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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

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
  - xeromal 3y ago
    Appreciate this comment. This is why I love hackernews.
  - senectus1 3y ago
    very interesting, thank you.
  - natmaka 3y ago
    Indeed! According to Hannah Ritchie: - The world has enough lithium for our electric vehicles, decades into the future. - The world is currently not producing enough of it to keep up with demand. This could be a major bottleneck this decade. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-v...
    - eru 3y ago
      > - The world has enough lithium for our electric vehicles, decades into the future. We are sitting on a huge pile of matter, the earth. We have enough of every mineral to last us more than just 'decades'. (Remember the 'peak phosphorus' panic a few years ago?) Your second point is the more interesting question: what are the costs of extraction? Is available supply keeping up?
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    Great research thanks
  - starkparker 3y ago
    > 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. Grain of salt, but Jindalee claims 97-98% extraction rate on acid leeching cores at the McDermitt site on the northern caldera, on an inferred 21.5 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent. They're expecting 1400 ppm on 3 Bt. Cores from Lithium Americas's inferred 19 Mt LCE find at Thacker Pass on the southern caldera is extracting at 84% on acid leeching. (For context, Clayton Valley's brine project converts at 85%.) Jindalee also claims they can also extract lithium phosphate from it and convert it to either carbonate or hydroxide. That's cool, but they don't really go into the cost of doing that, but I think the point is that it's supposedly a very flexible lode. > 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. GM and POSCO (the Korean cathode active material supplier for GM) are already working with Jindalee on feasibility of exploiting clay at scale, and GM already bought $650M of equity in Lithium Americas back in January for Thacker Pass. Probably know by February/March 2024 what the damage will be for processing clay, but Jindalee already expects to know whether they'll be shovels-in-ground by June 2024. That is a very fast turnaround for something that hasn't really been done before at any scale, much less 30 Mt of LCE-scale. Which I think is also why this article is a bit more focused on whether they can learn enough from how this find came about to make more finds like it. They might not know how to extract clay for a while, but if they can learn how to find more similarly exploitable clay first, they can get more investment to catch up. Inferring >30 Mt of LCE at 1400 ppm from just two sites in one caldera still seems like plenty of reason to fund figuring that out ASAP, though. Clayton Valley is like 6 Mt LCE; at this stage of the process, they were suggesting 1.3 Mt LCE at 900 ppm, on a feasibility target of 400 ppm. That was good enough for $700M in funding.
- jddj 3y ago
  Nothing really beats good spodumene yet, and even that's pretty hard to get right at the mining stage, let alone at the refinement. Traditional brines are fine but need scale and time and still a surprising amount of process tuning. Clays, lepidolite and alternative brine methods (DLE. Extractive beads, etc) are efficient media for extracting money from the public markets but that's about all.
  - tbruckner 3y ago
    If that is the only efficient method for lithium extraction, is it fair to say that accessible lithium is not as abundant as people typically say?
- MikeOfAu 3y ago
  If you want a very comprehensive answer, then this series of (3?) youtube videos might be interesting to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqF_OZJSbxY&list=PLyvdbTy3v1d4QDNkr8uXoWyfY58SvMaPP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqF_OZJSbxY&list=PLyvdbTy3v1... The author is focused on answering questions around Tesla's ramp up, but the explanations are pretty comprehensive and general.
peytoncasper 3y ago
How is this different from oil? The vast majority of new deposits are leveraging different technology to enrich yields or extract it from challenging environments. Seems like a common problem for resource extraction that gets solved with time and investment.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  One of the biggest differences is that oil is all _primarily_ the same stuff and the difficulty is pulling out impurities. This means it can be quite cost effective to ship it where it needs to go to be processed. Crude oil is considered sour for example if it contains 1-2% sulfur. Ores on the other hand are usually mostly not the actual mineral you're looking for, and you're lucky if you're hitting double digit percentage concentrations, Lithium being "high concentration" if you're reaching 6%. This means that you ideally need to be doing most of (and usually all) of the processing at or very near the mine. One of the only minerals we regularly ship raw ore of is iron, since it tends to be in relatively high concentrations. Some Lithium mines might ship some ore but this is usually only done as an initial source of revenue while the processing is being built. The end result of this is that it's harder to take advantage of economies of scale where you can have a handful of processing facilities working on a very specific type of ore.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    So all of that Australian lithium being shipped off to China, is it being mostly processed in Australia first, or is most of the processing done in China, or something half half? The main reason America develops great oil tech and not lithium tech vs China is that the USA has lots of oil, while China doesn’t.
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      A lot of it is sent as partially processed ore, but two major reasons for that are: 1) a lot of these mines are very new and 2) Australia in particular is _very bad_ at secondary industries. We have a long history of just sending our minerals and raw food ingredients overseas to be processed and are lacking in expertise. Here is a recent article about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/business/australia-lithium-refining.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/business/australia-lithiu...
isykt 3y ago
If the expertise is to be developed, is it better for the US to develop it on their own deposits, or on the deposits of a competing nation?
- panick21_ 3y ago
