Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium • Hacker News Board

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#261

Post by Jensson » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:05 AM UTC

chefandy wrote: post #223

rmm wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Roughly what how much volume would 15m tons of pegmatite take up? I have no intuitive sense of scale with these things.

Rocks tend to be 5-10x denser than water, so assume 2 million cube meters. That is just 2 square kilometers 1 meter high, so not mountains or so. As a comparison, for a large iron mine they dig up many billions of tons of rock, and that is for very cheap iron, so you wouldn't need a very large operation to dig this up.

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#262

Post by prawn » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:15 AM UTC

uoaei wrote: post #245

mkl wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Swear I read an article recently about cuts to a lithium project in Australia due to dwindling demand.

Here's an article about it:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-18/kemerton-lithium-proj...

Including: "Demand for lithium has dropped by more than 80 per cent in the past year and nearly 11 per cent in the past month alone."

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#263

Post by borissk » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:23 AM UTC

rmm wrote: post #217

This is my wheelhouse (mining engineer) and sorry to say this is bunk from what i can see. Its not 15M Tonnes of Lithium. Its 15M Tonnes of lithium containing ore, with an average grade of 0.4% (which i also question without seening core results). Also terms such as "resource" and "reserve" have very specific meaning in mining (to do with economic viability of deposity/ level of confidence) and this is by no way a "r…

How would you interpret this news about phosphate in Norway: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/gre... ?

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#264

Post by thebruce87m » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 8:21 AM UTC

digging wrote: post #191

kccqzy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the weasel words of "demands slowing down". It's always not clear what exactly is happening from this phrase. Is the production or sales going down year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter? Because that's what people think "demand slowing down" means. However what's actually happening is that demand is going up, but at a rate slower than before. Imagine that in 2022 demand increased by 60% YoY but in 2023 demand…

So the rate of change of demand is decreasing. Decreasing rate of change is the definition slowing down. Although I agree that most people probably misinterpret the phrase as you say. (It seems other replies have had that interpretation.)

If you reduce acceleration, your speed is still increasing if you still have positive acceleration. This is still speeding up, not slowing down.

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#265

Post by smcin » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 8:33 AM UTC

Hackbraten wrote: post #110

topspin wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so this is a big find Plus it's far away from the environment, so recovery will be uncomplicated.

I see what you did there. [0] [0]: https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

@ 1m30s

Classic Clarke & Dawe

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#266

Post by aiauthoritydev » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 8:40 AM UTC

earthling8118 wrote: post #196

aiauthoritydev wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very common misconception. Production is all that matters and existence is completely irrelevant independently. Production factors in existence and future expected existence. For example if any oil rich nation thinks oil going to run out they will hoard it for future so they can make money. But some get pedantic and ask "But isnt number of Oil molecules in earth finite?" Such pedantism can be easily blowm a…

While the resources are out there it's very feasible that we could become locked into a scenario where it is out of reach. I don't particularly care for letting the cost stop us from taking it from outside Earth, but the prerequisite for doing so is having enough energy available to accomplish the goal. Which is a path we could easily close off for ourselves.

Nothing you have said contradicts what I have said. I said the same thing.

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#267

Post by fooker » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 8:43 AM UTC

uoaei wrote: post #245

mkl wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lithium is one of the most abundant solids in the universe. The earth has plenty, it's just going to become more and more economically feasible to extract it. You can even get reasonably large amounts from seawater if you have cheap energy.

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#268

Post by jillesvangurp » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 8:53 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #157

_heimdall wrote: post #94

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 hear people complain about this, but they never place it in context with the damage from, say, iron or copper mining. 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?

Or fossil fuels. We do a lot of damage to our planet to extract coal, gas, and oil. And that's before you consider the damage we then do by burning it. Most of that becomes redundant if we scale renewable energy production enough. The impact of Lithium mining is absolutely tiny in comparison to all that. And it kind of is really important as a resource to complete that transition.

The good news is that lithium is really common. The bad news is it's mostly not found in high concentrations. For example, ocean water contains about 180 billion tonnes of lithium. But in a concentration of 0.2 parts per million, you'd need to process about five million tonnes of ocean water to get 1 tonne of lithium. Extracting lithium and other minerals from sea water is something we can do nevertheless. It's just not very economical to do it.

But the good news is that we are aware of quite a few natural deposits with much higher concentrations of lithium in either brines or different kinds of mineral deposits. That's nature taking its course over billions of years concentrating the lithium for us. And we've barely scratched the surface (quite literally) looking for that stuff as the interest in large scale lithium mining did not exist until about 10-20 years ago.

In short, we're not going to run out of lithium. There's plenty of it. Extracting it is indeed costly and depending on how it's done can be a bit nasty. But the good news is that the damage is typically highly localized. And we have ways to mitigate that. And once extracted we can use the lithium over and over again. It's not destroyed by using it. Unlike fossil fuels.

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#269

Post by NERD_ALERT » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 9:43 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #210

NERD_ALERT wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US/CIA has a long history of inciting coups, rigging elections, and funding far right terror organizations across Latin America for matters similar or lesser than this [1]. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this as unprovoked internal conflict. Especially given that only a year after this event, another election was held in which Luis Arce won in a landslide [2]. Luis Arce was importantly the finance minister for…

> The US/CIA has a long history of inciting coups, rigging elections, and funding far right terror organizations across Latin America for matters similar or lesser than this [1]. More recently we've been supporting leftist elected candidates against right-wing coups. We don't care Bolivia has lithium. We get lithium from Australia. Third worldist leftists have many dumb ideas, but among them is the idea that wars are…

Which left wing governments has the US defended against right wing coups?

Re: Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium

#270

Post by kortilla » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 10:08 AM UTC

stouset wrote: post #251

kortilla wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Renewables used for extracting oil are renewables that can’t be used for other uses, and this shortfall will need to be made up for by… burning fossil fuels.

There is excess renewable generation in regions very frequently and coal can be burned rather than oil in the case fossil fuel is needed. You’re not making a coherent point.