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This article (and the UW press release they quote) state that the estimated 228,000 tons of lithium present at the site is "enough to meet annual U.S. demand".

• learc83 13y ago
  And lithium can be recycled, so if the price of mining more lithium increases too far, expect the amount of recycled lithium used to increase as well.
  • Recoil42 13y ago
    >lithium can be recycled Question, for anyone out there who might know: How much lithium (and of what quality) can be recovered from a typical modern li-on battery? How difficult is the process?
    • MrFoof 13y ago
      Looks to be around 93%. http://pubs.sciepub.com/materials/1/1/2/#.UXmcu5VcJnI http://pubs.sciepub.com/materials/1/1/2/#.UXmcu5VcJnI
      • dopamean 13y ago
        I dont know enough about these things but that seems like an incredible rate.
        • Someone 13y ago
          My chemistry is very bad, but that seems to be in 3M HCl with added H2O2 at 80°C. Combining that mix with Lithium batteries, to me, sounds like a process that may be difficult to safely scale up from the lab.
          • wiredfool 13y ago
            At least there's not a lot of nitrogen involved.
          • samatman 13y ago
            nope, that's a peracid, it's how you eat metals. Refluxing aqua regia happens, too.
        • deleted 13y ago
          [deleted]
          • randallsquared 13y ago
            Lithium is one of the lightest solid elements.
          • KaeseEs 13y ago
            > I mean when you get a rate that high, it seems like it must be just a relatively heavy element, and a metal, like Gold, and relatively unreactive (just carrying ions and such). This is the opposite of the truth. Lithium is not dense at all (~.53g/cm^3), especially for a metal, and as a Group 1 metal is extroardinarily reactive - if you cut lithium it will oxidize as you watch, and if you expose it to water is will explode into flaming chunks. > I imagine they don't get to 100% because they just don't bother to heat it high enough to melt things in there with a ridiculously high melting point and risk creative copper fumes and whatnot (from some metals evaporating). i.e. it's still easy, they just don't want to. No. Lithium has a very low melting point (roughly 180C/355F). Furthermore, your contention that a process with an efficiency of 93% should be easy to bring to 100% is so off base I don't even know where to begin. Squeezing out the last few percentage points is the hardest part!
      • dredmorbius 13y ago
        So, if battery life is 10 years, and we can recover 93% of the lithium, in 90 years we'll have lost roughly half of it, and in 400 years we'll be left with 5% of our present supply. That is: we lose half the original amount after 9 recyclings, and 95% in 40. Scale time to exhaust known lithium reserves accordingly in the event battery life is longer or shorter than stated above.
        • gizmo686 13y ago
          The lithium does not dissapear. If we ever do 'run out' of lithium (or similar resources), then we would still be able to mine it from our own waste. The only question is how expensive the resource has to get before it becomes economical to do so.
          • dredmorbius 13y ago
            Well, yes. But considering that, oh, say, batteries returned for recycling are going to be a relatively rich source of lithium, the recycling waste itself is no more viable a source than any other ore. You can separate minerals from one another given sufficient energy inputs, but then you're getting at the issue of EROEI for the entire battery storage chain. Pretty much anything, even gold, can be extracted from seawater, given sufficient energy investment.
• mjn 13y ago
  Some more detail would be needed to determine what portion of that is feasible to extract. The USGS document you link, for example, estimates (before this discovery) 38,000 tons of domestic reserves, but that is with a conservative definition of reserves that includes only those considered feasible to extract with current technology and market conditions. The total domestic reserves of lithium deposits known to exist were closer to 400,000 tons, from what I can find, i.e. only about 10% of domestic reserves are considered feasible to extract. How much of an impact this discovery has will depend on what proportion of that 228,000 tons ends up in each category.
  • to3m 13y ago
    The "reserve" is usually what's feasible to extract with current technology, with the total amount of stuff present being the "resource". See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_resource_classification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_resource_classification. People often aren't particularly precise about the distinction.
    • defrost 13y ago
      Indeed. So let's be precise. A Proven Ore Reserve is not all that is feasible to extract with current technology, it is all that which has been proven feasible. Emphasis on proven. Given a large resource area it's generally the case that only a partial area has been studied to the degree required to classify as Proven (often three or four increasingly detailed Technical Reports down the line). If the lithium deposits in the article have only just been found (that part is unlikely given they've gotten to the stage of having a rough estimate) then there's some way to go before they are sampled to the point of being feasible. Moreover if the deposit is split into portions it's probable that only one sub deposit at a time will climb the ladder to Proven. Investors would be watching for a gradual climb in the degree of Tech Report being released and poised to bet the bank just prior to the release of an Economic Feasibility Study, typically the first Prospectus to be floated (if it goes public) would be of the order of ~$50 million for a drill survey; a 'low cost' high risk evaluation. The penultimate Feasibility Study consolidates all the prior deposit evaluations and outlines the plant and extraction costs, paving the way for a 'big bucks' Prospectus to fund the major initial extraction capital costs.
• gizmo686 13y ago
  I have no experience in the mining industry, but is it possible that current technology has a limit on how quickly it can extract lithium from a deposit given the area of the exposed cross section?
  • nivloc 13y ago
    No, it's really the economics of it. Lithium and other evaporite minerals are usually concentrated in ponds so the evaporation rate can play a part, but usually it's a matter of efficiently using the capital over the lifetime of the operation. It's easy to drill more wells or build more ponds. I work in the industry and, as luck would have it, am on a project near the facility in Nevada.