  It depends on when you need those things. A new discovery will take 10 year minimum before it can be ready, more likely 20. So discoveries like this aren't gone do anything. There are some domestic companies further along in the process. But existing sources like South American brine and Australian hard rock will continue to be a huge part of the market. The US companies that originally mined in North Carolina are still around on the processing side. So its not really clear if having the mining domestically makes much of a difference. China is refining mostly things from Australia. Tesla is setting up a huge lithium refining factory on US soil but most of the material won't be mined in the US.
  - isykt 3y ago
    Is the market for lithium going to collapse in 10 years? I’m confused why something taking 10 years is a problem.
oneTbrain23 3y ago
USA lacks workers in those fields. So the problem is really "how to discover new twchnical expertise labor" to extract those lithium. It is same thing with solar and now silicon chips in USA.
- photonbeam 3y ago
  Isn’t the problem always that wages for skill is too low, so too few people know it
  - Negitivefrags 3y ago
    No, this isn’t always the problem. People are not fungible resources. You can’t simply turn a programmer from Google into a Lithium miner by paying more.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      The expertise China has built up is only around 20 years old, so it’s not like we couldn’t develop it in 20 years. Doing so in a free market way that isn’t undercut by Chinese suppliers, however, would be tricky (so some non free market mechanism is needed).
      - chii 3y ago
        > so it’s not like we couldn’t develop it in 20 years. 20 yrs is a very long time.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        It’s not really that long, but I guess it depends on how old you are (perception of passing time speeds up rapidly after 40).
- tw04 3y ago
  ^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital to our country's future. All the folks losing their minds are being short-sighted. While I agree in principle that the organizations should be paying their employees more, there's also the reality that China HEAVILY subsidizes their renewables AND has a lower base pay rate. Only one way to compete with that.
mkoubaa 3y ago
So then if prices of battery-grade lithium go up enough then it'll incentivize new production techniques?
- judge2020 3y ago
  They already are. With increased production, the price per unit staying stable means you either have an extremely mature industry, or the existing players don’t have any competition and can maintain insane YoY increases off of volume alone.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  There are various different compound of lithium at different qualities that count as 'battery grade'. That is what makes the market so complex. But generally speaking yes, there are 100s of junior lithium miners and all the big miners as well engaged in lithium extraction. Clay is as of yet untouched in mass production of lithium with many companies wanting to exploit it. Maybe most common is research on DLE, lithium extraction from brine where the brine is simply pumped back. This also exists in a deep brine variant where you pump water from super deep reservoirs. The problem is the ev market is going gang busters and even established companies spend decades on getting new plants up and running.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Does the UK have lots of lithium in their borders? France? Germany? Im sympathetic to the point that its fairly common but cant we overstate it’s abundance? As far as I know its not very evenly distributed and not everyone has good access to it.
- __s 3y ago
  https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-lithium-resource-availability-and-geostrategic-impacts-own-works-on-a-base-map-by_fig8_241756900 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-lithium-resource-... Europe may've gotten the short end of the stick, but there's plenty
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    There are more locations in Europe then that. Britain used to get Lithium from Cornwall and there are companies trying to revive that. But Europe simply hasn't put much effort into finding them. If need be plenty more could found in Europe.
    - b112 3y ago
      When I read that something is being shipped to China for processing, it makes me mentally add "Where there are no environmental laws, and processing in a very polluting way is OK". If you process many things in the West, you can't leave toxic chemicals in pools any more, to leak into ground water and cause cancer and other problems for people. So processing costs are going to be way more expensive than in a place where it's still OK to process+pollute and therefore kill and maim your citizens to make money. The West cannot compete with that.
      - panick21_ 3y ago
        I think people are to quick to just talk away any success China has as 'don't care for the environment' and 'don't care for people'. This might be sometimes true bit also more often isn't. Do you have actual evidence that lithium refining is a massively dirty industrial process that would cost multiple times more the West? Or are you speculating? Tesla is building a lithium refining plant in Texas right now, they didn't seem to have massive environmental problems and delays so far. In reality, the lead china has in these fields is more because of state investment policy and their drive to have an export car market. They saw the EV revolution as being able to make that happen, and it did.
dietr1ch 3y ago
I'd be surprised if the US cannot build the industry necessary for it, and even if that were the case, it seems that they could export ~raw lithium, and then buy it processed, or as batteries if needed meanwhile they figure things out, as the US doesn't really want to keep China owning critical production lines for the technology that's coming in the next 20+ years.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Here is the thing. Its not about what can happen in 20+ years. Of course the US can do whatever it want's in 20 years with enough money. In 20 years lot of things will be very different. But again, there was already plenty of lithium in the US, this discovery changes nothing. The US already has competent lithium companies. The US already has good relationship with South America and Australia where the resources are coming from. But currently 90%+ of refining is in China. Controlling the 'raw' resources is mostly uninteresting in this case.