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Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

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Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

#391

Post by panick21_ »

smugma wrote: post #368
panick21_ wrote: post #343

I'm so sick of these articles. The amount of 'lithium discovered' articles are crazy. Nobody cares, lithium is plentiful, it exists in lots of places and we haven't even looked for it much. If people really search for it, it would show up in many more places. The problem with lithium is not finding a resource, but doing the necessary chemical process to get it to be battery quality lithium. Lithium is not like base m…

Is China not one of their closest Allies (the other being Russia?

Iran and Russia have never really been friends. Just because they both don't like the US, doesn't mean they like each other.

China and Iran aren't friends, but of course China is willing to trade with them, and they might mine some lithium, but the refining would be done in China. No way will China give Iran what it needs for its own lithium industry. Maybe if Iran really pays for a lot for it, but even then, this would be a very long process.

Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

#392

Post by ETH_start »

epistasis wrote: post #340
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Light sweet crude definitely peaked. Petroleum reserves are basically tsr sands and fracking which is low EROEI, even with the industry externalizing costs like methane leakage, vast freshwater consumption / pollution. For example it used to be you burned a barrel of oil to get 20 or 30 out back in the easily accessible light sweet crude days. Shit like the tar sands is more like 2:1 EROEI.

EROEI: the metric deployed against solar and wind in the past, that was quickly erased from public discourse once it became apparent that modern fossil fuels did worse on it. All those people complaining about EROEI no longer seem to have the slightest concern, despite it being a significant hurdle for future fossil fuel use.

The EROEIs give for solar and wind appear to be mostly propaganda. Factoring in infrastructure costs like transmission lines and storage makes it apparent that solar/wind are enormously expensive:

"True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh"

https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...

Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

#393

Post by philipkglass »

adshouts wrote: post #388
thehappypm wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s like, one oil tanker to produce an entire fleet of cars?

Source: https://clifhigh.substack.com/p/3-million-barrels-of-oil-per...

This analysis is off by orders of magnitude. Tesla shipped 1.3 million vehicles in 2022, each of which contained a battery pack [1]. 3 million barrels of oil contains 6.1 * 10^15 joules of primary energy [2]. World primary energy production in 2021 was 5.95 * 10^20 joules [3].

Combining these numbers, Tesla's 1.3 * 10^6 battery packs shipped in 2022 would have taken 7.93 * 10^21 joules to manufacture. This is more than 10 times annual global energy production and is clearly in error.

Another way to spot-check and reject this number is to note that 3 million barrels of oil would cost in the neighborhood of $240 million. Getting that much energy from coal might cost only $75 million per vehicle but it's still a proposition that would see Tesla losing approximately $100 trillion dollars per year on sales of 1.3 million vehicles.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/02/investing/tesla-deliveries-pr...

[2] https://www.ocean.washington.edu/courses/envir215/energynumb...

[3] https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...

Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

#394

Post by weatherlite »

mywittyname wrote: post #297
epistasis wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a nickel mine for every time I've pointed out to someone that the "proven reserves" of lithium on a USGS two page PDF are completely uncorrelated to the amount of lithium that will soon be discovered, I'd be extremely wealthy with cobalt. (Cobalt is a common byproduct of nickel mining.) Even looking at the year-after-year increases in known lithium resources over the past decade shows massive increases. Lith…

Exactly. Lithium scarcity is a similar mindset to what peak oil was in the 90s. It seems like an issue given our current understanding, but there's a huge economic incentive to discover new deposits and make their extraction economically viable. Some of the the largest oil fields currently known were only discovered in the past decade or two. I wouldn't be surprised if battery materials follow a similar discovery cur…

> Some of the the largest oil fields currently known were only discovered in the past decade or two.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1088739/global-oil-disco...

Interesting I see an opposite trend but that's a 7 year window. AFAIK discoveries are slowing and the general trend is for newly discovered fields to have lower returns on energy.

Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

#396

Post by sofixa »

garyrob wrote: post #183
Convolutional wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did in 1953 when Prime Minister Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil. The US and UK launched a coup to stop that and installed a dictator (who was initially reluctant to go along with this and had to be convinced). Then SAVAK cracked down on domestic secular left opposition for decades, aided by the CIA.

I have pics of my grandfather standing and talking with the Shah, and then sitting next to him at a large banquet as if the two of them were the important people in the room. It's still a mystery to me what he was doing there or what their relationship was. My grandfather was a professor of economics at Columbia University who was a leader of relief efforts such as in Armenia after the genocide there. He definitely d…

Just a small clarification, you're talking about a different Shah - Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the guy who was in full control after the 1953 coup, took initial power in 1941 with foreign help (to help out with WW2 due to the strategic location of Iran for oil and supplies to the USSR) from his father, Reza Shah, who took power in 1925 from Ahmad Shah Qajar, who would have been the Shah your grandfather has pictures with.

Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

#397

Post by redeeman »

HPsquared wrote: post #235
j_maffe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is some highly suspect ontology here. These are mostly generic tax reductions for energy, and would apply equally to solar or any other energy source. For example in the UK, "fuel and power for domestic use" is subject to the reduced VAT rate of 5%, instead of the standard rate of 20% charged for most items. This is the kind of thing that gets labelled a "fossil fuel subsidy".

it is a special(well I wish) kind of thinking where EVERYTHING belongs to the government, so the notion that someone gets to keep more of their own produce can only mean subsidy. It is really quite sick when one thinks about it

Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

#398

Post by aussieguy1234 »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #327

"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." - Elon musk. https://web.archive.org/web/20200726004948/https://twitter.c... Don't be surprised if something similar happens here. Unless, of course, Iran's government is willing to play ball.

Just some context: If the Iranian regime falls this is actually a good outcome, even if it has backing from western interests.

Having said that, up until now Western governments have largely ignored the plight of the Iranian people, leaving them to fend for themselves.

If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources.

It's still a good outcome, but if it happens I don't think it will have came from the good will of western governments.

Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

#399

Post by defrost »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #398
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #327

"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." - Elon musk. https://web.archive.org/web/20200726004948/https://twitter.c... Don't be surprised if something similar happens here. Unless, of course, Iran's government is willing to play ball.

Just some context: If the Iranian regime falls this is actually a good outcome, even if it has backing from western interests. Having said that, up until now Western governments have largely ignored the plight of the Iranian people, leaving them to fend for themselves. If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won'…

> If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources.

s/ lithium / oil /

.. and now we're looking at the 1953 Iranian coup d'état in which the US and UK deposed a democratically elected government to prevent them poking into the details of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and exposing the degree to which Western goverments were "helping" the Iranian people (err, sorry, themselves) with resource royalties.

That led to 25 years of despised western puppet government and an eventual overthrow that over compansated and lurched backwards into theocracy .. leading to today.

Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

#400

Post by skinnymuch »

defrost wrote: post #399
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just some context: If the Iranian regime falls this is actually a good outcome, even if it has backing from western interests. Having said that, up until now Western governments have largely ignored the plight of the Iranian people, leaving them to fend for themselves. If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won'…

> If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources. s/ lithium / oil / .. and now we're looking at the 1953 Iranian coup d'état in which the US and UK deposed a democratically elected government to prevent them poking into the deta…

Even sadder, the US tried to claim it was because of communism. When it was basic nationalism. Communism has historically been the reason. Muslim also fits the bill ala the differences between PK + BG treatment vs India.
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