on mass manufacturable gen 4 nuclear reactors. We need a factory that spits these things out so we can ship them to developing nations because otherwise, they build coal plants. I have high hopes for Thorcon. They plan to use shipyards to build annually up to 200 GW of modular shippable reactors.