The new 'gold rush' for green lithium

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201124-how-geothermal-lithium-could-revolutionise-green-energy

by clouddrover • 6 years ago

97 45 6 years ago

saiya-jin• 6 years ago

Whatever keeps them from mining Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, one of nature's magic places. Wikipedia says it contains 50-70% of world reserves, and I can't imagine mining wouldn't destroy it completely over time.

I truly wish Bolivia to raise itself from poverty, but ideally without the destruction of its magical wonders. Damn I miss traveling...

bobthepanda• 6 years ago

Didn't some country offer to not mine their beautiful area if they were paid by Western countries an equivalent amount, but no one was willing to put their money where their mouth was?

cheschire2• 6 years ago

Isn't that the actual definition of extortion? That sounds like threatening something of value to the whole world for personal gain.

edit: clarity.

ianai• 6 years ago

Going there, I wonder whether there’s any nearby to earth rocks with large amounts of lithium. That could be a potential big thing for space industry.

markdown• 6 years ago

I don't know about that, but Norway is paying to save rainforests:

$1.2B to Brazil: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-amazon-norw...

$150M to Gabon: https://qz.com/africa/1714104/gabon-to-get-150-million-from-...

Indonesia: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/05/indonesia-norway-redd-paym...

Guyana: https://news.mongabay.com/2009/02/norway-to-pay-guyana-to-sa...

trianglem• 6 years ago

50-70%

That’s incredible. I presume this is because no one has been looking for large reserves of lithium until recently.

samatman3• 6 years ago

Easy lithium is in salars aka salt flats. They serve like a natural chromatography column, and some of the strata contain double-digit amounts of the ion (by molar mass, not weight, lithium is quite light).

There's no salar like Salar de Uyuni, so no, it isn't a simple matter of looking harder. There's plenty of lithium-bearing rock, for some value of 'plenty', but this is both expensive, and entails grinding and leaching ore, which is enormously more environmentally destructive and energy intensive.

HPsquared• 6 years ago

I don't think it would be possible to destroy a 10,000 sq km salt flat if that was even the intention.

RC_ITR• 6 years ago

Never underestimate the ability of unchecked human industriousness to turn an unimaginably large resource into a rapidly dwindling one.

hu3• 6 years ago

A total of 11,088 sq km (4,281 sq miles) of rainforest were destroyed from August 2019 to July 2020 in Brazil.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-55130304

samatman3• 6 years ago

I wouldn't say impossible.

I would go so far as to say that pumping up lithium enriched brine from underneath it is unlikely to despoil the natural beauty of the entire salt flat. One corner of it, perhaps.

Once that resource is exhausted, the choice could be made to strip-mine the surface. But that would be a choice, the slippery slope argument strikes me as tenuous here.

carapace• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_sea

The Aral Sea ... was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan (Aktobe and Kyzylorda Regions in the north) and Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan autonomous region in the south) which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up by the 2010s.
Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km2 (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size...
By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea.

naringas• 6 years ago

I am pretty sure that evo morales was quickly kicked out of there because he wasn't gonna easily let global corporations mine in a "cost efficient" way. so now that he's out is only a matter of time before there's cheaper lithium in the global market.

simlevesque• 6 years ago

Elon Musk said that he'd coup whoever he wants in order to get lithium... there is a lot at stake.

kazagistar2• 6 years ago

The people forced another election, and elected his party MAS (movement towards socialism) more overwhelmingly then they elected Evo Morales in the election last year where he was couped.

On the other hand, MAS intends to exploit its lithium. It just plans to do that in a way that grows a high tech domestic industry instead of just exporting raw product. They also plan to keep the profits local to fund social programs and such, which rubs the neoliberal free market imperialists like American foreign policy goons the wrong way.

grecy2• 6 years ago

Agree 100%. I spent a week driving across the Salar and the surrounding desert in 2010 [1], it was one of the most wild and unforgettable experiences of my life.

All around the world places have parallels or similarities. Patagonia reminds me of Alaska. The Sahara is a bit like the Simpson, white sand beaches in Northern Australia are similar to those in Thailand or the Bahamas.

Not so with Bolvia. I've never seen anything on the planet remotely like the high Altiplano around the Salar and the entire South Western part of Bolivia. It's utterly breathtaking and unique.

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/the-uyuni-salt-flats-to-chile-1

tspike• 6 years ago

How would you compare it with the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah?

samatman3• 6 years ago

Lithium extraction from salars is done by pumping up brine from below the surface, then evaporating in ponds and processing the concentrated salts.

This would despoil the area around the pump, somewhat. But this would be less than 1% of the 10,000km of the salar. Factories aren't very attractive, but enormous dunes of lithium-depleted salt might even be pretty. A matter of taste, let's say, but again, the great majority of the landscape would be untouched.

It would also create some subsidence, I imagine. But this wouldn't be visible.

And this must be balanced against the great good to humanity which is realized by the enormous amount of lithium batteries which could be manufactured with this resource.

