23 ms·

Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found

706 points by jseliger 3y ago

jseliger 3y ago
The price of a given commodity rises due to demand increases -> people look for more of it -> people find it -> the commodity is eventually mined or otherwise exploited -> prices moderate. It happened with oil and now it's happening with lithium.
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  See also Aluminium. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/aluminum-was-once-one-of-the-most-expensive-metals-in-the-world/382447/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/alumi...
- mschuster91 3y ago
  And in a lot of cases it's countries that aren't exactly stable which have the resources. A lot of currently known lithium deposits (thankfully) come from nations at least allied with the West, but there are also places like Afghanistan [1] that just reek of a repeat of the failure in managing oil countries. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ev-lithium-afghanistan-taliban-china/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ev-lit...
  - jbm 3y ago
    > of the failure in managing oil countries It's always fun when we go masks off on HN.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      The West propped up a ton of dictators and looked sideways as radical Islamists got ever more and more power. Yes I'd call that a failure in management.
- mulmen 3y ago
  It has happened with all resources. I won’t assume your intent but you invoked oil so I do want to point out the difference. In a battery lithium is not consumed completely after every use like oil. The lithium in a battery is used hundreds or thousands of times. When the pack is dead it can still be downcycled and eventually the individual cells recycled. With the lithium being recovered and reused. Yes, there is or will be a “lithium rush”. But it will look a lot more like gold or aluminum than oil.
- mabbo 3y ago
  I think the difference is that lithium is being created into a reusable product while oil is mostly made into a consumable, used once. A good battery lasts years, maybe decades. And in theory it can then be recycled.
  - echelon 3y ago
    > I think the difference is that lithium is being created into a reusable product while oil is mostly made into a consumable, used once. Sourcing lithium is something we've been thinking a lot about, whereas we haven't reached peak fossil fuels or scarcity. There are plenty of places to continue drilling: the US, Greenland, the Arctic Circle, Antarctica ... The problem with fossil fuels is the carbon entering the atmosphere.
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      To be fair, "peak oil" was a big scare at one point.
      - nostrademons 3y ago
        Arguably we reached peak oil in 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-production-in-barrels-per-day/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-produc... It's hard to extrapolate a trend though - there was a dip caused by COVID, and global oil use has been growing since then, but it's still not back to where it was 4 years ago. Also a lot of people think peak oil means that we suddenly won't have any gas available. No. Peak oil means all the easily extractable oil is gone, and so all future projects need to use more capital-intensive, technologically-advanced extraction techniques that cost more, and so the price of oil goes up, and then we use less of it while it's replaced by other technologies. Which is exactly what's been happening for the past ~5-15 years. U.S. is back to being the world's top oil producer, but all of it is in shale oil fields that aren't economically viable below ~$50/barrel, and so gas will never go back down to the $1/gallon it was in the 90s.
        3y ago
georgeburdell 3y ago
(The volcano is dormant)
- jandrewrogers 3y ago
  Not dormant, extinct. Calderas in that area tend to be ancient ancestors of the current Yellowstone caldera.
  - dtgriscom 3y ago
    "This is an ex-volcano."
- jj999 3y ago
  (list 'The 'volcano 'is 'dormant)
ChatGTP 3y ago
[flagged]
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  I don't understand this criticism. You mine lithium once. You have to pull fossil fuels out of the ground constantly even after you build the car using iron you've mined out of the ground.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    How much of the lithium in a typical electric car battery is able to be extracted and put into another battery?
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      I think the answer for "able to be" is 100%. I think the question is how economical we can make it to separate it from the rest of the materials and then process it into a new battery. I'm sure we'll never be able to get back 100% cost effectively, but I'm sure someday people will be working on driving it as close to that as they can.
  - wyager 3y ago
    To be fair, petroleum extraction is minimally invasive. You can easily live with an oil well on your property. You can't live with a lithium mine on your property.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Why not? The process doesn't look that bad.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      Not sure what you are talking about, it highly depends on the way lithium is extracted. A lithium hard rock mine is like any other open pid mine. Its a big hole in the ground with trucks going up and down. A brine operations is basically a bunch of huge fields of water that just sort of sit there. It needs lots of space. New forms of DLE Deep Brine mines look very much like a petroleum extraction well (even using old holes from that). However not fully commercial yet. However I would also say that petroleum extraction on a large scale, specially in the ocean has lots of bad effects. And the gas from those mines will escape for decades.
aa_is_op 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - aa_is_op 3y ago
