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When you look at elements' abundance in Earth's crust lithium is about 50% more common than lead, but we mine 268 times more lead every year. We just weren't l
by ajuc 3y ago
When you look at elements' abundance in Earth's crust lithium is about 50% more common than lead, but we mine 268 times more lead every year.
We just weren't looking very hard to find lithium compared to lead till very recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
- brianwawok 3y agoLithium is a pretty volatile chemical though. Does the 50% more common take into account the fact that some lithium blows up?
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y agoDoes the ore blow up often?
- Arrath 3y agoI suppose it depends on if blasting is utilized at a given lithium ore production site.
- frabert 3y agoIs lithium normally mined in its elemental form? If not, its volatility as an ore might be wildly less than in its metallic form
- Legend2440 3y agoEssentially no metals are mined in their pure elemental form - only the noble metals like gold or platinum.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoNative copper exists. Sometimes even to a minable degree, as with the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan.
- adonovan 3y agoThat “blowing up” already happen billions of years ago. Lithium salts (ore) is what is left when lithium violently oxidizes.
- kadoban 3y agoLithium isn't found as a pure element, if that's what you mean. It's part of minerals bound up into stable molecules. So it won't blow up. It's very hard to find anything volatile in nature, pretty much by definition. Exceptions are things that are continually generated, eg you can find reactive oxygen in nature because plants keep making more. That or things that are only volatile once you purify or transform them in some way.
- legulere 3y agoMinerals can be common but infeasible for extraction. Aluminum is one of the most common elements but we extract it just from bauxite
- Ringz 3y agoJust like uranium.
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoWe extract aluminum only from bauxite because it's slightly (think 5%) less expensive to refine it from bauxite than the next class of materials. If all of world's bauxite reserves ran dry, we would move to the next best sources, and this would impact aluminum prices less than typical yearly variations in electricity costs near smelters. Nearly all aluminum minerals are potential ores for aluminum, the only question is how much other, undesirable material (mostly silica) you need to remove. Bauxite is nice because nature did a lot of the early separation process steps (slightly acidic rains washed away silica over millennia).