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Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
- notShabu 4y agoFrom what I understand the lithium bottleneck seems similar to the lumber bottleneck in 2021. It's not the lack of trees but the lack of processing facilities. But instead of lack of workers or technical know-how it's the pollution produced.
- wslh 4y ago[flagged]
- LatteLazy 4y agoI think your numbers are total's in that country. The article claims this is the biggest single "reserve" (I assume they mean deposit?). But your core point is not wrong: there is still much more available in the counties you list...
- wiredfool 4y agoThere are generally 3 categories: * Production: What's been mined & produced * Reserves: What's economically viable to produce * Resources: All the mineral we know about, including that which is not economically or technically viable to mine Numbers (2021) I've seen show total world reserves as ~ 20MT. Total Resources are more like 90MT. Bolivia has a large percentage of the resources (ca 20MT), but no appreciable reserves (according to USGS) and I haven't seen production numbers from it.
- maxerickson 4y agoIsn't ChatGPT currently stuck in the past?
- defrost 4y agonsenergybusiness.com is being fast and loose and not particulalry precise with technical mining jargon. JORC standards have it that: A resource is that amount of a geologic commodity that exists in both discovered and undiscovered deposits—by definition, then, a “best guess.” Reserves are that subgroup of a resource that have been discovered, have a known size, and can be extracted at a profit. [1] https://www.jorc.org/docs/JORC_code_2012.pdf https://www.jorc.org/docs/JORC_code_2012.pdf While this is an Australian standard it (and near equivilants) are the standards used on the largest mineral exchanges on the globe ( TSX et al ) The above 21 million tonne figure for Boliva is a best guess resource guesstimate and not an actual Proven Reserve estimate backed by sampling + geophysical survey + drilling + staged Technical Reports. For that matter Iran here is asserting that they have an actual reserve backed by drill data and tech reports which leaves the question of: Where is the published data?
- dubcanada 4y agoI have no idea why people seem to think ChatGPT is correct all the time.
- notahacker 4y agoAnd even when it's broadly right, it manages to be wrong (ask it for coal reserves and it'll give you a real world source, a list of countries which is correct, and some percentages which... don't match the source it claims to have taken them from) You might as well put "well according to my mate Dave who claims to know everything"
- krapp 4y agoPeople have been conditioned to mistrust everything, even the premise of objective reality, to the point that they don't believe it matters - ChatGPT being wrong some of the time is still seen as preferable to the perceived status quo that all media, politicians, scientists, scholars and everyone on the internet actively lie to you and manipulate you all the time.
- wslh 4y agoI am not, take it with a grain of salt. There is first reference which is not ChatGPT and you can check the answer and go in deep with the main point.
- Felminor 4y agoEven Germany has lithium
- slackfan 4y agoAh, so this timeless classic will trully be timeless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8hEtI9AI0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8hEtI9AI0U
- recuter 4y agoThey are out in the open enriching uranium to 84% with a breakout time to a weapon measured in weeks now, how many reasons do you need really?
- VulgarExigency 4y agoBy your logic, shouldn't countries that already have a nuclear arsenal be bombed first?
- throwaway4good 4y agoMaybe they wouldn’t have done it had the US not bailed out on the Iran nuclear deal.
- dismalpedigree 4y agoYou of course are referring to the deal that had the US air freight $400m in the middle of the night to close the deal, only for the Iranians to completely ignore the deal anyway?
- PaywallBuster 4y agoIs Tesla gonna become a Defense company?
- pelasaco 4y agoYou mean America must bring democracy to Iran ASAP?
- kevviiinn 4y agoRound 2... Or 3?
- RobotToaster 4y agoMusk already admitted to being involved in one Coup https://www.telesurenglish.net/amp/news/elon-musk-confesses-to-lithium-coup-in-bolivia-20200725-0010.html https://www.telesurenglish.net/amp/news/elon-musk-confesses-...
- dontlaugh 4y agoHe could be bragging about something he didn't do. But it's bad enough that he'd want to be involved in a coup.
- px43 4y agoHe made an insensitive joke tweet when people were accusing him of getting lithium from Bolivia. Last I checked, Tesla denied sourcing any lithium from Bolivia, and no external investigators have managed to show a connection. He deleted the tweet as soon as his ambien/amphetamine cocktail (or whatever tf he's been on lately) wore off.
- Adraghast 4y agoFor the record, I agree it was probably a joke, albeit one that reveals something true about how he and people like him view the world. But if the idea is that Musk personally supported the coup because the Morales government wouldn’t hand the rights to Bolivia’s lithium reserves over to US firms, Tesla not using batteries made with Bolivian lithium would be expected.
