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We are also behind in having the minerals necessary to build batteries no matter where the factory is. “given existing reserves, it is possible for the United

We are also behind in having the minerals necessary to build batteries no matter where the factory is. “given existing reserves, it is possible for the United States and its key partners to significantly friendshore production. However, given current production in democratic countries, it would require an unprecedented build-out of the mining industry to achieve 2030 clean energy targets.” https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/05/03/friendshoring-critical-minerals-what-could-u.s.-and-its-partners-produce-pub-89659 https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/05/03/friendshoring-criti...

jandrese 3y ago
I wouldn't rule out the free market to supply a product that is in demand. Mining is relatively low capex by heavy industry standards as well.
- bequanna 3y ago
  Permitting is the limiting factor. In the United States, the current political climate will either support and fast-track or essentially deny/permanently delay all mining permits.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    Ha, given the current state of politics in the US, I can't decide which side would be the support, and which the deny.
    - qup 3y ago
      I agree, it could go either way. It's probably up to whoever replaced Tucker Carlson (who was it? I never heard). The entire right will align with their stance, and the left will rally against whichever stance it is.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
epistasis 3y ago
There will undoubtedly be a big buildout in mining, the only question is if it will happen in the short term or the longer term, which is dependent on permitting timeframes. Last I heard, copper mines took 17 years to permit. But in 17 years time, we will need to increase copper production to 150% to 200% of its current value, ie go from 28M tons/year to ~50M tons/year. (And important to note that only 5M ton/year are from energy transition demand). And the volume of material needed for the energy transition is small compared to existing mining, and in particular to the amount of material that we move around for fossil fuels, which will all drastically decrease. This is a big project to solve, sure, but it needs to be compared to the scale and scope of what we currently do, and what would happen even without the energy transition. And when we do that comparison, I think we will find that the energy transition will be far less resource intensive than the expansion of our fossil fuel industries that would happen anyway.
- scythe 3y ago
  >But in 17 years time, we will need to increase copper production to 150% to 200% of its current value, ie go from 28M tons/year to ~50M tons/year. Demand elasticity is a funny thing. Some applications, like turbines, really need copper. Others, like the wiring of a house, can in principle get away with aluminum just fine. Currently, houses are built with copper wiring because the thermal expansion of aluminum requires some additional engineering complexity to achieve fire safety. But it's hard to project copper 'needs' when we use so much of it out of 'convenience'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
  - ebruchez 3y ago
    My house, from the 1970s, has 100% aluminum wiring. I bought special connectors to connect copper wires to aluminum wires for extra safety when I put new outlets and switches in, as there is a fire concern when the connections are not done properly.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      Aluminium is crazy for wiring... You can wire up a whole house in aluminium, and it be fine for decades, and then suddenly catch fire. The cause is that over time, aluminium joints become higher and higher resistance, and get hotter and hotter till one day they fail. There is some special gunge stuff you can get to put in each joint which supposedly stops this happening. But personally I don't trust the gunge to keep working for the 100+ years the wiring might remain in use. Particularly if there is a water leak and the gunge is washed away - and then your 10 year timer starts ticking till a deadly fire.
tomrod 3y ago
I don't think that's accurate -- US and Brazil could join forces for mining where needed. US has about 5% known reserves of China, Brazil about 55%. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/rare-earths-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
- lukas099 3y ago
  Hopefully Brazil's social systems can handle the influx of extractive wealth, but odds are low.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    A US-driven, extractive wealth transformation in a South American country… I mean what’s the worst that could happen, right?
    - dylan604 3y ago
      What's the most exported item from South America that does not get snorted?
      - Symbiote 3y ago
        From Brazil, iron ore and soya beans. https://oec.world/en/profile/country/bra https://oec.world/en/profile/country/bra
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Raw materials. The mining industry in Peru and Chile is huge. I think drugs were ever really exported from Colombia and maybe Bolivia? But Bolivia also has a huge trove of raw materials.
        ethbr0 3y ago
        Also, Venezuelan oil, before they shot their industry in its foot.
whinenot 3y ago
