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How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

bbc.com

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Re: How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

#151

Post by EdwardDiego »

Gatsky wrote: post #141
hyperionplays wrote: post #20

Shame Australian's see little to no benefit, all of the profits are off shored and there are little royalties paid back to the Australian people.

Is that you, Clive? This doesn’t seem very plausible to me. You are proposing that there could have been an alternate universe where, for example, instead of sending iron ire to China for steel production, Australia could have become the steel producer. This has many assumptions - firstly, that China would buy Australian steel as opposed to finding another ore producer and doing what they do now anyway. You also assu…

You're far more correct in that China would far rather buy the iron ore and coal from Australia and make steel in China.

Why? Social stability, and the security of the party. Even if it's less efficient to import the ore and coal, the steelworks keeps people employed, particularly young men who might otherwise grow restive.

Re: How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

#152

Post by mrkeen »

rr808 wrote: post #7

Australia is like the Saudi Arabia of mining. Such a big continent with very few people. Politically stable and smart enough to exploit itself and keep most of the profits. The lucky country indeed.

Gina Rinehart sells Australia bit-by-bit to Chinese manufacturers and Australians buy back the goods.

Re: How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

#153

Post by mrkeen »

Gatsky wrote: post #141
hyperionplays wrote: post #20

Shame Australian's see little to no benefit, all of the profits are off shored and there are little royalties paid back to the Australian people.

Is that you, Clive? This doesn’t seem very plausible to me. You are proposing that there could have been an alternate universe where, for example, instead of sending iron ire to China for steel production, Australia could have become the steel producer. This has many assumptions - firstly, that China would buy Australian steel as opposed to finding another ore producer and doing what they do now anyway. You also assu…

I don't get it. Are you disagreeing with the parent comment, or taking it as a forgone conclusion with no plausible alternative?

Re: How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

#154

Post by bjowen »

roenxi wrote: post #122

The issue with lithium is it is effectively illegal to process in most of the world that knows how to do it. The subtext in this article is that Australia is a major lithium producer ... because it has easy access to the Chinese refining pipeline which refines the cheap and dirty way. If it were practical to refine lithium in the cheap way we know how, then countries with large lithium reserves (US & Europe) would be…

> The environmental damage of open pit mining operations is nothing compared to the environmental damage and visual pollution of a large city

Eh? These processes liberate vast amounts of heavy metals, arsenic and other environmental contaminants, making byproducts like poil and tailings are super toxic and expensive to deal with, and mining companies have a tendency to vanish before the cleanup is done. When these leak or fail, they often do so into water supplies for cities or isolated communities who have the serial insults of being displaced and then poisoned. Have a search for “tailings dam failures” or superfund sites, for that matter.

The lands in question in the Pilbara are the ancestral property of various first nations, and after a couple of centuries of it, are a bit wary of blokes turning up saying “well we need your resources we’re taking them.”

There are complex and intersecting interests here, and the tech industry acting like resources in someone’s country are there for the tech industry to exploit as of right, are a really good example of how colonialism continues to cause suffering and the inequalities it promises to emancipate us from.

Re: How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

#155

Post by bjowen »

llamaLord wrote: post #131
roenxi wrote: post #122

The issue with lithium is it is effectively illegal to process in most of the world that knows how to do it. The subtext in this article is that Australia is a major lithium producer ... because it has easy access to the Chinese refining pipeline which refines the cheap and dirty way. If it were practical to refine lithium in the cheap way we know how, then countries with large lithium reserves (US & Europe) would be…

As an Australian, you’re forgetting one really key part of the puzzle. Australia is a FUCKING ENORMOUS lump of mineral rich dust. The country is literally tinted red when viewed from space because of all the iron in our dry, desolate, empty-ass country. There is one, and I do mean ONE, advantage to being a developed western country that is also fucking empty and inhospitable. All the NIMBY’s are atleast 1000km away f…

Just. No. Leaving aside the massive pastoral leases, that is the ancestral land of the oldest continuing cultures on the planet.

Mabo vs Qld was handed down in 1992 and the idea that “nobody is out there” was formally and legally abolished then, and should be condemned to Australia’s regrettable, racist past.

Re: How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

#156

Post by guerby »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
Synaesthesia wrote: post #2

The flipside of electrification of vehicles is all the extra metal they need to mine, which is highly environmentally destructive. We don't even have the metal supplies to fully electrify car production, not even close, although I see South America is going to ramp up production substantially soon.