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    It's very similar to aluminum in this way. Aluminum mining is very different than many other minerals and metals. It's basically a processing thing. It's all about where you can get the resources to do the refining, not where the ore is. In the case of Aluminum its electricity. They call aluminum solidified electricity for a reason. That's why the biggest aluminum smelters in the world are where electricity is cheap. Same here, it's not like there is big chunks of Lithium just waiting to be picked up. It's a small percentage of dirt, and you need to process huge amounts of that dirt to extract it. That processing takes resources. Those resources are the limiting factor, not the raw ore. In the case of aluminum its electricity. In the case of lithium I gather it's also energy (to do the heating) and sulfuric acid, and the associated containment snd cleanup of such. Source: "After the ore is mined, it is crushed and roasted at 2012°F (1100°C). It is then cooled to 140°F (65°C), milled and roasted again, this time with sulfuric acid, at 482°F (250°C), a process known as acid leaching." https://www.sttsystems.com/industries/lithium-extraction/#:~:text=After%20the%20ore%20is%20mined,process%20known%20as%20acid%20leaching https://www.sttsystems.com/industries/lithium-extraction/#:~....
roenxi 3y ago
Also it is likely that, because of environmental regulations, it is not possible to mine the lithium economically. I haven't kept up, but the lack of lithium production in the US suggests that there are regulatory factors at play. Although apparently Australia is a big lithium producer so it must be possible to do in an environmentally conscious way. Or Australia's lithium mines have managed to fly under the radar of the environmentalists. It looks like Australia's lithium deposits are unusual being hard rock deposits, and we have it processed in China because I assume that part of the process is illegal in Australia.
- sherry-sherry 3y ago
  > it must be possible to do in an environmentally conscious way. Or Australia's lithium mines have managed to fly under the radar of the environmentalists Sadly, both don't seem to be true. Australia's lithium mining has a higher carbon footprint than others (3.4): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344922004670 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492... We has some of the highest CO2 emissions per capita, so it's not much of a surprise we are doing this inefficiently too.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  > Also it is likely that, because of environmental regulations, it is not possible to mine the lithium economically. I haven't kept up, but the lack of lithium production in the US suggests that there are regulatory factors at play. That's a large assumption to make without any investigation.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    It would be. But I've made a lot of investigations.
    - dtgriscom 3y ago
      {citation needed}
jillesvangurp 3y ago
It's not so much an expertise problem but more a problem of having to tailor the process to the supply of lithium. We're talking typically low quantities of lithium mixed with a lot of other materials in either some kind of clay, brine, or rock. Or recycled lithium batteries. Those sources of lithium require different approaches and there are multiple companies working on all of those. Historically, lithium was not interesting to mine at scale until the invention of lithium batteries thirty years ago. And only about ten years ago we figured out that we needed a lot of lithium to power things like cars, trucks, planes and electricity grids. We've only been looking for lithium for a relatively short amount of time. Before we started looking, it was a relatively low value by product of mining other stuff. There's this perception that we have to go to places like Bolivia, Australia, etc. because that's where the known, easy to access deposits are. But as this article shows, there are probably loads of other places that might have rich lithium deposits. The market for refining lithium is basically expanding at the pace we can build refineries. It's apparently a big reason Tesla chose to build their own refinery in Texas because the rest of the industry was not moving quick enough. Supplying lithium to the refinery isn't the issue. There's plenty of it. And if you start looking, you'll find some more. Rich deposits like this are of course nice and rare. The high concentration of lithium means extracting it is relatively cheap. But you can get it out of ocean water, there are natural brines in various places that have it, clay and rock deposits all over the place. By mass, it's one of the more common elements on this planet.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Sounds like every discovery is bad news for the environment because it raises the threshold for recycling even higher?
  - dv_dt 3y ago
    I don’t see why, recycling is refinement at a high density in a form that is near perfect for battery use. It’s probably more in wait of a high enough volume of input materials.
  - fennecfoxy 3y ago
    Which is why taxes should be going into subsidies for products made with genuinely recycled material, where the recycling is done in a sustainable way also. Rather than being used to bail out Banks & Airlines...and in America, Churches apparently. If it were up to me, I wouldn't just ban plastic straws. I'd ban almost all disposable packaging. Go to the supermarket, buy products and get them in sturdy plastic containers that you pay a deposit on. The next time you return you drop them back where they're cleaned for reuse at the location. Products like say a Coke are delivered in bulk format to the supermarket and dispensed into the relevant container at the location. After moving to the UK (from NZ), it's fucking disgusting how I go to the supermarket and _everything_ is in a disposable plastic container with a "sorry we don't recycle that yet" plastic film over _everything_. And the UK isn't even the worst place for this behaviour. We really are going to kill our planet at this point.
benreesman 3y ago
At some price it’ll get figured out. I’m a bit on the fence about whether Zeihan is a crank or a prophet (and there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground), but serious people pay green money to have him speak. If he’s right, the difference between “expensive lithium even amortized” and “unreliable lithium at best even if someone has a gun to your head” is existential.
- _hcuq 3y ago
  Those who can't get lithium will just use oil. Which will be cheap if electrification happens.
  - rini17 3y ago
    Oil is cheap due to economies of scale. There's unimaginably vast suply chain. When that starts to unravel, it might get cheaper but only temporarily.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
weinzierl 3y ago
Next time in the news: "Huge silicon dioxide discovery in the desert could end semiconductor shortage soon."