I'd say this is worth persuading the Bolivian people to accept, and isn't worth overthrowing their government over. But I don't get to make these decisions, alas.

Valgrim• 6 years ago

The lithium in Bolivia is not going to spoil or disappear if it's not extracted right now, and the demand for lithium is probably not going to drop anytime soon. I believe that in order to persuade those opposed to mining lithium in Bolivia, you'd have to address those issues (what they're actually opposed to):

1) Stealing land rights from indigenous people. 2) Lack of environmental regulations, oversight and rehabilitation. 3) Getting ripped off by big mining corporations from across the world with a strong tendency to corrupt politicians and local police. 4) Ensuring good working conditions and compensation for miners.

But alas, for powerful people "persuasion" is often just a synonym for repression and violence.

forgotmypw17• 6 years ago

this page is unreadable on android, the text is positioned off-screen

Solocomplex• 6 years ago

Page 404s with my old client (Materialistic)

lacker3• 6 years ago

I felt like this article did not clarify the problem for me, because it bounced between several different aspects of lithium production without really quantifying anything.

So here's my summary. From googling around, So lithium costs about $13,000 a ton. Hard rock mining releases 15 tons of CO2 for every ton of lithium. Carbon offsets cost about $8 a ton, using the numbers for Stripe's cheapest carbon offset program. So even if the CO2 was fully offset, that would be adding $120 per ton or about 1% to the cost of lithium. This doesn't seem like a very big deal.

For water consumption, that same ton of lithium takes 170 cubic meters, which is about 2 person-months of urban Chilean water consumption. I don't have a specific price or tradeoff to put on it, but it seems unlikely that the cost would amount to as much as the carbon dioxide.

I think what's really going on here is that the current methods of producing lithium are really not very environmentally harmful. IMO this proposed lithium production facility in the UK would be nice, but supporting it by saying that the current methods of lithium production are environmentally unsound doesn't seem right to me. This seems like a case of two different groups of environmentalists shooting each other in the foot, when the best thing for the environment is focusing on getting off fossil fuels instead of preemptively minimizing the small impact of lithium mining.

joe_the_user• 6 years ago

Does hard rock mining release CO2 inherently or does it just require energy? If it's just energy, which seems like to me, energy might be supplied by hydrogen or other CO2-free sources.

Water use compared to personal use isn't that important. Most water used by an industrial society is used in agriculture and that's probably true for Chile.

I think what's really going on here is that the current methods of producing lithium are really not very environmentally harmful.

Agreed. The negative impact of mining generally comes from companies incentivized to cut corners. Strong regulations requiring waste be contained, etc, are what needed. The worst problem is that large companies do cost arbitrage across the world, incentivizing countries to lower their standards - why all the "rare earth" mining went to China when they were willing cut corners and then the West screamed bloody murder when China stopped wanting to be the world's garbage dump.

lacker3• 6 years ago

Water use compared to personal use isn't that important. Most water used by an industrial society is used in agriculture

Oh that's a good point. So for comparison, a ton of wheat takes about 1300 cubic meters of water, so 8x the water per ton as lithium. That wheat sells for about $200, so lithium is using orders of magnitude less water per dollar of revenue. This comparison makes lithium mining look even more environmentally friendly than comparing it to urban use does. Of course these are all estimates based on brief internet research so the true numbers could be different.

I couldn't figure out from Google where exactly the CO2 emissions from lithium mining comes from - that sort of thing would have been great for the actual professional article to provide.

bigger_cheese• 6 years ago

Water used in Mining also has an environmental impact - wet processing of minerals creates "tailings", which is essentially contaminated waste water which then needs to be stored somewhere usually in a dam. A lot of the largest environmental disasters in recent history have been caused by tailings dams.

AtlasBarfed• 6 years ago

I would think the geothermal water can be used for energy at the same time it's used for lithium extraction.

erentz2• 6 years ago

How do you offset a ton of emitted CO2 for $8? Here Stripe is paying between $75 and $775 per ton: https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases

lacker3• 6 years ago

That's for "negative emissions" which are more expensive than offsets. I got my data from https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/19/20811981/stripe-carbon-ca... which cites the $8 figure.

im3w1l• 6 years ago

For water consumption, that same ton of lithium takes 170 cubic meters, which is about 2 person-months of urban Chilean water consumption.

m3 of water is a nonsense metric. Water is abundant in some places, and in those places it might as well be free. In other places it is highly scarce. Furthermore water is not consumed it's just borrowed for a while. So really you need to look at it more qualitatively, tell a story of the consequences of the water use.

arendtio• 6 years ago

Lithium is crucial for the transition to renewables, but mining it has been environmentally costly.

From my limited insight into the issue, I got the impression, that the mining of lithium in itself isn't the problem, but that is being done in the cheapest ways. For example, when mining it from water, the water is being evaporated and the wind carries it to other places. But shouldn't it be possible to required miners by law to pump as much water into the ground as they pump out of it?

That would be more expensive, but as far as I understand it, it should reduce the environmental effects significantly.

The new 'gold rush' for green lithium

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