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USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

usgs.gov

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Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#141

Post by UltraSane »

luckylion wrote: post #106
ianeigorndua wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trash, mostly.

Not really. I live close to Hamburg, Germany. _Very_ eager to be eco-friendly and sustainable. Currently: 64% coal, lots of nat gas, ~20 renewables. The future plan is to use a lot more industrial waste heat. Burning garbage is done and planned, but nowhere near a major factor. Not to mention that the garbage would also need to come from something: plastics from oil, wood from trees etc.

Germany shutting down their perfectly safe nuclear reactors instead of their coal plants was so stupid. Germany emits 5 to 6 times more CO2 per J than France.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#142

Post by [deleted] »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #57
idontwantthis wrote: post #40

Say Lithium becomes essentially free because we find so much of it…would that drastically lower battery costs? Is our current supply of lithium limiting production?

Is sand essentially free because we have beaches and deserts full of it? It can be used to make concrete, a valuable material? (Don't forget the shipping, storage, and refining costs)

[deleted]

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#143

Post by jofer »

_heimdall wrote: post #125
jofer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You physically can't remove the overburden for this. The Smackover is at a depth of multiple kilometers in most of these areas. It's mining brine. I.e. the "mines" are basically deep water wells. The limestone itself doesn't have any lithium. It's the water in the pores in the limestone that is relatively concentrated in lithium. In most of these cases, you're already producing brines from the smackover formation as…

Extremely helpful, thanks for the extra detail here. I have a background in the oil industry and live in a region strip mined for coal (I actually can't tap a useful ground well because of it), but I don't know much about how lithium is actually extracted. As far as evap ponds go, are there usually chemicals or elements in the same brine water as lithium that is important when evaporating into the atmosphere?

There are a lot of things in deep subsurface brine. It really varies.

First and foremost, here are definitely lots of other salts. It is brine, after all. You produce a lot of halite (salt), gypsum, calcite, and all kinds of other evaporite minerals.

There are all kinds of things in smaller concentrations, though.

What comes out of a oil/water separator would need lots of additional processing before going to something like an evap pond. It's relatively hazardous stuff for a lot of reasons other than oil (e.g. it can be rather radioactive). It typically goes through quite a bit of additional processing unless it's being immediately reinjected.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#144

Post by CSSer »

Animats wrote: post #114
diggernet wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your description of the location of this mine doesn't match your Wikipedia link. Searching in Google Maps, Thacker Mine comes up as 40.58448942010599, -117.8912129833345. As you say, that is near I-80 and Mill City, and there is nothing there. But Wikipedia says it's at 41.70850912415866, -118.05475061324945 in the McDermitt Caldera, nowhere near Mill City or I-80. I'm thinking probably don't trust Google on this one…

Right. The Nevada Appeal, which actually has people on the ground, has far more info.[1] North of Thacker Pass is the area to look. The mine is building their own rail yard west of Winnemuca. The mine will be an open-pit mine like a coal mine. Sawtooth Mining division of North American Coal will do the mining. Dig down 350 feet, take out clay with lithium, process, put back clay without lithium. The processing plant…

And they can all visit us at Burning Man every year!

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#145

Post by jofer »

pfdietz wrote: post #139
jofer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You physically can't remove the overburden for this. The Smackover is at a depth of multiple kilometers in most of these areas. It's mining brine. I.e. the "mines" are basically deep water wells. The limestone itself doesn't have any lithium. It's the water in the pores in the limestone that is relatively concentrated in lithium. In most of these cases, you're already producing brines from the smackover formation as…

I think they're using better processes than evaporation these days. For example, concentrating the brine using reverse osmosis first.

Those are expensive and are avoided when possible. Brine ponds are cheap if you can use them. But with that said, yeah, evaporation ponds don't work especially well on the Gulf Coast.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#146

Post by pfdietz »

jofer wrote: post #145
pfdietz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're using better processes than evaporation these days. For example, concentrating the brine using reverse osmosis first.

Those are expensive and are avoided when possible. Brine ponds are cheap if you can use them. But with that said, yeah, evaporation ponds don't work especially well on the Gulf Coast.

The process for here, I was reading, would involve concentration of the lithium with resin absorbers (to separate it from other alkali elements, I imagine), followed by elution into water, reverse osmosis, and only then evaporation. This is called "DLE": Direct Lithium Extraction.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#147

Post by lazide »

jofer wrote: post #143
_heimdall wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extremely helpful, thanks for the extra detail here. I have a background in the oil industry and live in a region strip mined for coal (I actually can't tap a useful ground well because of it), but I don't know much about how lithium is actually extracted. As far as evap ponds go, are there usually chemicals or elements in the same brine water as lithium that is important when evaporating into the atmosphere?