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
- xeromal 3y ago
  Appreciate this comment. This is why I love hackernews.
- senectus1 3y ago
  very interesting, thank you.
- natmaka 3y ago
  Indeed! According to Hannah Ritchie: - The world has enough lithium for our electric vehicles, decades into the future. - The world is currently not producing enough of it to keep up with demand. This could be a major bottleneck this decade. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-v...
  - eru 3y ago
    > - The world has enough lithium for our electric vehicles, decades into the future. We are sitting on a huge pile of matter, the earth. We have enough of every mineral to last us more than just 'decades'. (Remember the 'peak phosphorus' panic a few years ago?) Your second point is the more interesting question: what are the costs of extraction? Is available supply keeping up?
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  Great research thanks
- starkparker 3y ago
  > 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. Grain of salt, but Jindalee claims 97-98% extraction rate on acid leeching cores at the McDermitt site on the northern caldera, on an inferred 21.5 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent. They're expecting 1400 ppm on 3 Bt. Cores from Lithium Americas's inferred 19 Mt LCE find at Thacker Pass on the southern caldera is extracting at 84% on acid leeching. (For context, Clayton Valley's brine project converts at 85%.) Jindalee also claims they can also extract lithium phosphate from it and convert it to either carbonate or hydroxide. That's cool, but they don't really go into the cost of doing that, but I think the point is that it's supposedly a very flexible lode. > 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. GM and POSCO (the Korean cathode active material supplier for GM) are already working with Jindalee on feasibility of exploiting clay at scale, and GM already bought $650M of equity in Lithium Americas back in January for Thacker Pass. Probably know by February/March 2024 what the damage will be for processing clay, but Jindalee already expects to know whether they'll be shovels-in-ground by June 2024. That is a very fast turnaround for something that hasn't really been done before at any scale, much less 30 Mt of LCE-scale. Which I think is also why this article is a bit more focused on whether they can learn enough from how this find came about to make more finds like it. They might not know how to extract clay for a while, but if they can learn how to find more similarly exploitable clay first, they can get more investment to catch up. Inferring >30 Mt of LCE at 1400 ppm from just two sites in one caldera still seems like plenty of reason to fund figuring that out ASAP, though. Clayton Valley is like 6 Mt LCE; at this stage of the process, they were suggesting 1.3 Mt LCE at 900 ppm, on a feasibility target of 400 ppm. That was good enough for $700M in funding.
jddj 3y ago
Nothing really beats good spodumene yet, and even that's pretty hard to get right at the mining stage, let alone at the refinement. Traditional brines are fine but need scale and time and still a surprising amount of process tuning. Clays, lepidolite and alternative brine methods (DLE. Extractive beads, etc) are efficient media for extracting money from the public markets but that's about all.
- tbruckner 3y ago
  If that is the only efficient method for lithium extraction, is it fair to say that accessible lithium is not as abundant as people typically say?
MikeOfAu 3y ago
If you want a very comprehensive answer, then this series of (3?) youtube videos might be interesting to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqF_OZJSbxY&list=PLyvdbTy3v1d4QDNkr8uXoWyfY58SvMaPP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqF_OZJSbxY&list=PLyvdbTy3v1... The author is focused on answering questions around Tesla's ramp up, but the explanations are pretty comprehensive and general.

