9 ms·

It's made of sodium and iron, which together make up about 8% of the earth's crust, so yes, they chemistry is made of really common materials. By contrast lithi

It's made of sodium and iron, which together make up about 8% of the earth's crust, so yes, they chemistry is made of really common materials. By contrast lithium makes up about 0.002%.

yrro 3y ago
I was editing after doing some basic research so sorry for making it look like you're repeating my comment :)
kzrdude 3y ago
Lithium is element #3 on the periodic table so it's very simple and should be universally abundant. Literally in the universe, unfortunately not on earth.
- nickcw 3y ago
  There is a lot less Lithium in the universe than you might expect being element #3 There is also a lot less Lithium in the universe than our models predict: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem
  - willis936 3y ago
    This stinks of bad science. All of the observations come from stars. "Older stars seem to have less lithium than they should, and some younger stars have much more." "BBC Science Focus wrote in 2023 that "recent research seems to completely discount" such theories; the magazine held that mainstream lithium nucleosynthesis calculations are probably correct." I am unconvinced.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- arbitrandomuser 3y ago
  Helium is no 2 , and that too is pretty scarce on earth , but again helium is a very light gas and simply shoots out of the atmosphere eventually, Why is lithium rare
- Tuna-Fish 3y ago
  Lithium is not very universally abundant. You cannot estimate abundance by atomic number like that. The big bang produced mostly hydrogen and helium, with traces of lithium and beryllium. The elements heavier than that are mostly produced by stars, and the physics of fusion have a massive impact on what elements, specifically, get made. Free protons join together to become helium-4 much more readily than any other fusion process, meaning that by the time heavier things start forming, the raw material is entirely ⁴He. This means that things that are easily made of ⁴He are dramatically more common than anything else, making the most common isotopes after ⁴He oxygen-16 (4 alphas), carbon-12 (3 alphas, less common than oxygen because it's less stable and easily picks up another alpha), neon-20 (5 alphas), and iron-56 (14 alphas to nickel-56 which immediately decays twice through β+ to produce ⁵⁶Fe). Iron is so high up above all the other intermediate steps, because it's the last stop: In heavy enough stars, the entire core converts to iron, and reactions past that are energy-consuming, not energy-producing, so after that the star collapses. Lithium is not on any of the major stellar nucleosynthesis pathways, which means it's only produced by exceptional processes, making it roughly as universally abundant as the other stuff that is made by exceptional processes, like scandium or gallium or zirconium. But none of that matters, because: Lithium is abundant and easy to extract in the earth's crust. While there's not that much of it up there, there's plenty easy to extract down here, because it's so light and likes forming light compounds, meaning that a huge proportion of all the lithium of all the rocks that came together to form the earth is reachable to us. Lithium is not rare. Any statement about lithium batteries that bemoans the scarcity of lithium is doubly confused: Firstly, because lithium is simply not scarce. Secondly, because lithium is such a tiny portion of the battery, that despite being in the name, only a small fraction of the materials cost is lithium. Lithium price has had a few big spikes because mining is a very high-capital industry where spinning up projects is measured in years, if not decades, and we suddenly started using a lot more lithium in ~2010. Accordingly, the price has spiked from the ~$5k per ton (which is roughly in the same ballpark typical cost of extraction, where any abundant mineral prices end up at), to the heights of $37k per ton last year. Even at this high price, lithium was not even the most expensive material component in most lithium batteries, because typically only 1-3% of the battery's weight is lithium. But these prices won't last, because having the price of a commodity so high above the cost of extraction means that new mining projects are spinning up.
- chongli 3y ago
  That’s not how it works! Lithium is a fuel that gets used up by stars immediately whenever it might be produced in trace amounts. Unlike hydrogen, lithium wasn’t produced in the Big Bang. So most of the lithium that remains in the universe is produced outside of the cores of stars through the interaction of cosmic rays with other matter. Needless to say, that’s not a very common interaction (relatively speaking). Now if you look at how larger stars operate (the CNO cycle [1]) you’ll see that it matches up with the higher relative abundance of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in the universe. Lithium, beryllium, and boron get “skipped over” in a sense. Furthermore, if you look at a graph of the relative abundance of all elements, you’ll note that odd-numbered elements are less abundant than even (with the exceptions of hydrogen and beryllium). This is called the Oddo-Harkins rule [2] and it may also be playing a role. Edit: I should also add that the third major process in stars, triple-α [3], involves the fusion of three helium-4 nuclei into one carbon-12 nucleus. This occurs in older stars that have exhausted most of their hydrogen fuel and so have built up a large core of “inert” helium. When their outward pressure from hydrogen fusion is no longer high enough to withstand gravity, they reach the much higher pressures and temperatures needed for triple-α fusion. Unfortunately for the lithium industry, there’s no chance of producing lithium this way since it is skipped over on the way to carbon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddo%E2%80%93Harkins_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddo%E2%80%93Harkins_rule [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process