- nixass 4y agoHey old buddy old pal, long time no see!
- psychphysic 4y agoCan I interest you in some liberation?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoThe people of Iran are currently in the process of liberating themselves. I hope they succeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_Iranian_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_Iranian_prot...
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago> themselves With zero external influence, I bet ;)
- ybinator604g3 4y agoExactly, like all the external influence that keep the mullahs afloat :)
- pphysch 4y agoThe govt of Iran has savvy foreign policy, and it's remarkable that it had stayed afloat despite being targeted by monstrous crimes like Stuxnet and assassinations.
- my_city 4y ago[flagged]
- reitanqild 4y ago[flagged]
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- newaccount2021 4y ago[dead]
- dubcanada 4y ago> According to a senior official of the Iranian Ministry of Industry, Mine, and Trade (MIMT), the lithium deposits could contain some 8.5 million metric tons (MT) ready for extraction, which would make it one of the largest global discoveries. Could? This article title implies they have, but the text implies they are searching still and have not actually found it.
- defrost 4y agoThe text implies they know exactly where it is but have not yet sufficiently measured it in order to create rich 3D volumetric maps laying out the various zouns of mineral concentrations at what PPM \ PPB 's ( parts per million | per billion ). Technically this makes it a "resource" (ie. guesstimate) rather than a "reserve" (drill mapped with a solid plan on extraction methods, costs, estimated profits etc. to a JORC (or equiv) standard).
- seydor 4y agoMaybe Iran will meet democracy
- Convolutional 4y agoIt did in 1953 when Prime Minister Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil. The US and UK launched a coup to stop that and installed a dictator (who was initially reluctant to go along with this and had to be convinced). Then SAVAK cracked down on domestic secular left opposition for decades, aided by the CIA.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoYup, and the fascinating part was, that the US actually admitted doing that (well.. declassified some documents regarding this, 60 years after the fact). So yeah... who know what they're denying now, and what we'll find out in 60 years
- garyrob 4y agoI have pics of my grandfather standing and talking with the Shah, and then sitting next to him at a large banquet as if the two of them were the important people in the room. It's still a mystery to me what he was doing there or what their relationship was. My grandfather was a professor of economics at Columbia University who was a leader of relief efforts such as in Armenia after the genocide there. He definitely did good in his life, but whatever his involvement was with the Shah makes me wonder. UPDATE: more information makes its way onto the internet over time, and while I've done searches on him in the past, this tidbit is now available via Google that wasn't before; he was "Director of Relief for the American Persian Relief Commission in Teheran, Iran in 1919" and I guess he was still involved there when the Shah took over and they developed some sort of relationship.
- sofixa 4y agoJust a small clarification, you're talking about a different Shah - Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the guy who was in full control after the 1953 coup, took initial power in 1941 with foreign help (to help out with WW2 due to the strategic location of Iran for oil and supplies to the USSR) from his father, Reza Shah, who took power in 1925 from Ahmad Shah Qajar, who would have been the Shah your grandfather has pictures with.
- ijustlovemath 4y agoIt's a little bit sickening that so many of these initial comments are joking about the US going to war over the lithium.
- amval 4y agoWhat is the part that sickens you?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cced 4y agoDo people really have to say that jokes about war which inevitably lead to the death of many in order to have bigger and better phone batteries at a reduced cost is sickening?
- kevviiinn 4y agoHumor is one way of dealing with things we can't control, my guess is that most of those commenters would love to not go to wars every few years. We don't exactly have co from over what the government t does whether we like to believe it or not
- comboy 4y agoYou can't fix the problem by not talking about it. It wasn't an unfortunate natural disaster.
- krapp 4y agoYou can't fix the problem, period, certainly not by talking about it. The internet offers catharsis, not praxis. Americans have no more ability to affect their government's imperial capitalist agenda than they do to command the tides, others outside of the US even less so.
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- shaky-carrousel 4y agoTwo weeks from now, we are going to discover that those reserves are basically inaccessible, and all of this was a publicity stunt to bait naïve investors.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- steveBK123 4y agoA strong argument for the existence of a diety is hilarious-if-true outcomes like the Ayatollah getting to have both oil & lithium to remain fully hedged through the EV transition. Too improbable for a fictional movie, but here we are. Life, as always, is stranger than fiction.
- rcme 4y agoIt doesn't seem that improbable that at least one place on Earth has both large oil and lithium reserves.
