If you want to look at realistic lithium extraction in the US, look at Thacker Pass. That is much closer to being an actual reality.
Nobody has yet made Geothermal Brines a reality and nobody has even really managed commercial DLE.
The reality is all lithium in the world today comes from conventional brine project that use natural evaporation or it comes from Spodumene rock. We will scale those things first in order to increase lithium production.
Lithium industry is difficult, its very hard for these operations to be profitable. And the California is specially difficult.
But this is very much a very, very real problem. Lithium will be a huge cost even in LFP batteries as you can't take it out. We already know that not enough new lithium mines are coming online for coming demand. And high oil price made it even worse.
We do actually seriously need to move to other types of battery chemistries as well. The most promising by far is Sodium batteries and CATL (big dog of batteries) is commercializing it. It has far, far less supply issues and it will be dense enough to make standard cars practical.
There are lots of other ideas but the reality is, its absurdly hard to get even a tiny innovation in the cathode into actual cars and takes 5+ years. Doing it with a totally new chemistry is even more difficult.
> Nobody has yet made Geothermal Brines a reality and nobody has even really managed commercial DLE.
The same is said about every innovation or invention ever. If you have knowledge about why it is infeasible, then your references are welcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30802349
From https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/zero-carbon-lithi... “A pilot plant to demonstrate DLE from the project became operational in April 2021 while the first battery-quality lithium hydroxide was produced from the pilot operations in September 2021.”. They are doing it and obviously believe it is commercially viable to do so.
From https://geo40.com/geolithium/ “We have successfully recovered lithium from low, moderate and high-grade brine types covering Europe, the Americas and New Zealand at laboratory scale. We will move to pilot stage in 2022.”. I am more sceptical about the economics of this (some government funding, possibly for positive discrimination, and no obvious commercial investors). “Lithium bearing geothermal fluid is allowed contact with Geo40’s proprietary GeoSeive compound. The GeoSieve is then regenerated to release the lithium”, and reused.
I'm not saying its infeasible. I'm saying it will take a more time then many people think and it will take more money and some of the companies wont make it.
You are dismissive of one technology (which the article never implies is ready), then bring up a battery technology that is even more irrelevant (for the reasons you state).
> Lithium will be a huge cost even in LFP batteries as you can't take it out.
The figure I have heard is ~5% of the battery cost is related to the cost of Lithium. The cost of the raw Lithium compounds is not a dominant factor in the cost of most Lithium batteries, for example see https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271367/1-s2.0-S037877531... I did some googling to find something recent that could compare the raw costs of materials, but they usually only break it down to the cost of the cathode material rather than individual metal compounds. https://www.crugroup.com/knowledge-and-insights/spotlights/n... imply that Nickel and Cobalt costs dominate currently.
The Goodenough battery is truly the best case of nominative determinism in history.
No one is going to want to drive on sodium batteries, which are merely good, rather than good enough. We're talking about the weight of a Tesla with the range of a Leaf, as a best case scenario.
As for lithium, there are absolutely enormous amounts of it in highly available form, in the parts of the world where brine evaporated relatively recently. The Great Basin has a lot of those.
When you say lithium extraction is difficult to do profitably, this is just a way of saying the supply/demand curve yields cheap lithium in 2022.
We're in no danger of supply issues at the right price, no one who wants to buy some lithium is coming up short, and no such future is at all likely in this century.
> No one is going to want to drive on sodium batteries, which are merely good, rather than good enough. We're talking about the weight of a Tesla with the range of a Leaf, as a best case scenario.
People said the same about LFP and Sodium is getting pretty close to that on a system level. You have to consider the whole pack and its price.
The reality is that there are literally millions that could run with sodium and be a practical product.
And the extra volume required is actually not that big a problem in many vehicles.
> When you say lithium extraction is difficult to do profitably, this is just a way of saying the supply/demand curve yields cheap lithium in 2022.
No actually lithium is getting more and more expensive and demand is growing at insane rates while getting new mines in production is really hard. So the price will likely continue to go up.
> We're in no danger of supply issues at the right price, no one who wants to buy some lithium is coming up short, and no such future is at all likely in this century.
Price go up until some people that had plans will reconsider those plans.
> No one is going to want to drive on sodium batteries, which are merely good, rather than good enough. We're talking about the weight of a Tesla with the range of a Leaf, as a best case scenario.