It's already getting built out. The Salton Sea is being rebranded as 'Lithium Valley'. [0] [0]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lithium-extraction-california-electric-vehicle-batteries-60-minutes-transcript-2023-05-07/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lithium-extraction-california-e...
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  is anyone extracting commercially significant volumes of minerals from the Salton Sea yet?
  - whinenot 3y ago
    Looks like 2024, at the earliest.[0] The relative speed to production is largely due to the fact that they're just refining the waste stream from already established geothermal power plants. As the old saying goes, "one power plant's trash is another refiner's treasure". [0] https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2022/05/13/lithium-valley-look-major-players-near-salton-sea-seeking-billions-funding/9665978002/ https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2022/05/13/lithium-vall...
  - hedora 3y ago
    I'm guessing that will never happen. This is not the first time people have proposed mining it. One problem is that, even without mining, it's on track to poising the air of something like 33% of the Los Angelos metropolitan area in the next few decades. So, anyone that touches it will now own that environmental disaster. This can, and should, be fixed by spending huge amounts of federal money on environmental remediation, and I can imagine using lithium revenues to offset it, but none of that will be politically easy.
    - sidewndr46 3y ago
      wouldn't it be way easier to just put some water in the Salton sea? Even saltwater would work.
      - 3y ago
tiedieconderoga 3y ago
It seems like wealthy nations often leave resources in the ground until they really need them. Mining, refining, logging, chemical processing...these are dirty businesses. Why muddy up your local communities and reduce your future reserves, if one of your trading partners is willing to do it on their turf? It does mean short-term pain if capacity and expertise need to be built out quickly, but that's the price of admission.
- jollyllama 3y ago
  Can you offer any examples? When I think of the wealthy nations like the USA or UK, they mined and extracted much of their resources earlier than anyone. They just often did it in the less wealthy parts.
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    Mines in the US are frequently delayed or prevented from opening entirely due to environmental lobbying pushback. We've got plenty of resources we could be tapping into, but cheap overseas competition plus strict pollution controls and environmental lobbying red tape on top of that makes it a very long, expensive investment to see a return on. For example, the Interior Department instated a 20-year moratorium on renewing any leases for mining operations near the boundary waters in northern Minnesota. Understandably, the consequences of copper sulfide ore polluting the waters is severe, but the 20 year ban is nonsensical. The dangers won't be any less in 20 years. We aren't exactly 20 years away from magical technology that will make it safe. It's a purely arbitrary number meant to appease environmental groups without having to pay out to buy the land and permanently ban resource extraction. For what it's worth, I'm not really in favor of the mines, per se, just irked that we keep playing games. Either do environmental reviews and let miners mine when they have leases to do so and appropriate safeguards in place, or don't. A 20 year moratorium just sets up political groups (mining and environmental lobbies) to suck up more cash donations and sets up another political fight down the road.
    - yodelshady 3y ago
      > Mines in the US are frequently delayed or prevented from opening entirely due to environmental lobbying pushback. They are now, yes. I believe the point is, that's a relatively recent development. (And surely, from an environmental perspective, having all the damage in one area is good? Baotau isn't getting any better. By the same token, it's not getting worse.) Side note but, with politeness, one enormously frustrating part of arguing with Americans is you really don't realise just how many problems are trivial to solve when you have US-level natural resources at your disposal. The social elements are still there, I'm not claiming every US problem is trivial, but the resource access element just isn't. You go to an electronics conference, you're researching some new PV tech, so are your US colleagues, but they've got hundreds of hectares of land that's perfect for the application and worthless to everyone else. And that happens in almost every field. Good for you, but JFC, that's not a universal experience.
tomcar288 3y ago
it's not just the US that is behind in having the minerals necessary: it's the entire world! In order to electrify every car in the world, it would take half the world's known supply of lithium.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  "known reserves" not "known supply". Lithium is a very common element on Earth, so the known supply is many orders of magnitude more than we need. "Known reserves" is defined as those that are currently economically viable to extract. Which is why the amount of known reserves can grow drastically when the price increases slightly or extraction methods get cheaper.
nahnahg 3y ago
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jandrese 3y ago

