151–160 of 311 posts
Hmm so 300 million cars with 50 kg lithium in each. That's about four years worth of global car production. Would make a dent in oil usage certainly!
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Yes. Think people have impression we are energy independent and Scot-free because of fracking. Really, fracking was a second chance. A reprieve. We'll just be behind 8-ball again if we don't take this reprieve and grow some other energy source.
I do not really understand why we are obsessed with energy independence. It only matters if we were to ban exports which is an absurd thing to do.
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Isn’t energy independence more about other countries exports? From the perspective of Germany, their reliance on Russian oil caused a high spike in cost of energy during the current Ukraine invasion. For the US, we don’t really want to be at the whim of OPEC. The 1973 Oil Crisis is a historical example of OPEC taking a religious and political stance and using their oil exports to coerce the US against Israel. Another…
Germany's plight is entirely owed to their own political malfeasance in shutting down their nuclear power plants. With them, they would have managed just fine without Russian oil and natural gas.
I'm assuming it's not a giant 15M ton chunk of (highly reactive) metal in the ground, but rather they took a bucket of dirt, analyzed it, and extrapolated how much lithium is available in the ground. My question is, how much "earth" do they need to dig up and refine to extract this amount of lithium?
https://thethaiger.com/news/national/thai-lithium-deposits-o...
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Deposits appear sufficiently distributed to not cause geopolitical conflicts [1]. This is not oil. Lithium is relatively abundant, and a mineral to be reused, not energy to be consumed once through. To keep it conflict free, we must continue to discover reserves and drive down the value of the commodity. No one goes to war over say, salt, in the 21st century (at least not yet!). [1] https://lithiumfuture.org/map.html
The 2019 Bolivian political crisis [1] came right off the heels of Evo Morales negotiating lithium trade with Russia and China. Bolivia happens to have the largest lithium reserves of any nation. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_political_cris...
One thing I didn't see mentioned here, lithium brine extraction has some pretty serious environmental downsides. Finding all that lithium will be a win if/when its extracted and usable, actually extracting it is a different story.
I've done lots of web searches, read lots of articles, and there's never definitive measures of harm or comparisons to what current mining does.
In a standard f150, how much damage is done from mining? How much damage comes from oil extraction compared to the one-time cost to extract lithium?
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Not taking the extreme and unprecedented rate of temperature change into account is either ignorance or disingenuity. https://xkcd.com/1732/ It's probable that very few species will be able to adapt to such an abrupt change.
Adaptation happens when it's forced to happen.
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It's the new oil, so I would be careful. Democracy and camaraderie and all those greater good things tend to come where the cheap resources are.
Deposits appear sufficiently distributed to not cause geopolitical conflicts [1]. This is not oil. Lithium is relatively abundant, and a mineral to be reused, not energy to be consumed once through. To keep it conflict free, we must continue to discover reserves and drive down the value of the commodity. No one goes to war over say, salt, in the 21st century (at least not yet!). [1] https://lithiumfuture.org/map.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not really understand why we are obsessed with energy independence. It only matters if we were to ban exports which is an absurd thing to do.
Isn’t energy independence more about other countries exports? From the perspective of Germany, their reliance on Russian oil caused a high spike in cost of energy during the current Ukraine invasion. For the US, we don’t really want to be at the whim of OPEC. The 1973 Oil Crisis is a historical example of OPEC taking a religious and political stance and using their oil exports to coerce the US against Israel. Another…