    Mister HN moderator.... maybe you should read more about China's extensive efforts to control the rare earth mining market using anti-mining campaigns in countries such as the US and Australia. Examples: https://www.businessinsider.com/pro-china-propaganda-campaign-targeted-us-rare-earths-industry-2022-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/pro-china-propaganda-campaig... https://qz.com/1962580/china-is-insecure-about-its-global-rare-earths-dominance https://qz.com/1962580/china-is-insecure-about-its-global-ra... https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/06/20/can-australia-break-chinas-monopoly-on-critical-minerals https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/06/20/can-australia-brea... It's not my fault autocratic regimes are flooding the internet with propaganda. The comment isn't "flamebait" at all. It's a representation of China's frustration that rare earth minerals exist anywhere outside its borders.
    - dang 3y ago
      Sorry, but it was an unsubstantive one-liner on a divisive topic, and those are flamebait.
MenhirMike 3y ago
This is going to be the plot of a Bruckheimer/Emmerich co-production, is it? A team of scientists needs to travel into the heart of a volcano to find the lost city of Lithium, but one of them is actually a spy for a foreign power that will try to kill everyone else to prevent the secret to get out, only to be thwarted by the lone survivor, a man who was recently divorced by his wife and just wants to see his children again. He finds another (female) survivor, and together they defeat the spy mastermind and are evacuated by the US Military mere seconds before the volcano erupts.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  CCR plays in the background
- vermasque 3y ago
  Sounds a lot like Michael Crichton's Congo
- Blammar 3y ago
  You should work with ChatGPT4 to generate a movie script for Roland! Shouldn't take more than a week!
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    It certainly couldn't be any worse or more idiotic than the scripts for probably every Hollywood natural disaster movie: The Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, etc.
    - MenhirMike 3y ago
      Yeah, it wouldn't need ChatGPT and it wouldn't take a week - my initial post pretty much came to my mind fully formed because it's just every action movie trope of any 90's/00's Blockbuster. I can probably write a 90-Minute script over the course of a week if I write only during toilet breaks, the main issue is "Will there be $40M in the budget to blow up an actual Volcano?"
- 3y ago
sdsd 3y ago
[flagged]
- labster 3y ago
  Memories are essentially stories we tell ourselves about the world. They’re not real records of events, they’re condensed down into a narrative. Stories are how we understand the world. It’s hard to fault you for picking up on the meme of Manifest Destiny; at least you’re self aware about it.
  - labrador 3y ago
    I realized recently that my memories aren't true stories. They feel true, but a lot of context is missing that would make them closer to the truth.
  - qup 3y ago
    Sometimes I tell myself I may as well change some bad memories to be better. If I manage to accomplish that, I can change the past. Because the only record of some of these events is in my own brain. I am the arbiter.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  That's maybe because you have distorted view of the worth of 'discovering lithium' is. You hear: "Valueable resource found under Biden's watch' I hear: "Another lithium resource that want be exploited discovered"
almost_usual 3y ago
> ‘They seem to have hit the sweet spot where the clays are preserved close to the surface, so they won’t have to extract as much rock, yet it hasn’t been weathered away yet.’ > Benson says his company expects to begin mining in 2026. It will remove clay with water and then separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.
- greggsy 3y ago
  This sounds very similar to uranium refinement. How economical is the refinement of lithium clays compared to stone or brine mines? Do they have similar chemical, water and mechanical refinement requirements?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
panick21_ 3y ago
As with all the 5000 news articles talking about lithium discovers, please remember, lithium is very common, discovering it is easy, there is plenty around and plenty of known location. However lithium operates more like a advanced chemical then a base metal. Each mine lithium mine is different and has to be separately qualified for each battery manufactures/car company. There are very, very few companies who have actually managed to produce battery grade lithium and many, many company who have been struggling for years to achieve it. We simply don't have a lithium problem, what is lacking is the expertise to actually bring deposits like this to use.
- foota 3y ago
  This is really interesting, could you explain a little more? Is it that each of these mines is a different lithium compound, and there's no economical process to convert it to some base form?
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Just to be clear, I'm not a chemists. This is just what I have learned from following this industry. Any real domain expert feel free to correct or expand. Lithium comes in many forms, on a high level there are 3, hard rock, clay and brine. Hard rock was initially common, when lithium was new and was mined in North Carolina. It turn out it was cheaper to produce lithium from brines in South America. This basically means pumping salty water from below the earth and using the sun to evaproate the water [2]. However since the battery revolution, Australia has been a leading miner of Spodumene [1]. This then shipped to China and turned into lithium chemicals. Clay has not yet been exploited, but many are tying (like Tesla showed in their presentation). Another technology much talked about is Direct Lithium Extraction, that simple extracts lithium and releases slightly less salty water back into the environment. From these mining operations two different chemicals are produced as input for battery cathode refining processes, lithium carbonate [3] and lithium hydroxide [4]. Different