If you think 10kg of lithium in a Tesla is a lot of extraction, you're never going to believe how much steel and aluminum is in a car.

Yes and 10kg if lithium is fully reusable at the end of life of the car.

400k km in an ICE vehicule is 24000 liter of refined petroleum product.

Assuming 90% recovery rate for lithium (very conservative) in fine you compare 1kg of lithium to 24000 liters of refined petroleum product.

99% recovery rate makes it 100g of lithium vs 24000 liters of refined petroleum products.

It's quite a shock to me that people even discuss/compare when there is such a wide 5 order of magnitude difference.

Re: How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

#157

Post by roenxi »

bjowen wrote: post #154
roenxi wrote: post #122

The issue with lithium is it is effectively illegal to process in most of the world that knows how to do it. The subtext in this article is that Australia is a major lithium producer ... because it has easy access to the Chinese refining pipeline which refines the cheap and dirty way. If it were practical to refine lithium in the cheap way we know how, then countries with large lithium reserves (US & Europe) would be…

> The environmental damage of open pit mining operations is nothing compared to the environmental damage and visual pollution of a large city Eh? These processes liberate vast amounts of heavy metals, arsenic and other environmental contaminants, making byproducts like poil and tailings are super toxic and expensive to deal with, and mining companies have a tendency to vanish before the cleanup is done. When these le…

> The lands in question in the Pilbara are the ancestral property of various first nations, and after a couple of centuries of it, are a bit wary of blokes turning up saying “well we need your resources we’re taking them.”

This perspective, while common, is a baffler in context. Start by assuming Aboriginal Australians aren't stupid. Note that whoever owns the land will, assuming they are intelligent or compassionate, develop it to support the the seething mass of humans who need steel.

Aboriginals don't live like poor people because they have a deep philosophical connection to lousy accommodation and dodgy services. They live that way if and only if they are poor. We can respect that, we can acknowledge the dignity of generations of a lifestyle without the comforts of industrialisation, we could potentially accept that there is no need to integrate them into an industrial culture by external policy (I argue we should leave them to it as far as government policy goes, but I tend to lose that sort of argument). Give them standard ownership rights a vast amount of valuable land and they'll choose to live like people who own vast amounts of valuable land. Particularly given that there are about a billion people in Asia who will be vastly better off if they have more cheap steel - that argument should melt any heart, particularly given the amount of profit involved as a motivator. The minerals will get mined.

Re: How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

#158

Post by asdff »

advisedwang wrote: post #99
asdff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats just because we don't care about reusing spent carbon. If we wanted to sequester all carbon into trees that we use again for fuel, for example, you can cycle atoms of carbon infinitely, and therefore power your vehicle purely from the sunlight energy that structures the chemistry of your woody carbon fuel without needing to build and replace solar panels every few decades.

There are quite a few technologies that attempt to use chemical energy storage, but none of them are as well developed as electricity/batteries: - The hydrogen economy. Currently hydrogen generation is very expensive and there's no distribution system yet because of H2's physical properties. - Biodiesel. Looks promising, but basically limited by inputs. - Fuel cells can potentially be run reversibly, so you could hav…

You can make fuel with yeast today and power your car with it. Go to the grocery store, buy a packet of bakers yeast and some granulated sugar, and distill your sugar wine into liquor. In fact you can probably use any locally available plant material; people make hooch from grass even. The issue is just that gallon for gallon, subsidies make things like corn based ethanol or natural gasoline cheaper. Subsidies can change however, and incentives will shift and behavior will change accordingly.

https://www.ucf.edu/news/ucf-researchers-ethanol-fuel-cells-...

Re: How Australia became the world’s greatest lithium supplier

#160

Post by Gatsky »

mrkeen wrote: post #153
Gatsky wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that you, Clive? This doesn’t seem very plausible to me. You are proposing that there could have been an alternate universe where, for example, instead of sending iron ire to China for steel production, Australia could have become the steel producer. This has many assumptions - firstly, that China would buy Australian steel as opposed to finding another ore producer and doing what they do now anyway. You also assu…

I don't get it. Are you disagreeing with the parent comment, or taking it as a forgone conclusion with no plausible alternative?

Disagreeing.
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