peytoncasper 3y ago

How is this different from oil? The vast majority of new deposits are leveraging different technology to enrich yields or extract it from challenging environments. Seems like a common problem for resource extraction that gets solved with time and investment.

Turskarama 3y ago
One of the biggest differences is that oil is all _primarily_ the same stuff and the difficulty is pulling out impurities. This means it can be quite cost effective to ship it where it needs to go to be processed. Crude oil is considered sour for example if it contains 1-2% sulfur. Ores on the other hand are usually mostly not the actual mineral you're looking for, and you're lucky if you're hitting double digit percentage concentrations, Lithium being "high concentration" if you're reaching 6%. This means that you ideally need to be doing most of (and usually all) of the processing at or very near the mine. One of the only minerals we regularly ship raw ore of is iron, since it tends to be in relatively high concentrations. Some Lithium mines might ship some ore but this is usually only done as an initial source of revenue while the processing is being built. The end result of this is that it's harder to take advantage of economies of scale where you can have a handful of processing facilities working on a very specific type of ore.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  So all of that Australian lithium being shipped off to China, is it being mostly processed in Australia first, or is most of the processing done in China, or something half half? The main reason America develops great oil tech and not lithium tech vs China is that the USA has lots of oil, while China doesn’t.
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    A lot of it is sent as partially processed ore, but two major reasons for that are: 1) a lot of these mines are very new and 2) Australia in particular is _very bad_ at secondary industries. We have a long history of just sending our minerals and raw food ingredients overseas to be processed and are lacking in expertise. Here is a recent article about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/business/australia-lithium-refining.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/business/australia-lithiu...

isykt 3y ago

If the expertise is to be developed, is it better for the US to develop it on their own deposits, or on the deposits of a competing nation?

panick21_ 3y ago
It depends on when you need those things. A new discovery will take 10 year minimum before it can be ready, more likely 20. So discoveries like this aren't gone do anything. There are some domestic companies further along in the process. But existing sources like South American brine and Australian hard rock will continue to be a huge part of the market. The US companies that originally mined in North Carolina are still around on the processing side. So its not really clear if having the mining domestically makes much of a difference. China is refining mostly things from Australia. Tesla is setting up a huge lithium refining factory on US soil but most of the material won't be mined in the US.
- isykt 3y ago
  Is the market for lithium going to collapse in 10 years? I’m confused why something taking 10 years is a problem.

oneTbrain23 3y ago

USA lacks workers in those fields. So the problem is really "how to discover new twchnical expertise labor" to extract those lithium. It is same thing with solar and now silicon chips in USA.

photonbeam 3y ago
Isn’t the problem always that wages for skill is too low, so too few people know it
- Negitivefrags 3y ago
  No, this isn’t always the problem. People are not fungible resources. You can’t simply turn a programmer from Google into a Lithium miner by paying more.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    The expertise China has built up is only around 20 years old, so it’s not like we couldn’t develop it in 20 years. Doing so in a free market way that isn’t undercut by Chinese suppliers, however, would be tricky (so some non free market mechanism is needed).
    - chii 3y ago
      > so it’s not like we couldn’t develop it in 20 years. 20 yrs is a very long time.
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        It’s not really that long, but I guess it depends on how old you are (perception of passing time speeds up rapidly after 40).
tw04 3y ago
^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital to our country's future. All the folks losing their minds are being short-sighted. While I agree in principle that the organizations should be paying their employees more, there's also the reality that China HEAVILY subsidizes their renewables AND has a lower base pay rate. Only one way to compete with that.