  - simplicio 3y ago
    Nitpick: Lithium was produced in the Big Bang, though in a ratio of something like one per billion compared to H production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem
- hedora 3y ago
  Lithium is extremely abundant on earth. Unless we start launching it into space, or start building up after covering the surface with buildings and roads, we’re not going to run out. Lithium production capacity is scarce however, since it’s a mostly useless element unless you’re building batteries out of it. Anyway, once cities realize that they need to stop taking water from rivers, we should be able to skim quite a bit of lithium from desalination plant waste water.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  I mean in that case Hydrogen fuel cells are clearly the future, just as soon as we manage to make our gravity well irrelevant.
jvm___ 3y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/s/Co4zeAhcmT https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/s/Co4zeAhcmT Iron is on top. Lithium is one up from the bottom left.
- 867-5309 3y ago
  strange how calcium and sodium are omitted
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    Sodium is not "mined" per se, as, you know, just get some sea water Calcium is, but maybe because it's not processed as most metals it is not included in the graph
    - vlabakje90 3y ago
      At least half of all NaCl that's used world wide is mined from salt mines. For many places in the world it's not feasible to rely on solar evaporation of sea water. Using other energy sources to evaporate sea salt is not cost effective and many places have large salt deposits. https://salt-partners.com/pdf/Santorini2006Paper.pdf https://salt-partners.com/pdf/Santorini2006Paper.pdf
      - Integrape 3y ago
        Would it be feasible to use the sodium from desalination wastewater?
        culi 3y ago
        desalination wastewater contains a number of other chemicals used in the desalination process (e.g. pH adjusters, coagulants and flocculants, antiscalants, dispersants, biocides, and reducing chemicals)
        3y ago
raducu 3y ago
> the chemistry is made of really common materials I don't want to sound like a conspiray theorist, but something tells me the really big actors (like states) only want materials that they can control the suply of.
- earthnail 3y ago
  I don’t think control goes that far. China definitely thinks that way, but I doubt the western governments do.
  - wheelerof4te 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - ben_w 3y ago
      NATO doesn't do that. The US can do that alone, and sometimes brings the UK with it, which might look similar but is really different in important ways.
      - oblio 3y ago
        Outside of the Iraq 2003 stupidity, has the US done this kind of thing in the past 20 years? I'd hope the times of the US trying to turn regular countries into banana republics are over.
        hindsightbias 3y ago
        More Europe dragged the US/NATO into Libya and Syria.
        oblio 3y ago
        Libya you could argue for, but Syria??? Syria was an offshoot of... wait for it... Iraq. Guess who started that.
bertil 3y ago
Northvolt’s original factory in Skellefteå is near (well, ‘Arctic near’: 460 km along an existing rail line) Kiruna, one of the largest Iron mines in the world, so that’s one of the two material supply safe. Industrial Sodium is made with electrolysis of sea salt; the factory is next to the Gulf of Bothany and has abundant (wind and hydro) power, so the other material supply is safe. It wasn’t hard anywhere, but it’s straightforward in that particular case.
- antonhag 3y ago
  This got me thinking - the salinity of the water in the bothnian bay is very low (seems to be about 1/10th of ocean water). Wouldn't that effect electrolysis?
  - bertil 3y ago
    Possibly—but if that’s a concern, you can also get some from the North Atlantic.
hwillis 3y ago
Misleading way of looking at it. Lithium and sodium are not the major cost (or weight, or volume) inputs to making batteries, and crustal occurrence is very distantly related to cost. We mine things from places with 100x-1mx higher concentrations than natural. Water concentrates lithium into brines and clays for us. Sodium's low density causes it to create massive domes underground that are extremely recoverable. In contrast many metals aren't naturally concentrated. Lithium batteries aren't made of lithium. They're made of nickel- or iron, or manganese, or cobalt. In iron and manganese batteries the #1 price factor is the manufacturing- the energy, solvents, and machinery used to deposit materials onto film. Likewise sodium batteries are not made of sodium. There's 13x more iron in them than sodium. There may also be large amounts of manganese or vanadium. The cost of manufacturing is also higher per kWh.
- asow92 3y ago
  This sort of misses the point of sodium ion batteries though, no? One of the main objections to lithium ion batteries is the need for cobalt because of how it's sourced through "artisanal mining" in Africa.
  - coryrc 3y ago
    LFP has no cobalt.
    - thebruce87m 3y ago
      And can be regularly charged to 100%, and lasts for a greater number of charge cycles.
- scottLobster 3y ago
  Lithium batteries are made of lithium to a point that there is a lithium supply bottleneck if we want to use lithium-ion batteries as the base chemistry for the green transition. It will take time to mass produce things regardless, but I imagine Sodium has far fewer bottlenecks.