methods of mining and refining produce either of those. If my understanding is correct, most brine operations end up being carbonate and most hard rock operations end up as hydroxide. Often hydroxide is also produced from carbonate as a follow up process. Depending on your cathode material and your process you need carbonate or hydroxide of specific quality. And because the material performance here is so important and the battery as a system is so sensitive, even the slight changes in source material and the process can have large impacts. Even the slight changes in source material and the process can have big effects. So that means if you have a mine, you can't just mine do minimal refinement and then throw it on to the international standardized metals market the way it works for other materials. You need to build a highly sophisticated chemical processing facility that can handle your material specifically and produce high quality materials in a sufficient quantity that car makers can go threw the many rounds of testing that are required before a new source material ever makes it into a car. Since the lithium industry is comparatively so small the necessary expertise to do these things is not at all common. A few companies can do it and that's not very many people. So getting a team together that can pull of a major project like that isn't easy. Some media sources that do lot of good reporting: Global Lithium Podcast - https://www.globallithium.net/podcast https://www.globallithium.net/podcast - Opinion-ed Insider and Interviews The Limiting Factor - https://www.youtube.com/@thelimitingfactor/videos https://www.youtube.com/@thelimitingfactor/videos - Well researched videos on batteries but also lithium supply chains. Also some interviews with experts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodumene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodumene [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Lithium_mine%2C_Salar_del_Hombre_Muerto%2C_Argentina.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Lithium_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_carbonate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_carbonate [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide
davidw 3y ago
I've actually driven through the "town" of McDermitt, on the border. It is in the middle of f'ing nowhere. It's not terribly far from one of the original "McFarthest spots" ( http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdonalds-sept-2010/ http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon... ). Some environmentalists and local native Americans aren't terribly happy about the idea: https://apnews.com/article/nevada-lithium-mine-court-appeal-15bd07e0ec03230d81349ff172c790dd https://apnews.com/article/nevada-lithium-mine-court-appeal-... It's actually a pretty interesting bit of country to see, because it's rare for most of us to experience places that remote. A few years back, when visiting Steens Mountain (highly recommended) we drove the paved road from Frenchglen to the Alvord desert. We saw I think 2 other cars in an hour.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  I refuse to call these people "environmentalists" until they provide a list of places they are ok with mining. What they are is just glorified NIMBYs who knee jerk oppose everything.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    NIMBYS say that things should be built/mined, just not near them.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Pretty sure those protestors are driving there in vehicles using mined minerals, fueling them with energy refined and extracted using mined minerals (and likely burning fossil fuels too), etc. If that isn’t saying things should be mined, just not where they can see it, I don’t know what is.
  - mkoubaa 3y ago
    Agree, nobody wants to know or see how the sausage is made, they just want the sausage.
    - 3y ago
josh_today 3y ago
[dead]
runjake 3y ago
The”US Volcano” == McDermitt caldera on the Oregon/Nevada border.
skymast 3y ago
[dead]
yieldcrv 3y ago
Cant wait for Elon to come spread some democracy to US!
- iwasanewt 3y ago
  Quite improbable, it seems [1] [1](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1700805058370113934?t=D0_RVu0Ob8RfyNfieZGiEw&s=19 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1700805058370113934?t=D0...)
jbverschoor 3y ago
Will this mean peace in Africa?
8bitsrule 3y ago
A lot of different battery techs are being worked on. Lithium might wind up being left behind in five years.
- simondotau 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36834046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36834046
- jokoon 3y ago
  Dear battery technology claimant, Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because: [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale. [ ] it will be too expensive for users. [ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles. [ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels. [ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures. [ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable. [ ] it has too short of a lifetime. [ ] its charge rate is too slow. [ ] its materials are too toxic. [ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode. [ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care. [ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then. [ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it. [ ] your claims are lies.
momirlan 3y ago
funny thing is, technology is advancing so fast that lithium might not even be a factor in new batteries.
foreverobama 3y ago
[dead]
balls187 3y ago
Completely off-topic, but my 5 and 7 year old know about Kurt Cobain, Nirvana because of their song Lithium. It's played everytime the Seattle Kraken score a goal at home, and we go to lots of games as a family. My youngest always asks to play "Lithium by Nirvana" song when it's his turn to pick. Would be cool for the US to produce better batteries.
rcdwealth 3y ago
[dead]
UberFly 3y ago
Time to buy real estate in McDermitt Nevada I guess.