mkoubaa 3y ago

So then if prices of battery-grade lithium go up enough then it'll incentivize new production techniques?

judge2020 3y ago
They already are. With increased production, the price per unit staying stable means you either have an extremely mature industry, or the existing players don’t have any competition and can maintain insane YoY increases off of volume alone.
panick21_ 3y ago
There are various different compound of lithium at different qualities that count as 'battery grade'. That is what makes the market so complex. But generally speaking yes, there are 100s of junior lithium miners and all the big miners as well engaged in lithium extraction. Clay is as of yet untouched in mass production of lithium with many companies wanting to exploit it. Maybe most common is research on DLE, lithium extraction from brine where the brine is simply pumped back. This also exists in a deep brine variant where you pump water from super deep reservoirs. The problem is the ev market is going gang busters and even established companies spend decades on getting new plants up and running.

nonethewiser 3y ago

Does the UK have lots of lithium in their borders? France? Germany? Im sympathetic to the point that its fairly common but cant we overstate it’s abundance? As far as I know its not very evenly distributed and not everyone has good access to it.

__s 3y ago
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-lithium-resource-availability-and-geostrategic-impacts-own-works-on-a-base-map-by_fig8_241756900 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-lithium-resource-... Europe may've gotten the short end of the stick, but there's plenty
- panick21_ 3y ago
  There are more locations in Europe then that. Britain used to get Lithium from Cornwall and there are companies trying to revive that. But Europe simply hasn't put much effort into finding them. If need be plenty more could found in Europe.
  - b112 3y ago
    When I read that something is being shipped to China for processing, it makes me mentally add "Where there are no environmental laws, and processing in a very polluting way is OK". If you process many things in the West, you can't leave toxic chemicals in pools any more, to leak into ground water and cause cancer and other problems for people. So processing costs are going to be way more expensive than in a place where it's still OK to process+pollute and therefore kill and maim your citizens to make money. The West cannot compete with that.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      I think people are to quick to just talk away any success China has as 'don't care for the environment' and 'don't care for people'. This might be sometimes true bit also more often isn't. Do you have actual evidence that lithium refining is a massively dirty industrial process that would cost multiple times more the West? Or are you speculating? Tesla is building a lithium refining plant in Texas right now, they didn't seem to have massive environmental problems and delays so far. In reality, the lead china has in these fields is more because of state investment policy and their drive to have an export car market. They saw the EV revolution as being able to make that happen, and it did.

dietr1ch 3y ago

I'd be surprised if the US cannot build the industry necessary for it, and even if that were the case, it seems that they could export ~raw lithium, and then buy it processed, or as batteries if needed meanwhile they figure things out, as the US doesn't really want to keep China owning critical production lines for the technology that's coming in the next 20+ years.

panick21_ 3y ago
Here is the thing. Its not about what can happen in 20+ years. Of course the US can do whatever it want's in 20 years with enough money. In 20 years lot of things will be very different. But again, there was already plenty of lithium in the US, this discovery changes nothing. The US already has competent lithium companies. The US already has good relationship with South America and Australia where the resources are coming from. But currently 90%+ of refining is in China. Controlling the 'raw' resources is mostly uninteresting in this case.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  It's very similar to aluminum in this way. Aluminum mining is very different than many other minerals and metals. It's basically a processing thing. It's all about where you can get the resources to do the refining, not where the ore is. In the case of Aluminum its electricity. They call aluminum solidified electricity for a reason. That's why the biggest aluminum smelters in the world are where electricity is cheap. Same here, it's not like there is big chunks of Lithium just waiting to be picked up. It's a small percentage of dirt, and you need to process huge amounts of that dirt to extract it. That processing takes resources. Those resources are the limiting factor, not the raw ore. In the case of aluminum its electricity. In the case of lithium I gather it's also energy (to do the heating) and sulfuric acid, and the associated containment snd cleanup of such. Source: "After the ore is mined, it is crushed and roasted at 2012°F (1100°C). It is then cooled to 140°F (65°C), milled and roasted again, this time with sulfuric acid, at 482°F (250°C), a process known as acid leaching." https://www.sttsystems.com/industries/lithium-extraction/#:~:text=After%20the%20ore%20is%20mined,process%20known%20as%20acid%20leaching https://www.sttsystems.com/industries/lithium-extraction/#:~....