- Gravityloss 4y agoIsn't it the opposite. Oil found somewhere -> countries get really interested at invading. Finland found nickel in Petsamo in the thirties...
- themitigating 4y agoSo this "diety" is helping the Iranian government but not the people?
- steveBK123 4y agoNever assume the best outcomes
- akiselev 4y agoGeography is destiny.
- nnurmanov 4y agoUS could impose the upper limit to buy lithium from Iran, as they did with Russian oil.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoWhich means China will buy it. And that might be good: right now China is the largest carbon emitter in the world, so everything that helps them transition rapidly helps us too.
- 988747 4y agoYep, US sanctions were working in the past, when US economy dominated the world. Right now sanctioning a country just means that you are giving China a free reign over it.
- SXX 4y agoAnything that takes resources from Putin is worth it. China does not currently wage war in the center of Europe and neither it use terrorist attacks against civilian population in countries that compete with them.
- 988747 4y agoThat's because they do all of the above, and more, indirectly, using Russia as their puppet. They are too smart to do this openly. But you know, Putin would not start the war if he wasn't sure of China's support.
- tzs 4y agoIt also helped in that past that if a country stopped doing whatever it was that drew US sanctions the US would lift those sanctions. Take Iran. The US and several others sanctioned them over trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran stopped the weapons program, agreed to inspections to verify compliance, and the sanctions were lifted. Then the US put back sanctions for domestic political reasons, and so now when Iran does something the US does not like (such as supplying Russia with weapons to use against Ukraine), the US doesn't really have a way to deal with that because (1) they've already got Iran nearly maximally sanctioned, and (2) even if they could find something else to sanction Iran over there is no reason for Iran to believe that changing their behavior would lead to removal of that sanction.
- 0xDEF 4y agoThe "Cradle" is Iranian state media: https://gdil.org/behind-the-veil-the-marketing-of-iranian-state-media-to-foreign-audiences/ https://gdil.org/behind-the-veil-the-marketing-of-iranian-st... That doesn't mean it's false. Just read it with healthy scepticism.
- yrdmb 4y agoI wonder what gdil.org is? Everything should be read with healthy skepticism.
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y agoDid the US actually take any oil from Iraq? And besides that Lithium is even harder to transport than oil is. You need blue team to occupy the mines and secure a perimeter so that red team cannot disrupt not only extraction but also transportation to the nearest port.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoIt did not.
- oblak 4y agoInteresting line of thought! Implicitly questioning the very existence of oil tankers and other infrastructure.
- omershapira 4y agoI guess that means they no longer need nuclear research for energy purposes?
- my_city 4y ago[flagged]
- quic5 4y agoYeah because wanting basic human rights is just something "the West" wants
- Tsarbomb 4y agoI'm 99% sure the person you are replying to was saying that tongue in cheek / sarcastically.
- my_city 4y agoOf course not, but The West (NATO and its allies) uses those excuses to support coups, dictatorships and regime changes that benefit American companies. The objective is to plunder the country of its natural resources, and control it politically and militarly. Do you think the west gives a flying fuck about human rights? Do you see protests erupting in Saudi Arabia or Dubai or other western allies? They dont care about human rights, they care about stealing and controlling the resources of another nation.
- Eumenes 4y agoI'm psyched for the Brad Paisley song about Iran and some live stream about human rights at the Golden Globes
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- wslh 4y agoIt seems Iran is not the second largest lithium reserve: https://isdp.eu/challenging-chinese-dominance-over-lithium-batteries-the-eu-and-us-responses/ https://isdp.eu/challenging-chinese-dominance-over-lithium-b...
- mxxc 4y agovery few people bringing up that thecradle is a pro-mullahs, pro-russia and pro-hezbollah outlet disguised as a normal geopolitics website? :)
- Adraghast 4y agoAs opposed to an anti-mullahs, anti-Russia, and anti-Hezbollah outlet that would be a normal geopolitics website?
- mxxc 4y agonot what i said at all. it's obvious that the cradle is a whitewashed organ of a dictatorship that pretends to be neutral.
- Adraghast 4y agoI’m not very familiar with it. Why is that obvious?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> not very familiar with it. Why is that obvious? You’re pleading your ignorance. The Cradle is Iranian state media.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- logicalmonster 4y agoI think it's fair to point out that every news source has their own biases, especially normal geopolitics websites.
- yrdmb 4y agoGood. Lets hear what other side has to say.