zaroth 3y ago
How does the long lifecycle of large lithium batteries affect the lithium recycling industry? I would guess that large-scale recycling is only just coming online in the next few years. Of course there is initial supply now, but battery production is growing exponentially (for EV and Grid) those battery lifespans are 5-10 years or longer.
Roark66 3y ago
How these two sentences are in any way compatible with eachother: >company will (..) separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium. And: >‘If they can extract the lithium in a very low energy intensive way, or in a process that does not consume much acid, then this can be economically very significant,’ Centrifuging doesn't seem to be a very low energy process compared with what they do in Bolivia (just let the water evaporate in huge shallow lakes then gather the material with dozers). And the acid thing is just contradictory. They plan to leach with sulphuric acid and hope to find a way to not use acid at the same time? It is very good more lithium deposits are found outside China, but isn't lithium one of most abundant things on earth? And isn't the key difficulty in economic extraction the fact established mines use practices that would not be allowed in places like US/Europe? Surely, we should start with funding r&d to come up with an economic and less polluting process of extraction.
0xDEF 3y ago
There is a lot of propaganda on TikTok about how lithium mining and refining is too polluting and only the clever Chinese know how to do it at scale without polluting.
tmountain 3y ago
I’ve heard a lot about the potential of the Salton Sea regarding producing the “world’s greenest lithium”. I wonder how this compares.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Why do elements group together into a deposit instead of being evenly mixed like soup?
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  I assume that liquids at different densities form different layers. And maybe surface tension helps?
pfdietz 3y ago
I would not be too surprised if there were more deposits in the US southwest. While the specific sequence of events for this one may be unique, there was tremendous volcanic activity there during the "Mid-Tertiary Ignimbrite Flareup". This event, from about 25-40 million years ago, produced enough pyroclastic deposits that (if evenly spread) would bury the entire continental US 55 meters deep. I believe the largest known supervolcanic eruption ever was part of this period.
corethree 3y ago
If all cars in the world had lithium batteries how long would lithium last?
neycoda 3y ago
Wouldn't it be cool to harness volcanos and Earth's magma layer to recycle our junk and craft materials we use?
1-6 3y ago
Unfortunately, OSHA will prevent dumpster-diving for that lithium.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Dumb question. Could a really serious impact from space increase the probability of a volcano forming at the point of impact? I’m imagining that volcanoes are a little bit like the channeling hazard when making espresso, where the shallow or disturbed area are more likely to erupt with hot liquid. This is relevant because I have seen it said that meteors could be a source of lithium.
- tommykins 3y ago
  Oh man - there's actually a much cooler version of this scenario, which is Sudbury impact crater, which was a massive Nickel deposit that was 'enriched' by the impact crater that hit it, not by adding Nickel, but by adding heat into the system.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    How is that cooler than an asteroid impact creating a volcano? You must be chemist or something.
demondemidi 3y ago
Mixed feelings. On the one hand: cool, less exploitation of developing nations by a few billionaires. (Downvotes. Cool. I know it is hard for some people to accept reality because they just need to worship a wealth they'll never experience, no matter who or what it obliterates.) On the other hand: dammit, we were just getting around to cost-effectiveness of lithium recycling, but now it looks like that's another several decades off.
tommykins 3y ago
Welcome to the world of resource and reserve calculations, where the numbers are made up and the points don't matter. It's very easy to come up with a back of the envelope calculation to say we have this much Lithium, or this much Copper and come up with an absolute whopper of a number, the question is how much of it is recoverable and can it form part of a resource. There's a reason we (mining industry) don't let people produce these kind of numbers offhand, it's wildly speculatory and holds no basis in mining reality (yet!) - however very cool stuff and might provide a new exploration target in the future.
monkaiju 3y ago
It'd be much easier to stomach some level of 'necessary' cost towards ecologically re-structuring our society if people would stop pretending that that means you can simply maintain our current way of living but in a 'green' way. For example, there is no genuinely ecological way to have our current car-based infrastructure, let alone expand it into other parts of the world, regardless of whether they're EVs or ICE. We absolutely must wrangle with the fact that we need a society not premised on infinite growth. Anything else is inherently NOT ecological and makes any claims about things like extracting lithium for a 'green transition' nonsense.
- walleeee 3y ago
  This is the most important comment here. Everything we consider "wealth" is downstream of our ecobiological cocoon. If one's reaction to this is "we can just develop artifical life support": suggestions that a well-functioning planetary ecology is not necessary had better come with a demonstrably viable alternative. We are nowhere close. Even if we were, is there no value in the beings we share this planet with? Can we really justify their indiscriminate destruction? To what end?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
AlokNandan 3y ago
https://www.mangrovelithium.com/ https://www.mangrovelithium.com/ Raised Series B recently, not sure its discussed already or not.