Do many people care about the weight of their car? I would bet most people couldn’t tell you what their car weighs with any accuracy (me, for one).
People happily drive giant heavy trucks (like an F150) for much shorter distances than the range of a Leaf.
Or weight matters for some other reason? Shipping?
The energy required to move increases with mass. More energy, more pollution. We want more efficiency, not less.
More mass also means collisions are higher energy, so crash and pedestrian safety become an issue at lower speeds.
The tradeoffs have to justify the extra weight, so money saved on batteries has to exceed money spent on stronger frames, etc. I think Tesla is playing at the edges, so it's probably safe to say inefficient (heavier) batteries aren't going to be feasible.
By that logic people now wouldn't use LFP. Demand is huge, and a slightly bigger/heavier battery is totally acceptable if the battery can be cheaper. The reality is it is better to produce more EV even with batteries that are not at peak density specially if they are cheaper.
As I pointed out, Sodium could get reasonably to LFP. So just as we moved from NMC to LFP, we will move from LFP to Sodium. That doesn't mean NMC or LFP will go away.
Sodium rhodizonate [1] gets a comparable real density to lithium by using an excellent cathode (rhodizonate) that doesn't work with lithium. The thing is that the rhodizonate method hasn't escaped Yi Cui's lab as far as I can tell.
I understand that the demand for lithium grows but as someone who currently lives in Northern Nevada its sad to see more beautiful areas and critical habitat going to be destroyed for new mines and mineral extraction.
The reality is mines have to exist somewhere. The cost of them being abroad is more CO2 spent on getting materials shipped around the world, national security vulnerabilities, worse environmental laws, removing economic pie pieces, and a loss of potential jobs.
I look on a map of Nevada and it’s just vast, uninhabited space. Are the only sources of Nevada resources in actually lived areas, or is it something a handful of people see in any given year?
Do you have any source for resources in Nevada being inhabited by endangered animals, and said extraction of such resources will kill them? Otherwise it just sounds like generic negativity.
Great article, this is from TheConversation, it is attributed at the bottom of the article but ideally this would like to that since there’s no tracking, and it’s the original:
In New Zealand there is this company https://geo40.com/ it is trying to develop this technology. Interesting stuff, though ultimately it feels like we need an alternative battery tech not based on lithium. But next 10-20 years seems like it is going to be big for batteries.
Potassium resources are a concern if you're talking about fertilizer, where it has to be extremely cheap. For technical use in batteries cost would not be a concern. Potassium is about 4000x more abundant in seawater than is lithium, btw.
From what has been said about other such projects in europe, you do not take much salt or water out of the system. Instead, you pump the same amount of material down again in a closed circle, also reducing the amount of energy you have to spend to pump up the hot-water in the first place. When extracting lithium, you would substitute either the lithium itself or the lithium salt (depending on exact process). Afterall, you do not want to remove thousands of tons of material from hundereds of meters deep without knowing what kind of consequences (i.e earth quakes) that may have.
Lithium mining itself uses a LOT of water. It is weird to see the article talking about how geothermal is all we need to enable lithium mining when these areas have significant issues with water usage already.
Is there enough lithium on the planet to move everyone entirely over to electric cars, and still keep up with the demand for phones, tablets, drones, etc?
There are 230 billion tonnes of Lithium in sea water, and it constitutes .002 percent pf the Earth's crust. It is very common, and widely available in economically viable concentrations.
The concerns are building new mines and extraction plants fast enough to meet during demand, and the environmental damage from doing so. There are no concerns about running out.
Exactly, there are some companies working on less energy intensive solutions for extracting it.
These guys look like they have some promising technology: https://energyx.com/
They are currently testing membranes that can selectively let through lithium. Their solution vastly reduces cost, water usage, and energy usage.
Lithium is light. This means that it generally floats to the top of things. This means that it is not a good candidate for asteroid mining, because while it has floated to the surface of the Earth over the course of many many many years, it has not floated to the surface of asteroids.
This is also why things like gold or platinum are good to mine from asteroids, because they have not had the opportunity to sink to the core of those asteroids like they did on Earth. (And getting to the core of an asteroid is a significantly more reasonable proposition than getting to the core of the earth)
Lithium is $17,000 per tonne. Even if you found a pure Lithium asteroid, it wouldn't be worth shipping in a 100 tonne Starship that would need a dozen refueling trips to make it to the asteroid and back
You don't use something like Starship to haul lithium back from the asteroid belt 100 tonnes at a time.