roenxi 3y ago

Also it is likely that, because of environmental regulations, it is not possible to mine the lithium economically. I haven't kept up, but the lack of lithium production in the US suggests that there are regulatory factors at play. Although apparently Australia is a big lithium producer so it must be possible to do in an environmentally conscious way. Or Australia's lithium mines have managed to fly under the radar of the environmentalists. It looks like Australia's lithium deposits are unusual being hard rock deposits, and we have it processed in China because I assume that part of the process is illegal in Australia.

sherry-sherry 3y ago
> it must be possible to do in an environmentally conscious way. Or Australia's lithium mines have managed to fly under the radar of the environmentalists Sadly, both don't seem to be true. Australia's lithium mining has a higher carbon footprint than others (3.4): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344922004670 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492... We has some of the highest CO2 emissions per capita, so it's not much of a surprise we are doing this inefficiently too.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
> Also it is likely that, because of environmental regulations, it is not possible to mine the lithium economically. I haven't kept up, but the lack of lithium production in the US suggests that there are regulatory factors at play. That's a large assumption to make without any investigation.
- roenxi 3y ago
  It would be. But I've made a lot of investigations.
  - dtgriscom 3y ago
    {citation needed}

jillesvangurp 3y ago

It's not so much an expertise problem but more a problem of having to tailor the process to the supply of lithium. We're talking typically low quantities of lithium mixed with a lot of other materials in either some kind of clay, brine, or rock. Or recycled lithium batteries. Those sources of lithium require different approaches and there are multiple companies working on all of those. Historically, lithium was not interesting to mine at scale until the invention of lithium batteries thirty years ago. And only about ten years ago we figured out that we needed a lot of lithium to power things like cars, trucks, planes and electricity grids. We've only been looking for lithium for a relatively short amount of time. Before we started looking, it was a relatively low value by product of mining other stuff. There's this perception that we have to go to places like Bolivia, Australia, etc. because that's where the known, easy to access deposits are. But as this article shows, there are probably loads of other places that might have rich lithium deposits. The market for refining lithium is basically expanding at the pace we can build refineries. It's apparently a big reason Tesla chose to build their own refinery in Texas because the rest of the industry was not moving quick enough. Supplying lithium to the refinery isn't the issue. There's plenty of it. And if you start looking, you'll find some more. Rich deposits like this are of course nice and rare. The high concentration of lithium means extracting it is relatively cheap. But you can get it out of ocean water, there are natural brines in various places that have it, clay and rock deposits all over the place. By mass, it's one of the more common elements on this planet.

usrusr 3y ago
Sounds like every discovery is bad news for the environment because it raises the threshold for recycling even higher?
- dv_dt 3y ago
  I don’t see why, recycling is refinement at a high density in a form that is near perfect for battery use. It’s probably more in wait of a high enough volume of input materials.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  Which is why taxes should be going into subsidies for products made with genuinely recycled material, where the recycling is done in a sustainable way also. Rather than being used to bail out Banks & Airlines...and in America, Churches apparently. If it were up to me, I wouldn't just ban plastic straws. I'd ban almost all disposable packaging. Go to the supermarket, buy products and get them in sturdy plastic containers that you pay a deposit on. The next time you return you drop them back where they're cleaned for reuse at the location. Products like say a Coke are delivered in bulk format to the supermarket and dispensed into the relevant container at the location. After moving to the UK (from NZ), it's fucking disgusting how I go to the supermarket and _everything_ is in a disposable plastic container with a "sorry we don't recycle that yet" plastic film over _everything_. And the UK isn't even the worst place for this behaviour. We really are going to kill our planet at this point.

benreesman 3y ago

At some price it’ll get figured out. I’m a bit on the fence about whether Zeihan is a crank or a prophet (and there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground), but serious people pay green money to have him speak. If he’s right, the difference between “expensive lithium even amortized” and “unreliable lithium at best even if someone has a gun to your head” is existential.

_hcuq 3y ago
Those who can't get lithium will just use oil. Which will be cheap if electrification happens.
- rini17 3y ago
  Oil is cheap due to economies of scale. There's unimaginably vast suply chain. When that starts to unravel, it might get cheaper but only temporarily.

deleted 3y ago

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weinzierl 3y ago

Next time in the news: "Huge silicon dioxide discovery in the desert could end semiconductor shortage soon."