706 points by jseliger 3y ago

The price of a given commodity rises due to demand increases -> people look for more of it -> people find it -> the commodity is eventually mined or otherwise exploited -> prices moderate. It happened with oil and now it's happening with lithium.

CameronNemo 3y ago
See also Aluminium. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/aluminum-was-once-one-of-the-most-expensive-metals-in-the-world/382447/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/alumi...
mschuster91 3y ago
And in a lot of cases it's countries that aren't exactly stable which have the resources. A lot of currently known lithium deposits (thankfully) come from nations at least allied with the West, but there are also places like Afghanistan [1] that just reek of a repeat of the failure in managing oil countries. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ev-lithium-afghanistan-taliban-china/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ev-lit...
- jbm 3y ago
  > of the failure in managing oil countries It's always fun when we go masks off on HN.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    The West propped up a ton of dictators and looked sideways as radical Islamists got ever more and more power. Yes I'd call that a failure in management.
mulmen 3y ago
It has happened with all resources. I won’t assume your intent but you invoked oil so I do want to point out the difference. In a battery lithium is not consumed completely after every use like oil. The lithium in a battery is used hundreds or thousands of times. When the pack is dead it can still be downcycled and eventually the individual cells recycled. With the lithium being recovered and reused. Yes, there is or will be a “lithium rush”. But it will look a lot more like gold or aluminum than oil.
mabbo 3y ago
I think the difference is that lithium is being created into a reusable product while oil is mostly made into a consumable, used once. A good battery lasts years, maybe decades. And in theory it can then be recycled.
- echelon 3y ago
  > I think the difference is that lithium is being created into a reusable product while oil is mostly made into a consumable, used once. Sourcing lithium is something we've been thinking a lot about, whereas we haven't reached peak fossil fuels or scarcity. There are plenty of places to continue drilling: the US, Greenland, the Arctic Circle, Antarctica ... The problem with fossil fuels is the carbon entering the atmosphere.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    To be fair, "peak oil" was a big scare at one point.
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      Arguably we reached peak oil in 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-production-in-barrels-per-day/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-produc... It's hard to extrapolate a trend though - there was a dip caused by COVID, and global oil use has been growing since then, but it's still not back to where it was 4 years ago. Also a lot of people think peak oil means that we suddenly won't have any gas available. No. Peak oil means all the easily extractable oil is gone, and so all future projects need to use more capital-intensive, technologically-advanced extraction techniques that cost more, and so the price of oil goes up, and then we use less of it while it's replaced by other technologies. Which is exactly what's been happening for the past ~5-15 years. U.S. is back to being the world's top oil producer, but all of it is in shale oil fields that aren't economically viable below ~$50/barrel, and so gas will never go back down to the $1/gallon it was in the 90s.
      - 3y ago

georgeburdell 3y ago

(The volcano is dormant)

jandrewrogers 3y ago
Not dormant, extinct. Calderas in that area tend to be ancient ancestors of the current Yellowstone caldera.
- dtgriscom 3y ago
  "This is an ex-volcano."
jj999 3y ago
(list 'The 'volcano 'is 'dormant)

ChatGTP 3y ago

[flagged]

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
I don't understand this criticism. You mine lithium once. You have to pull fossil fuels out of the ground constantly even after you build the car using iron you've mined out of the ground.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  How much of the lithium in a typical electric car battery is able to be extracted and put into another battery?
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I think the answer for "able to be" is 100%. I think the question is how economical we can make it to separate it from the rest of the materials and then process it into a new battery. I'm sure we'll never be able to get back 100% cost effectively, but I'm sure someday people will be working on driving it as close to that as they can.
- wyager 3y ago
  To be fair, petroleum extraction is minimally invasive. You can easily live with an oil well on your property. You can't live with a lithium mine on your property.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Why not? The process doesn't look that bad.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Not sure what you are talking about, it highly depends on the way lithium is extracted. A lithium hard rock mine is like any other open pid mine. Its a big hole in the ground with trucks going up and down. A brine operations is basically a bunch of huge fields of water that just sort of sit there. It needs lots of space. New forms of DLE Deep Brine mines look very much like a petroleum extraction well (even using old holes from that). However not fully commercial yet. However I would also say that petroleum extraction on a large scale, specially in the ocean has lots of bad effects. And the gas from those mines will escape for decades.

aa_is_op 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- aa_is_op 3y ago
  Mister HN moderator.... maybe you should read more about China's extensive efforts to control the rare earth mining market using anti-mining campaigns in countries such as the US and Australia. Examples: https://www.businessinsider.com/pro-china-propaganda-campaign-targeted-us-rare-earths-industry-2022-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/pro-china-propaganda-campaig... https://qz.com/1962580/china-is-insecure-about-its-global-rare-earths-dominance https://qz.com/1962580/china-is-insecure-about-its-global-ra... https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/06/20/can-australia-break-chinas-monopoly-on-critical-minerals https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/06/20/can-australia-brea... It's not my fault autocratic regimes are flooding the internet with propaganda. The comment isn't "flamebait" at all. It's a representation of China's frustration that rare earth minerals exist anywhere outside its borders.
  - dang 3y ago
    Sorry, but it was an unsubstantive one-liner on a divisive topic, and those are flamebait.

