251–260 of 311 posts
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Yep, that’s frankly a much bigger deal and something I should have specifically noted.
It’s not really a big deal because we have renewables that can fund the extraction. Oil isn’t useful for its contribution to global energy, it’s useful because it’s portable.
Looks like existing worldwide reserves are 26M tons [0], so this is a big find. [0] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-lithium.pd...
The confusion comes from wrong vocabulary. There are two different words in use: resources and reserves. Resources is what ever there is in (or in some cases on) the ground. Reserves is what can be viably extracted. World lithium resources are close to 100M tons, but usable part, reserves, is about 1/4 of it. Notice how it is also stated in the article: “We are trying to find out how much can we use from the resource…
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15,000,000t×0.004 = 60,000,000kg. 60,000,000kg/63kg per car [1] ≈ 952,000 cars, about 55% of Tesla's production last year. [1] https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...
Yikes, looks like EVs are gonna be resource-constrained real soon unless new battery tech emerges.
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230 billion tons in sea water isn't even a single PPM, doesn't seem feasible to me.
They're already building a pilot facility to do so: https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/kaust-spinout-wil... Lithium can be a lot more prevalent in some waters, they are already competitive commercial mining operations from briny lake beds. Utah's Salt Lake for example is 21ppm and is mined at $2/kg
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At ever-increasing costs.
And decreasing EROI. Maybe you meant that, but it’s worth stating outright, as no amount of money can fix that.
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Can you elaborate on the specific meanings of “resource” and “reserve”? This has piqued my interest.
The largest resource market on the globe is the Toronto TSX which uses the Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results ( JORC ) and other damn near equivilent definitions. https://www.jorc.org/ Pages 8 & 9: https://www.jorc.org/docs/JORC_code_2012.pdf Essentially: (Inferred | Indicated) Resources is weak guesswork whereas: (Measured | Proved) Reserves is (almost) bankable. If you're in a certtain type of g…
s/fantasy footbal /fantasy football /
> The real money gravitates towards increasing proven reserves etc.
Like a Reserve Bank - a mineral Reserve is a known entity - at least as known as anything can be to the limits of modern technology prior to actually digging it up.
There's been enough drilling to know the volumetric extents and grades of the materials of interest (most deposits have multiple minerals of interest), and quite often there's been an independant third party engineering and economic Technical Report commissioned on the feasibility of extraction, costs, methods, lifetime, and expected profit margins.
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?
from what i can see the media/government minister have blown this out of proportion. First off it looks like they identified 15M tonnes of lithium hosting rock (pegmatite) which has a grade of 0.4% of lithium in the form of spodumene (which then needs ot be processed to extract the lithium out of). But in general, how it works is they drill a bunch of holes in the ground and analyse the cores. From that that interpol…
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?
this site says 0.4% so they would need to extract 3.5B tons of rock https://thethaiger.com/news/national/thai-lithium-deposits-o...