You use something like Starship to deliver construction equipment that can be used to build engines on the asteroid it to earth orbit for processing.
Ideally you'd bring the minimum amount of equipment necessary to do in-situ production of the rest of the equipment, but we're not at that boot-strap self-replicating level quite yet.
I don't think you have an appreciation for how much fuel is required to adjust an asteroid's orbit to approach earth. Much less align with earth's orbit. Much less get it into stable orbit around earth.
Or the fuel required to get the fuel you need to the asteroid.
Fuel that has to be lifted into orbit. Which requires fuel.
Go look up the costs of lifting equipment just into orbit. Then look at how much lithium is worth per kg.
Then go look at the fact that we have exactly zero manufacturing capacity in space. Simple operations and repairs using pre-made parts on the ISS take hours-long spacewalks that require weeks of planning. And you think we can "build engines" on asteroids?
I was thinking that we could send a bunch of engines inside a starship to mount on the side of objets that we want to take back and we can fuel them with material that we find on the object we want or on near by objects.
Why not just use the engines that come with the starship? In any case, both shipping the asteroid bit by bit inside a rocket or converting the entire asteroid into a rocket will need basically the same amount of fuel. You would need to bring over the lithium ore processing equipment as well, so you only need to transport refined lithium metal back to earth. You might even be able to use the non-lithium parts of the asteroid as reaction mass in that case.
The problem with lithium is not availability. Not in the least. There is enough 10x over.
The problem with lithium is that it is spread out, that means you can't really find good ores with high concentration.
Additionally, lithium behaves less like copper, nickel and so on, and more like a specialty chemical.
Mining lithium is basically more running a chemical plan and only very few companies can do it so far.
This leads to a situation where lithium mines are very hard to make profitable and you need a huge amount of knowledge to run one. The on-boarding of new mines and expansion of capacity is the problem, not the total availability.
Mostly because we're looking at new ways of extracting it. Most well known is the Tesla parent for extracting from mud. Most well known because Tesla, but there are lots of other companies looking at different extraction methods.
Lithium price has gone up a lot because demand is growing faster than the mines and plants that extract it. That 80 million tonne figure was based on low prices -- at high prices a lot more reservess become viable and we have a lot more.
If Lithium scarcity becomes a significant problem, there will be plenty of economic incentives for recycling. There are already multiple competing companies offering ~95% recycling of lithium ion battery materials.
Also, batteries more suited to grid-scale operation like iron-flow are already in commercial use and will likely replace a fair bit of the large-scale lithium ion battery market.
Lithium ion batteries use a zeolite cathode which have atomic sized pores that safely 'stores' the metallic lithium[1]. Issue with sodium is unlike lithium sodium increases in size when reduced. That tends to damage the cathode.
For ion batteries the cathode is the big technological challenge. Has to be cheap, manufacturable, stable, conductive, and hold as high a percentage of lithium as possible.
[1] There are lithium batteries with bulk lithium cathodes. But they are hazardous.
yea but a major battery maker now has sodium ion batteries that are comparable to the lithium ones that Tesla uses in China and will be using in future cars from now on.
I find it strange that the article talks only about supplying power for lithium planets with no mention of the massive amounts of water that lithium mining operations use. This seems like a pretty significant hurdle in the SW where surface water is scarce and the aquifers are already dropping significantly.
If you want to look at realistic lithium extraction in the US, look at Thacker Pass. That is much closer to being an actual reality.
Nobody has yet made Geothermal Brines a reality and nobody has even really managed commercial DLE.
The reality is all lithium in the world today comes from conventional brine project that use natural evaporation or it comes from Spodumene rock. We will scale those things first in order to increase lithium production.
Lithium industry is difficult, its very hard for these operations to be profitable. And the California is specially difficult.
But this is very much a very, very real problem. Lithium will be a huge cost even in LFP batteries as you can't take it out. We already know that not enough new lithium mines are coming online for coming demand. And high oil price made it even worse.
We do actually seriously need to move to other types of battery chemistries as well. The most promising by far is Sodium batteries and CATL (big dog of batteries) is commercializing it. It has far, far less supply issues and it will be dense enough to make standard cars practical.
There are lots of other ideas but the reality is, its absurdly hard to get even a tiny innovation in the cathode into actual cars and takes 5+ years. Doing it with a totally new chemistry is even more difficult.