It's made of sodium and iron, which together make up about 8% of the earth's crust, so yes, they chemistry is made of really common materials. By contrast lithium makes up about 0.002%.

yrro 3y ago

I was editing after doing some basic research so sorry for making it look like you're repeating my comment :)

kzrdude 3y ago

Lithium is element #3 on the periodic table so it's very simple and should be universally abundant. Literally in the universe, unfortunately not on earth.

nickcw 3y ago
There is a lot less Lithium in the universe than you might expect being element #3 There is also a lot less Lithium in the universe than our models predict: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem
- willis936 3y ago
  This stinks of bad science. All of the observations come from stars. "Older stars seem to have less lithium than they should, and some younger stars have much more." "BBC Science Focus wrote in 2023 that "recent research seems to completely discount" such theories; the magazine held that mainstream lithium nucleosynthesis calculations are probably correct." I am unconvinced.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
arbitrandomuser 3y ago
Helium is no 2 , and that too is pretty scarce on earth , but again helium is a very light gas and simply shoots out of the atmosphere eventually, Why is lithium rare
Tuna-Fish 3y ago
Lithium is not very universally abundant. You cannot estimate abundance by atomic number like that. The big bang produced mostly hydrogen and helium, with traces of lithium and beryllium. The elements heavier than that are mostly produced by stars, and the physics of fusion have a massive impact on what elements, specifically, get made. Free protons join together to become helium-4 much more readily than any other fusion process, meaning that by the time heavier things start forming, the raw material is entirely ⁴He. This means that things that are easily made of ⁴He are dramatically more common than anything else, making the most common isotopes after ⁴He oxygen-16 (4 alphas), carbon-12 (3 alphas, less common than oxygen because it's less stable and easily picks up another alpha), neon-20 (5 alphas), and iron-56 (14 alphas to nickel-56 which immediately decays twice through β+ to produce ⁵⁶Fe). Iron is so high up above all the other intermediate steps, because it's the last stop: In heavy enough stars, the entire core converts to iron, and reactions past that are energy-consuming, not energy-producing, so after that the star collapses. Lithium is not on any of the major stellar nucleosynthesis pathways, which means it's only produced by exceptional processes, making it roughly as universally abundant as the other stuff that is made by exceptional processes, like scandium or gallium or zirconium. But none of that matters, because: Lithium is abundant and easy to extract in the earth's crust. While there's not that much of it up there, there's plenty easy to extract down here, because it's so light and likes forming light compounds, meaning that a huge proportion of all the lithium of all the rocks that came together to form the earth is reachable to us. Lithium is not rare. Any statement about lithium batteries that bemoans the scarcity of lithium is doubly confused: Firstly, because lithium is simply not scarce. Secondly, because lithium is such a tiny portion of the battery, that despite being in the name, only a small fraction of the materials cost is lithium. Lithium price has had a few big spikes because mining is a very high-capital industry where spinning up projects is measured in years, if not decades, and we suddenly started using a lot more lithium in ~2010. Accordingly, the price has spiked from the ~$5k per ton (which is roughly in the same ballpark typical cost of extraction, where any abundant mineral prices end up at), to the heights of $37k per ton last year. Even at this high price, lithium was not even the most expensive material component in most lithium batteries, because typically only 1-3% of the battery's weight is lithium. But these prices won't last, because having the price of a commodity so high above the cost of extraction means that new mining projects are spinning up.
chongli 3y ago
That’s not how it works! Lithium is a fuel that gets used up by stars immediately whenever it might be produced in trace amounts. Unlike hydrogen, lithium wasn’t produced in the Big Bang. So most of the lithium that remains in the universe is produced outside of the cores of stars through the interaction of cosmic rays with other matter. Needless to say, that’s not a very common interaction (relatively speaking). Now if you look at how larger stars operate (the CNO cycle [1]) you’ll see that it matches up with the higher relative abundance of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in the universe. Lithium, beryllium, and boron get “skipped over” in a sense. Furthermore, if you look at a graph of the relative abundance of all elements, you’ll note that odd-numbered elements are less abundant than even (with the exceptions of hydrogen and beryllium). This is called the Oddo-Harkins rule [2] and it may also be playing a role. Edit: I should also add that the third major process in stars, triple-α [3], involves the fusion of three helium-4 nuclei into one carbon-12 nucleus. This occurs in older stars that have exhausted most of their hydrogen fuel and so have built up a large core of “inert” helium. When their outward pressure from hydrogen fusion is no longer high enough to withstand gravity, they reach the much higher pressures and temperatures needed for triple-α fusion. Unfortunately for the lithium industry, there’s no chance of producing lithium this way since it is skipped over on the way to carbon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddo%E2%80%93Harkins_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddo%E2%80%93Harkins_rule [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process
- simplicio 3y ago
  Nitpick: Lithium was produced in the Big Bang, though in a ratio of something like one per billion compared to H production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem
hedora 3y ago
Lithium is extremely abundant on earth. Unless we start launching it into space, or start building up after covering the surface with buildings and roads, we’re not going to run out. Lithium production capacity is scarce however, since it’s a mostly useless element unless you’re building batteries out of it. Anyway, once cities realize that they need to stop taking water from rivers, we should be able to skim quite a bit of lithium from desalination plant waste water.
BobaFloutist 3y ago
I mean in that case Hydrogen fuel cells are clearly the future, just as soon as we manage to make our gravity well irrelevant.