• nivloc 13y ago
  There is another deposit in Nevada called Kings Valley that is in feasibility. It's about 300,000 tonnes LCE, and fairly likely to go into production. If the Wyoming deposit it real (their numbers wouldn't float for a listed company and they're short on details), it's probably 10+ years away from production. Neat discovery, but very speculative. http://www.westernlithium.com/project/ http://www.westernlithium.com/project/ is the Kings Valley project.
• ignostic 13y ago
  Thanks, I was wondering exactly the same thing. "Meet demand for how long?" I thought it might be a single year since it never specified, but 228k tons seemed a bit high. Sounds like it'll be a while before we know exactly how much of it we can mine.
• Gravityloss 13y ago
  Only about 6 grams per person per year? I guess the batteries are mostly just other stuff...
• apendleton 13y ago
  Seems to me like current and near-future levels are the only thing really worth discussing at this point, since predicting future demand for lithium seems ridiculously challenging. On the one hand, if electric cars actually take off (a big if), it seems at this point like lithium ion will be the most likely energy storage mechanism, so you could see a huge ramp-up in demand. On the other, if supercapacitor technology delivers on the promise some think it now has, it (or some other as-yet-unidentified energy storage or production technology) could pull the bottom out from under the lithium ion battery market. The outcome of each of those could shift future demand by a couple of orders of magnitude in either direction vs. current demand. But probably not for at least a decade or so. So we may as well talk about this in today's terms.
  • jnw2 13y ago
    Whether future demand for lithium includes less than 1% of the new cars sold in the US, as is true today, or near 100%, is in large part a function of the price of lithium. Most car buyers would probably love to have an 85kwh battery pack like Tesla sells in the Model S, but are only willing to pay a fraction of what Tesla is currently charging (no pun intended). But if an electric Toyota Camry equivalent with an 85 kwh battery pack were available that had a lifetime cost equal to a gasoline Camry, we'd probably see little demand for the gasoline version.
  • dredmorbius 13y ago
    However we can look at what possible applications of rechargeable batteries are, and how known reserves fit into that picture. Humans are looking very hard to replace our go-to energy storage media: solid coal and liquid petroleum, both of fossil origin. We'll have to replace them under one of two circumstances: we exhaust them, or we cannot continue to abide the CO2 they produce. We're likely to run into both constraints within the next 20 years, if not already. And when you start scaling known reserves of known battery component minerals against the task of providing, say, affordable transportation to a large portion of the planet's population, or even that portion which presently owns cars, the math starts falling apart pretty quickly. Lithium is nice for mobile and transportation applications because it's light and has a high storage density relative to mass. Lead-acid batteries also work, and there's probably enough lead to supply a lot of automobiles, but it's messy and toxic and heavy. When you start looking to grid-scale storage, even lead, as abundant as it is, comes up short: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat... More likely: molten-salt or liquid metal batteries. They're heavy and have lower power densities, but the raw materials are cheap and abundant. Thermal storage (again, molten salt, but used as a heat transfer fluid) and flywheels (very expensive relative to capacity, and having their own engineering challenges) might also see application, the latter having benefits for being able to respond very rapidly to large changes in supply or demand.
• dredmorbius 13y ago
  I'm also curious as to the demand figures. This and a related story concerning Bolivian lithium cite "demand" and (in the case of Bolivia) enough lithium to provide batteries for 4.8 billion automobiles. Which sounds like a lot. http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/bolivia-has-enough-lithium-for-48-billion-electric-cars.html http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/bolivia-h... http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aVqbD6T3XJeM http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a... But the Bloomberg piece does provide some quantification: "By 2014, the mine will produce 30,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate, more than Rockwood’s mine in Chile, which is the world’s second largest. Bolivian scientists say there are about 95 million tons of lithium under the Uyuni Salt Flat" So:  95 million tons supplies 4.8 billion automobiles. Simple division gives us 19.4 kg of lithium per vehicle. The Tesla Model S battery weighs on the order of 400kg. I'll assume half that weight is lithium. Clearly the Bloomberg piece isn't referring to high-range Tesla-style plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), of which Bolivia could only supply 475 million batteries. That's enough to satisfy the US, but hardly the world, let alone give everyone in the world, or even one in ten, a PEV, plus LiON-powered smartphone, tablet, and other rechargeable devices. And the rather more modest Wyoming find at 228,000 tons would be good four roughly 1.14 million vehicles. The simple truth is that we've been able to rely on fossil fuels for much of the past century to provide a convenient energy storage package that's going to be exceptionally difficult to replace. And we will have to replace it.
  • maxerickson 13y ago
    The Tesla apparently uses LiNiCoAlO2 (NCA lithium ion). So just starting from the chemistry gets you to less than 4% lithium by weight (~3.8%). Throw in packaging and such and really, the individual cells are more like 2%. The cells apparently weigh ~50 grams, so 7000 of them weigh ~350 Kg (7000 is the Tesla cell count, really 6,831). 2.5% of 350 Kg is 8.75 Kg. So a slightly less conservative estimate scales your figures by a factor of 22. Edit: The Model S probably uses NCA batteries (it's hard to say). Lithium is still only 7% by weight of LiCoO2 (Leaving at least a factor of 10).
    • dredmorbius 13y ago
• synctext 13y ago
  "equivalent to about 720 years of current global lithium production" In a best-case scenario, the 2,000-square-mile Rock Springs Uplift could harbor up to 18 million tons of lithium [http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2013/04/uw-researchers-lithium-discovery-could-boost-co2-storage-prospects.html http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2013/04/uw-researchers-lithium-d...]
• bane 13y ago
  so long as currently mined lithium is never reused... my understanding is that the Lithium in a used battery is still perfectly good to be used in another battery.