I wouldn't rule out the free market to supply a product that is in demand. Mining is relatively low capex by heavy industry standards as well.

bequanna 3y ago
Permitting is the limiting factor. In the United States, the current political climate will either support and fast-track or essentially deny/permanently delay all mining permits.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  Ha, given the current state of politics in the US, I can't decide which side would be the support, and which the deny.
  - qup 3y ago
    I agree, it could go either way. It's probably up to whoever replaced Tucker Carlson (who was it? I never heard). The entire right will align with their stance, and the left will rally against whichever stance it is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

epistasis 3y ago

There will undoubtedly be a big buildout in mining, the only question is if it will happen in the short term or the longer term, which is dependent on permitting timeframes. Last I heard, copper mines took 17 years to permit. But in 17 years time, we will need to increase copper production to 150% to 200% of its current value, ie go from 28M tons/year to ~50M tons/year. (And important to note that only 5M ton/year are from energy transition demand). And the volume of material needed for the energy transition is small compared to existing mining, and in particular to the amount of material that we move around for fossil fuels, which will all drastically decrease. This is a big project to solve, sure, but it needs to be compared to the scale and scope of what we currently do, and what would happen even without the energy transition. And when we do that comparison, I think we will find that the energy transition will be far less resource intensive than the expansion of our fossil fuel industries that would happen anyway.

scythe 3y ago
>But in 17 years time, we will need to increase copper production to 150% to 200% of its current value, ie go from 28M tons/year to ~50M tons/year. Demand elasticity is a funny thing. Some applications, like turbines, really need copper. Others, like the wiring of a house, can in principle get away with aluminum just fine. Currently, houses are built with copper wiring because the thermal expansion of aluminum requires some additional engineering complexity to achieve fire safety. But it's hard to project copper 'needs' when we use so much of it out of 'convenience'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
- ebruchez 3y ago
  My house, from the 1970s, has 100% aluminum wiring. I bought special connectors to connect copper wires to aluminum wires for extra safety when I put new outlets and switches in, as there is a fire concern when the connections are not done properly.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Aluminium is crazy for wiring... You can wire up a whole house in aluminium, and it be fine for decades, and then suddenly catch fire. The cause is that over time, aluminium joints become higher and higher resistance, and get hotter and hotter till one day they fail. There is some special gunge stuff you can get to put in each joint which supposedly stops this happening. But personally I don't trust the gunge to keep working for the 100+ years the wiring might remain in use. Particularly if there is a water leak and the gunge is washed away - and then your 10 year timer starts ticking till a deadly fire.

tomrod 3y ago

I don't think that's accurate -- US and Brazil could join forces for mining where needed. US has about 5% known reserves of China, Brazil about 55%. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/rare-earths-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...

lukas099 3y ago
Hopefully Brazil's social systems can handle the influx of extractive wealth, but odds are low.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  A US-driven, extractive wealth transformation in a South American country… I mean what’s the worst that could happen, right?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    What's the most exported item from South America that does not get snorted?
    - Symbiote 3y ago
      From Brazil, iron ore and soya beans. https://oec.world/en/profile/country/bra https://oec.world/en/profile/country/bra
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Raw materials. The mining industry in Peru and Chile is huge. I think drugs were ever really exported from Colombia and maybe Bolivia? But Bolivia also has a huge trove of raw materials.
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        Also, Venezuelan oil, before they shot their industry in its foot.

whinenot 3y ago

It's already getting built out. The Salton Sea is being rebranded as 'Lithium Valley'. [0] [0]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lithium-extraction-california-electric-vehicle-batteries-60-minutes-transcript-2023-05-07/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lithium-extraction-california-e...