jvm___ 3y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/s/Co4zeAhcmT https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/s/Co4zeAhcmT Iron is on top. Lithium is one up from the bottom left.

867-5309 3y ago
strange how calcium and sodium are omitted
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Sodium is not "mined" per se, as, you know, just get some sea water Calcium is, but maybe because it's not processed as most metals it is not included in the graph
  - vlabakje90 3y ago
    At least half of all NaCl that's used world wide is mined from salt mines. For many places in the world it's not feasible to rely on solar evaporation of sea water. Using other energy sources to evaporate sea salt is not cost effective and many places have large salt deposits. https://salt-partners.com/pdf/Santorini2006Paper.pdf https://salt-partners.com/pdf/Santorini2006Paper.pdf
    - Integrape 3y ago
      Would it be feasible to use the sodium from desalination wastewater?
      - culi 3y ago
        desalination wastewater contains a number of other chemicals used in the desalination process (e.g. pH adjusters, coagulants and flocculants, antiscalants, dispersants, biocides, and reducing chemicals)
        3y ago

raducu 3y ago

> the chemistry is made of really common materials I don't want to sound like a conspiray theorist, but something tells me the really big actors (like states) only want materials that they can control the suply of.

earthnail 3y ago
I don’t think control goes that far. China definitely thinks that way, but I doubt the western governments do.
- wheelerof4te 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ben_w 3y ago
    NATO doesn't do that. The US can do that alone, and sometimes brings the UK with it, which might look similar but is really different in important ways.
    - oblio 3y ago
      Outside of the Iraq 2003 stupidity, has the US done this kind of thing in the past 20 years? I'd hope the times of the US trying to turn regular countries into banana republics are over.
      - hindsightbias 3y ago
        More Europe dragged the US/NATO into Libya and Syria.
        oblio 3y ago
        Libya you could argue for, but Syria??? Syria was an offshoot of... wait for it... Iraq. Guess who started that.

bertil 3y ago

Northvolt’s original factory in Skellefteå is near (well, ‘Arctic near’: 460 km along an existing rail line) Kiruna, one of the largest Iron mines in the world, so that’s one of the two material supply safe. Industrial Sodium is made with electrolysis of sea salt; the factory is next to the Gulf of Bothany and has abundant (wind and hydro) power, so the other material supply is safe. It wasn’t hard anywhere, but it’s straightforward in that particular case.

antonhag 3y ago
This got me thinking - the salinity of the water in the bothnian bay is very low (seems to be about 1/10th of ocean water). Wouldn't that effect electrolysis?
- bertil 3y ago
  Possibly—but if that’s a concern, you can also get some from the North Atlantic.

hwillis 3y ago

Misleading way of looking at it. Lithium and sodium are not the major cost (or weight, or volume) inputs to making batteries, and crustal occurrence is very distantly related to cost. We mine things from places with 100x-1mx higher concentrations than natural. Water concentrates lithium into brines and clays for us. Sodium's low density causes it to create massive domes underground that are extremely recoverable. In contrast many metals aren't naturally concentrated. Lithium batteries aren't made of lithium. They're made of nickel- or iron, or manganese, or cobalt. In iron and manganese batteries the #1 price factor is the manufacturing- the energy, solvents, and machinery used to deposit materials onto film. Likewise sodium batteries are not made of sodium. There's 13x more iron in them than sodium. There may also be large amounts of manganese or vanadium. The cost of manufacturing is also higher per kWh.

asow92 3y ago
This sort of misses the point of sodium ion batteries though, no? One of the main objections to lithium ion batteries is the need for cobalt because of how it's sourced through "artisanal mining" in Africa.
- coryrc 3y ago
  LFP has no cobalt.
  - thebruce87m 3y ago
    And can be regularly charged to 100%, and lasts for a greater number of charge cycles.
scottLobster 3y ago
Lithium batteries are made of lithium to a point that there is a lithium supply bottleneck if we want to use lithium-ion batteries as the base chemistry for the green transition. It will take time to mass produce things regardless, but I imagine Sodium has far fewer bottlenecks.