MenhirMike 3y ago

This is going to be the plot of a Bruckheimer/Emmerich co-production, is it? A team of scientists needs to travel into the heart of a volcano to find the lost city of Lithium, but one of them is actually a spy for a foreign power that will try to kill everyone else to prevent the secret to get out, only to be thwarted by the lone survivor, a man who was recently divorced by his wife and just wants to see his children again. He finds another (female) survivor, and together they defeat the spy mastermind and are evacuated by the US Military mere seconds before the volcano erupts.

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
CCR plays in the background
vermasque 3y ago
Sounds a lot like Michael Crichton's Congo
Blammar 3y ago
You should work with ChatGPT4 to generate a movie script for Roland! Shouldn't take more than a week!
- midoridensha 3y ago
  It certainly couldn't be any worse or more idiotic than the scripts for probably every Hollywood natural disaster movie: The Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, etc.
  - MenhirMike 3y ago
    Yeah, it wouldn't need ChatGPT and it wouldn't take a week - my initial post pretty much came to my mind fully formed because it's just every action movie trope of any 90's/00's Blockbuster. I can probably write a 90-Minute script over the course of a week if I write only during toilet breaks, the main issue is "Will there be $40M in the budget to blow up an actual Volcano?"
3y ago

sdsd 3y ago

[flagged]

labster 3y ago
Memories are essentially stories we tell ourselves about the world. They’re not real records of events, they’re condensed down into a narrative. Stories are how we understand the world. It’s hard to fault you for picking up on the meme of Manifest Destiny; at least you’re self aware about it.
- labrador 3y ago
  I realized recently that my memories aren't true stories. They feel true, but a lot of context is missing that would make them closer to the truth.
- qup 3y ago
  Sometimes I tell myself I may as well change some bad memories to be better. If I manage to accomplish that, I can change the past. Because the only record of some of these events is in my own brain. I am the arbiter.
panick21_ 3y ago
That's maybe because you have distorted view of the worth of 'discovering lithium' is. You hear: "Valueable resource found under Biden's watch' I hear: "Another lithium resource that want be exploited discovered"

almost_usual 3y ago

> ‘They seem to have hit the sweet spot where the clays are preserved close to the surface, so they won’t have to extract as much rock, yet it hasn’t been weathered away yet.’ > Benson says his company expects to begin mining in 2026. It will remove clay with water and then separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.

greggsy 3y ago
This sounds very similar to uranium refinement. How economical is the refinement of lithium clays compared to stone or brine mines? Do they have similar chemical, water and mechanical refinement requirements?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

panick21_ 3y ago

As with all the 5000 news articles talking about lithium discovers, please remember, lithium is very common, discovering it is easy, there is plenty around and plenty of known location. However lithium operates more like a advanced chemical then a base metal. Each mine lithium mine is different and has to be separately qualified for each battery manufactures/car company. There are very, very few companies who have actually managed to produce battery grade lithium and many, many company who have been struggling for years to achieve it. We simply don't have a lithium problem, what is lacking is the expertise to actually bring deposits like this to use.