sidewndr46 3y ago
is anyone extracting commercially significant volumes of minerals from the Salton Sea yet?
- whinenot 3y ago
  Looks like 2024, at the earliest.[0] The relative speed to production is largely due to the fact that they're just refining the waste stream from already established geothermal power plants. As the old saying goes, "one power plant's trash is another refiner's treasure". [0] https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2022/05/13/lithium-valley-look-major-players-near-salton-sea-seeking-billions-funding/9665978002/ https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2022/05/13/lithium-vall...
- hedora 3y ago
  I'm guessing that will never happen. This is not the first time people have proposed mining it. One problem is that, even without mining, it's on track to poising the air of something like 33% of the Los Angelos metropolitan area in the next few decades. So, anyone that touches it will now own that environmental disaster. This can, and should, be fixed by spending huge amounts of federal money on environmental remediation, and I can imagine using lithium revenues to offset it, but none of that will be politically easy.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    wouldn't it be way easier to just put some water in the Salton sea? Even saltwater would work.
    - 3y ago

tiedieconderoga 3y ago

It seems like wealthy nations often leave resources in the ground until they really need them. Mining, refining, logging, chemical processing...these are dirty businesses. Why muddy up your local communities and reduce your future reserves, if one of your trading partners is willing to do it on their turf? It does mean short-term pain if capacity and expertise need to be built out quickly, but that's the price of admission.

jollyllama 3y ago
Can you offer any examples? When I think of the wealthy nations like the USA or UK, they mined and extracted much of their resources earlier than anyone. They just often did it in the less wealthy parts.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Mines in the US are frequently delayed or prevented from opening entirely due to environmental lobbying pushback. We've got plenty of resources we could be tapping into, but cheap overseas competition plus strict pollution controls and environmental lobbying red tape on top of that makes it a very long, expensive investment to see a return on. For example, the Interior Department instated a 20-year moratorium on renewing any leases for mining operations near the boundary waters in northern Minnesota. Understandably, the consequences of copper sulfide ore polluting the waters is severe, but the 20 year ban is nonsensical. The dangers won't be any less in 20 years. We aren't exactly 20 years away from magical technology that will make it safe. It's a purely arbitrary number meant to appease environmental groups without having to pay out to buy the land and permanently ban resource extraction. For what it's worth, I'm not really in favor of the mines, per se, just irked that we keep playing games. Either do environmental reviews and let miners mine when they have leases to do so and appropriate safeguards in place, or don't. A 20 year moratorium just sets up political groups (mining and environmental lobbies) to suck up more cash donations and sets up another political fight down the road.
  - yodelshady 3y ago
    > Mines in the US are frequently delayed or prevented from opening entirely due to environmental lobbying pushback. They are now, yes. I believe the point is, that's a relatively recent development. (And surely, from an environmental perspective, having all the damage in one area is good? Baotau isn't getting any better. By the same token, it's not getting worse.) Side note but, with politeness, one enormously frustrating part of arguing with Americans is you really don't realise just how many problems are trivial to solve when you have US-level natural resources at your disposal. The social elements are still there, I'm not claiming every US problem is trivial, but the resource access element just isn't. You go to an electronics conference, you're researching some new PV tech, so are your US colleagues, but they've got hundreds of hectares of land that's perfect for the application and worthless to everyone else. And that happens in almost every field. Good for you, but JFC, that's not a universal experience.

tomcar288 3y ago

it's not just the US that is behind in having the minerals necessary: it's the entire world! In order to electrify every car in the world, it would take half the world's known supply of lithium.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
"known reserves" not "known supply". Lithium is a very common element on Earth, so the known supply is many orders of magnitude more than we need. "Known reserves" is defined as those that are currently economically viable to extract. Which is why the amount of known reserves can grow drastically when the price increases slightly or extraction methods get cheaper.

nahnahg 3y ago

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