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoAnd aren’t we saying Iran has WMDs now? Great timing guys.
- FlyingSnake 4y agoGeological survey also discovered huge Lithium reserves in India¹ recently. I wonder how much undiscovered Lithium resources we're sitting upon. 1: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blexplainer/the-lithium-find-excitement/article66496638.ece https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blexplainer/the-lithium...
- lambdasquirrel 4y agoAnywhere where there's a bunch of endorheic basins.
- lencastre 4y agoWOW
- leke 4y agoYou can't really trust anything Iran says. They have a terrible reputation for lies.
- AStellersSeaCow 4y agoMaria Bamford is excited. But not too excited.
- npalli 4y agoWith India also discovering a very large amount of lithium reserves very recently, lithium might end up being abundant and accelerate the EV transition even faster. [1] https://innovationorigins.com/en/india-discovers-5-5-of-worlds-lithium-reserves/ https://innovationorigins.com/en/india-discovers-5-5-of-worl...
- gleenn 4y agoI believe even ocean water is a potential source of Lithium if we ever get constrained on more direct sources. Unfortunately it's not really Lithium holding back EVs, it's Cobalt and a few other rare earth metals. Also not sure how much having Lithium locked up in a heavily sanctioned country will help the big battery manufacturers. Edit: typos
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoDoesn't Iran export oil to China? I'm sure they can export lithium, too.
- Swizec 4y ago> Also not sure how much having Lithium locked up in a heavily sanctioned country will help the big battery manufacturers To put my cynic’s hat on: Having something the super powers want sounds like a great way to stop being so sanctioned. Great negotiating leverage.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 988747 4y agoOr a great way to get yourself invaded by said superpower.
- SuoDuanDao 4y agoI'm sure Iran is glad to field-test its drones in the Ukrainian theatre for this reason.
- rgmerk 4y agoPop quiz: name the world’s largest producer of lithium. Lithium production is important but lithium is not the next oil. It’s not going to dominate the world economy. There aren’t going to be wars fought over it. And we will ultimately extract plenty of it to build EVs.
- glitchc 4y agoChina.
- comte7092 4y agoIIRC China is the worlds largest refiner, but they are not the largest producer. The largest producers are Australia and Chile.
- slackdog 4y agoAustralia sometimes seems like a huge mine with some cities around the fringes.
- glitchc 4y agoThanks for the emphasis, but production isn't defined the way you want it wishfully to be defined. Lithium ore is not very useful at all. It's refined lithium everyone cares about and China is responsible for ~60-70% of the world's lithium production: https://themeghalayan.com/china-controls-70-of-global-lithium-production-thats-a-worry-for-the-world/ https://themeghalayan.com/china-controls-70-of-global-lithiu...
- kornhole 4y ago[flagged]
- anon223345 4y ago[flagged]
- Namari 4y agoMy thought as well, how long before the US decide to invade to get rid of those "weapon of mass destruction".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ck2 4y agoI thought earth stores of lithium weren't the problem. The problem was no-one wants to extract it for the bare minimum prices it will produce. Exact same fallacy as with oil, ie. in the US it's only profitable to frack when the price per barrel is fetching more than $50
- donnowhy 4y agotime to do a Peru (or Bolivia, or Chile, or Argentina, or ....). best of luck to the CIA agents "NOT" working on it (plausibly deny... wink wink)
- user3939382 4y agoDang their need for "democracy" just went up by a lot...
- mistermann 4y agoThe funniest part is this is what (is constantly claimed to, thus [1] widely believed) powers this very phenomenon! Oh how I love irony, though I suspect our geopolitical rivals don't share my sentiments. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
- Aardwolf 4y agoAre we simply not looking hard enough in Europe, or is the European soil truly useless for competitive amounts of natural resources?
- sofixa 4y agoThere is quite a lot of lithium in Europe already, e.g. in Serbia [1]. However lithium mining is extremely environmentally destructive, and those sorts of things usually aren't accepted by Europeans. 1 - https://mondediplo.com/2022/11/10serbia https://mondediplo.com/2022/11/10serbia
- MSFT_Edging 4y agoI was told mass EV adoption was a solution to destroying the earth, rather than re-evaluating our transportation system!
- epistasis 4y agoIn what sense is lithium mining more destructive than iron, copper, or other mining? And does it have to be that way?