foota 3y ago
This is really interesting, could you explain a little more? Is it that each of these mines is a different lithium compound, and there's no economical process to convert it to some base form?
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Just to be clear, I'm not a chemists. This is just what I have learned from following this industry. Any real domain expert feel free to correct or expand. Lithium comes in many forms, on a high level there are 3, hard rock, clay and brine. Hard rock was initially common, when lithium was new and was mined in North Carolina. It turn out it was cheaper to produce lithium from brines in South America. This basically means pumping salty water from below the earth and using the sun to evaproate the water [2]. However since the battery revolution, Australia has been a leading miner of Spodumene [1]. This then shipped to China and turned into lithium chemicals. Clay has not yet been exploited, but many are tying (like Tesla showed in their presentation). Another technology much talked about is Direct Lithium Extraction, that simple extracts lithium and releases slightly less salty water back into the environment. From these mining operations two different chemicals are produced as input for battery cathode refining processes, lithium carbonate [3] and lithium hydroxide [4]. Different methods of mining and refining produce either of those. If my understanding is correct, most brine operations end up being carbonate and most hard rock operations end up as hydroxide. Often hydroxide is also produced from carbonate as a follow up process. Depending on your cathode material and your process you need carbonate or hydroxide of specific quality. And because the material performance here is so important and the battery as a system is so sensitive, even the slight changes in source material and the process can have large impacts. Even the slight changes in source material and the process can have big effects. So that means if you have a mine, you can't just mine do minimal refinement and then throw it on to the international standardized metals market the way it works for other materials. You need to build a highly sophisticated chemical processing facility that can handle your material specifically and produce high quality materials in a sufficient quantity that car makers can go threw the many rounds of testing that are required before a new source material ever makes it into a car. Since the lithium industry is comparatively so small the necessary expertise to do these things is not at all common. A few companies can do it and that's not very many people. So getting a team together that can pull of a major project like that isn't easy. Some media sources that do lot of good reporting: Global Lithium Podcast - https://www.globallithium.net/podcast https://www.globallithium.net/podcast - Opinion-ed Insider and Interviews The Limiting Factor - https://www.youtube.com/@thelimitingfactor/videos https://www.youtube.com/@thelimitingfactor/videos - Well researched videos on batteries but also lithium supply chains. Also some interviews with experts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodumene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodumene [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Lithium_mine%2C_Salar_del_Hombre_Muerto%2C_Argentina.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Lithium_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_carbonate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_carbonate [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide

davidw 3y ago

I've actually driven through the "town" of McDermitt, on the border. It is in the middle of f'ing nowhere. It's not terribly far from one of the original "McFarthest spots" ( http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdonalds-sept-2010/ http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon... ). Some environmentalists and local native Americans aren't terribly happy about the idea: https://apnews.com/article/nevada-lithium-mine-court-appeal-15bd07e0ec03230d81349ff172c790dd https://apnews.com/article/nevada-lithium-mine-court-appeal-... It's actually a pretty interesting bit of country to see, because it's rare for most of us to experience places that remote. A few years back, when visiting Steens Mountain (highly recommended) we drove the paved road from Frenchglen to the Alvord desert. We saw I think 2 other cars in an hour.

fallingknife 3y ago
I refuse to call these people "environmentalists" until they provide a list of places they are ok with mining. What they are is just glorified NIMBYs who knee jerk oppose everything.
- midasuni 3y ago
  NIMBYS say that things should be built/mined, just not near them.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Pretty sure those protestors are driving there in vehicles using mined minerals, fueling them with energy refined and extracted using mined minerals (and likely burning fossil fuels too), etc. If that isn’t saying things should be mined, just not where they can see it, I don’t know what is.
- mkoubaa 3y ago
  Agree, nobody wants to know or see how the sausage is made, they just want the sausage.
  - 3y ago

josh_today 3y ago

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runjake 3y ago

The”US Volcano” == McDermitt caldera on the Oregon/Nevada border.

skymast 3y ago

[dead]

yieldcrv 3y ago

Cant wait for Elon to come spread some democracy to US!

iwasanewt 3y ago
Quite improbable, it seems [1] [1](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1700805058370113934?t=D0_RVu0Ob8RfyNfieZGiEw&s=19 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1700805058370113934?t=D0...)

jbverschoor 3y ago

Will this mean peace in Africa?

8bitsrule 3y ago

A lot of different battery techs are being worked on. Lithium might wind up being left behind in five years.

simondotau 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36834046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36834046
jokoon 3y ago
Dear battery technology claimant, Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because: [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale. [ ] it will be too expensive for users. [ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles. [ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels. [ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures. [ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable. [ ] it has too short of a lifetime. [ ] its charge rate is too slow. [ ] its materials are too toxic. [ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode. [ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care. [ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then. [ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it. [ ] your claims are lies.

momirlan 3y ago

funny thing is, technology is advancing so fast that lithium might not even be a factor in new batteries.

foreverobama 3y ago

[dead]

balls187 3y ago

Completely off-topic, but my 5 and 7 year old know about Kurt Cobain, Nirvana because of their song Lithium. It's played everytime the Seattle Kraken score a goal at home, and we go to lots of games as a family. My youngest always asks to play "Lithium by Nirvana" song when it's his turn to pick. Would be cool for the US to produce better batteries.

rcdwealth 3y ago

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UberFly 3y ago

Time to buy real estate in McDermitt Nevada I guess.

zaroth 3y ago

How does the long lifecycle of large lithium batteries affect the lithium recycling industry? I would guess that large-scale recycling is only just coming online in the next few years. Of course there is initial supply now, but battery production is growing exponentially (for EV and Grid) those battery lifespans are 5-10 years or longer.