There are a lot of things in deep subsurface brine. It really varies. First and foremost, here are definitely lots of other salts. It is brine, after all. You produce a lot of halite (salt), gypsum, calcite, and all kinds of other evaporite minerals. There are all kinds of things in smaller concentrations, though. What comes out of a oil/water separator would need lots of additional processing before going to somethi…

Yeah, underground brine is rarely nice to be around, especially when concentrated, but does often have a lot of useful minerals. Related facts, I’m guessing.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#148

Post by trimethylpurine »

engineer_22 wrote: post #68
EA-3167 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major limiting factor of lithium is not really availability so much as the cost of extraction. China is the leader in this field, not so much because of abundance or stellar technology, but out of a willingness to completely ignore environmental externalities (including those of the power generation involved in the whole process). As a result the price of Chinese lithium is low enough that it would be essentially…

> the price of Chinese lithium is low enough that it would be essentially impossible to compete with them... In an export model, yes. However, given their negative externalities (including geo-political factors), importing countries may place tariffs on Chinese lithium in order to make use of other sources. If the total embodied value of lithium in any particular product is small compared to the overall value of the…

Congress plays whack-a-mole with policy while importers shuffle goods or various parts of the manufacturing process to neighboring countries or follow tighter packaging constraints to avoid specific tax rules or earn specific tax incentives. Tariffs are political showmanship. It's not really a viable nor an enforceable option in the modern economy, at least not based on my experience in the industry.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#149

Post by lazide »

jeffbee wrote: post #138
_heimdall wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, yes I do wish that we weren't opening such huge holes as we are for aluminum, iron, coal, etc. I worked in the upstream oil industry for a bit and live in an area heavily coal mined, I just wasn't clear how lithium mining compared and didn't want to assume that damage was on the same scale as the others.

It's not even close to as large as the footprint of oil and gas. The Thacker Pass project, which is one of several that are all individually described as satisfying global demand, will ultimately disturb only 7000 acres. Fossil fuel wells usually disturb 5 net acres each, and there are five million such wells in America alone.

Additionally, that area in Nevada can be - at best - charitably described as moonscape.

Which, for those of us that like moonscape, is a bit sad. But there is a lot of moonscape in that region, and there aren’t a huge number of moonscape fans. At least that are going to try to picket any projects. So overall, meh.

That area of Nevada is also pretty economically ‘challenged’, so why not.

Re: USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

#150

Post by lazide »

unusualmonkey wrote: post #107
gottorf wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is ludicrously off-base for fossil fuels, even if we're only talking about local pollutants from the plants themselves, nevermind things like Exxon Valdez or the pipelines or the act of mining. The energy density of fossil fuels means that those side-effects would be worse with other sources of energy. > is a result of urbanization mostly Urbanization, made possible by the economical source of energy that is f…

> The energy density of fossil fuels means that those side-effects would be worse with other sources of energy. Can you expand on this? How does the density of fossil fuel make them a better source of energy than say wind?

One oil well can produce an amount of free energy (24/7) that a 100 acre wind farm can only produce sporadically, assuming the well is a reasonably high volume producer. It depends on the specific well/geology.

The issue with fossil fuels is that they liberate fossil carbon, which has larger macro effects on the global environment. (It injects a lot of ‘new’ carbon into the carbon cycle)

They also do sometimes have some medium sized local effects from spills or contamination. But those can usually be controlled.

Geothermal is also usually ‘low footprint/high value’, but is only viable in specific limited locations.

Solar, wind, hydropower, tidal energy all have large physical footprints for the amount of energy they produce. Aka ‘low density’. All are also somewhat tied to specific, and often limited geology.

For solar for instance, areas with a lot of desert or other open ‘non productive’ land nearby, it’s great (assuming decent insolation). In areas where land is at a premium for other uses, or is very rugged/high maintenance, it definitely is a problem. Aka cities, certain types of high intensity farmland, heavily forested areas, high snow load/storm areas, etc.

Solar is not an awesome economic choice in Siberia, for example. It is an awesome economic choice in Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, etc.

For areas with geography that supports it (typically the right kind of mountain ranges) and rainfall, hydropower is awesome, though has serious side effects on wildlife and river health. For a place that doesn’t have the right geography (say England), it’s a non starter.

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