- thatguy0900 4y agoExtracting natural resources in a cost effective way involves a lot of pollution that Europeans would rather happen somewhere else
- 7373737373 4y agoThis is what I've always wondered especially re. Germany - is it possible to quantify how well a country has been prospected? How much is "resource poverty" a matter of low resource concentration vs (exploration)-absence? How do the economics change with changing energy and labor prices? What is the relationship between resources and the building of infrastructure, in terms of logistics and also permanent settling? Are many extraction and refining methods monopolized through patents or other mechanisms?
- Toine 4y agoKeep in mind that the ~1.5B cars + trucks in the entire world combine for only ~10% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Also, if your electricity is made by coal power plants there's no point using EV.
- seniorivn 4y agoThe most important reason to use EV is that nuclear cannot be safely miniaturized and used in vehicles. as to coal plants, there is none.
- Tagbert 4y agoIncorrect. Even if your power grid is the rare case of 100% coal power, an EV running on that grid would account for about as much CO2 as a ICE vehicle getting 50mpg which is better than most gasoline powered vehicles. Since almost all power grids use a mix of fossil fuels and carbon-free sources, the actual numbers are much better than that worst case.
- newyankee 4y agoNot just that, zero tailpipe emissions has a lot of public health benefits in urban areas at the least
- comte7092 4y agoEVs are significantly more efficient in turning energy into movement, and generating power in a dedicated power plant is far more optimized than it is within an ice car. Even if you are getting all of your power from coal power plants, the emissions are likely close to parity if not marginally better. That is the worst case scenario however. Most places in the developed world only get a percentage of their power from coal, and over the lifecycle of the vehicle, that percentage is set to reduce. It makes little sense to take about the state of the world today, when a new vehicle is expected to be on the road for multiple decades. Your talking points are tired and not helpful. This is a transition that needs to happen. There are better critiques to be made.
- triceratops 4y ago
- ivanstame 4y agoNow you are going to hear the US yelling "Iran needs democracy". Here we go again...
- skrbjc 4y agoReminds me of another discovery of lithium recently in Maine: https://www.mainepublic.org/2021-10-25/a-1-5-billion-lithium-deposit-has-been-discovered-in-western-maine-but-mining-it-could-be-hard https://www.mainepublic.org/2021-10-25/a-1-5-billion-lithium...
- aussieguy1234 4y ago"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." - Elon musk. https://web.archive.org/web/20200726004948/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286866843307737088 https://web.archive.org/web/20200726004948/https://twitter.c... Don't be surprised if something similar happens here. Unless, of course, Iran's government is willing to play ball.
- aussieguy1234 4y agoJust some context: If the Iranian regime falls this is actually a good outcome, even if it has backing from western interests. Having said that, up until now Western governments have largely ignored the plight of the Iranian people, leaving them to fend for themselves. If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources. It's still a good outcome, but if it happens I don't think it will have came from the good will of western governments.
- defrost 4y ago> If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources. s/ lithium / oil / .. and now we're looking at the 1953 Iranian coup d'état in which the US and UK deposed a democratically elected government to prevent them poking into the details of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and exposing the degree to which Western goverments were "helping" the Iranian people (err, sorry, themselves) with resource royalties. That led to 25 years of despised western puppet government and an eventual overthrow that over compansated and lurched backwards into theocracy .. leading to today.
- skinnymuch 4y agoEven sadder, the US tried to claim it was because of communism. When it was basic nationalism. Communism has historically been the reason. Muslim also fits the bill ala the differences between PK + BG treatment vs India.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoRattles come the sabers of war....
- panick21_ 4y agoI'm so sick of these articles. The amount of 'lithium discovered' articles are crazy. Nobody cares, lithium is plentiful, it exists in lots of places and we haven't even looked for it much. If people really search for it, it would show up in many more places. The problem with lithium is not finding a resource, but doing the necessary chemical process to get it to be battery quality lithium. Lithium is not like base metal mining at all. Lithium is more like a specialty chemical, each resources and purification process has to get separately designed, and has to be individually verified by each battery (or battery materials company). There are only very, very few companies who actually sell battery grade lithium, and lots of junior minors with lots of lithium in the ground and very little chance of developing it. Iran will not be developing its own battery grade lithium anytime soon, no matter how large their resource.
- smugma 4y agoIs China not one of their closest Allies (the other being Russia?
- panick21_ 4y agoIran and Russia have never really been friends. Just because they both don't like the US, doesn't mean they like each other. China and Iran aren't friends, but of course China is willing to trade with them, and they might mine some lithium, but the refining would be done in China. No way will China give Iran what it needs for its own lithium industry. Maybe if Iran really pays for a lot for it, but even then, this would be a very long process.