Roark66 3y ago

How these two sentences are in any way compatible with eachother: >company will (..) separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium. And: >‘If they can extract the lithium in a very low energy intensive way, or in a process that does not consume much acid, then this can be economically very significant,’ Centrifuging doesn't seem to be a very low energy process compared with what they do in Bolivia (just let the water evaporate in huge shallow lakes then gather the material with dozers). And the acid thing is just contradictory. They plan to leach with sulphuric acid and hope to find a way to not use acid at the same time? It is very good more lithium deposits are found outside China, but isn't lithium one of most abundant things on earth? And isn't the key difficulty in economic extraction the fact established mines use practices that would not be allowed in places like US/Europe? Surely, we should start with funding r&d to come up with an economic and less polluting process of extraction.

0xDEF 3y ago

There is a lot of propaganda on TikTok about how lithium mining and refining is too polluting and only the clever Chinese know how to do it at scale without polluting.

tmountain 3y ago

I’ve heard a lot about the potential of the Salton Sea regarding producing the “world’s greenest lithium”. I wonder how this compares.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Why do elements group together into a deposit instead of being evenly mixed like soup?

AndrewDucker 3y ago
I assume that liquids at different densities form different layers. And maybe surface tension helps?

pfdietz 3y ago

I would not be too surprised if there were more deposits in the US southwest. While the specific sequence of events for this one may be unique, there was tremendous volcanic activity there during the "Mid-Tertiary Ignimbrite Flareup". This event, from about 25-40 million years ago, produced enough pyroclastic deposits that (if evenly spread) would bury the entire continental US 55 meters deep. I believe the largest known supervolcanic eruption ever was part of this period.

corethree 3y ago

If all cars in the world had lithium batteries how long would lithium last?

neycoda 3y ago

Wouldn't it be cool to harness volcanos and Earth's magma layer to recycle our junk and craft materials we use?

1-6 3y ago

Unfortunately, OSHA will prevent dumpster-diving for that lithium.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

Dumb question. Could a really serious impact from space increase the probability of a volcano forming at the point of impact? I’m imagining that volcanoes are a little bit like the channeling hazard when making espresso, where the shallow or disturbed area are more likely to erupt with hot liquid. This is relevant because I have seen it said that meteors could be a source of lithium.

tommykins 3y ago
Oh man - there's actually a much cooler version of this scenario, which is Sudbury impact crater, which was a massive Nickel deposit that was 'enriched' by the impact crater that hit it, not by adding Nickel, but by adding heat into the system.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  How is that cooler than an asteroid impact creating a volcano? You must be chemist or something.

demondemidi 3y ago

Mixed feelings. On the one hand: cool, less exploitation of developing nations by a few billionaires. (Downvotes. Cool. I know it is hard for some people to accept reality because they just need to worship a wealth they'll never experience, no matter who or what it obliterates.) On the other hand: dammit, we were just getting around to cost-effectiveness of lithium recycling, but now it looks like that's another several decades off.

tommykins 3y ago

Welcome to the world of resource and reserve calculations, where the numbers are made up and the points don't matter. It's very easy to come up with a back of the envelope calculation to say we have this much Lithium, or this much Copper and come up with an absolute whopper of a number, the question is how much of it is recoverable and can it form part of a resource. There's a reason we (mining industry) don't let people produce these kind of numbers offhand, it's wildly speculatory and holds no basis in mining reality (yet!) - however very cool stuff and might provide a new exploration target in the future.

monkaiju 3y ago

It'd be much easier to stomach some level of 'necessary' cost towards ecologically re-structuring our society if people would stop pretending that that means you can simply maintain our current way of living but in a 'green' way. For example, there is no genuinely ecological way to have our current car-based infrastructure, let alone expand it into other parts of the world, regardless of whether they're EVs or ICE. We absolutely must wrangle with the fact that we need a society not premised on infinite growth. Anything else is inherently NOT ecological and makes any claims about things like extracting lithium for a 'green transition' nonsense.

walleeee 3y ago
This is the most important comment here. Everything we consider "wealth" is downstream of our ecobiological cocoon. If one's reaction to this is "we can just develop artifical life support": suggestions that a well-functioning planetary ecology is not necessary had better come with a demonstrably viable alternative. We are nowhere close. Even if we were, is there no value in the beings we share this planet with? Can we really justify their indiscriminate destruction? To what end?
deleted 3y ago
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AlokNandan 3y ago

https://www.mangrovelithium.com/ https://www.mangrovelithium.com/ Raised Series B recently, not sure its discussed already or not.