By the time any of these mines or refineries come online, lithium ion batteries will be being replaced by sodium ion for the larger EV and storage batteries. Besides that, America hardly manufactures phones or laptops.
Well, they could always rely on their good friend and partner China to never gate keep the minerals they possess 🤔…oh wait.
Oh cool so more lithium than they k ow what do do with. What’s next laws stating everyone has to own at least 100 phones and 50 laptops?
What’s next? Hopefully domestic-component grid storage batteries and EV batteries for greatly reduced cost and less reliance on China.
Any serious effort towards a “green” future is going to require better home and vehicular energy generation and storage. We need gridscale batteries and EV batteries, cheaply, now.
Greatly reduced cost
We’re lucky if energy costs stay the same
Cheaply
Ha ha, its made in the US, selling cheaply means less profits.
And lithium batteries are already obsolete sodium ion battery can last thousands of charge cycles
Um, so can lithium. And lithium has a much higher energy density.
Not really there’s a reason lithium is still used. Other battery chemistries have other drawbacks beyond longevity.
As far as I’m aware, lithium still isn’t beat on energy density.
Yeah and sodium ion batteries aren’t solid state yet either I don’t think.
They actually are.
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/bluetti-sodium-ion-portable-power-station/
Not yet at price parity with Lithium Ion, if you go by total charge capacity, and they are heavier and larger per watt hout charge capacity…
… but they can cycle a considerablely greater number of times, they have longer expected lifespans, work better in cold weather, can charge and discharge faster.
EDIT
Derp, ok, the above isn’t solid state… but it is a viable product, without being solid state.
Given the rate of adoption and research going into sodium ion related tech, solid state sodium ion may be a thing in under two years… a hell of a lot of people are actively working on solving basically assembly line and industrial use specific problems right now.
If they can scale I could imagine them making good battery arrays. The largest batteries in the world are not a chemical batteries currently however. Think 20-40 GWh vs 400 MWh (at a cursory search) being the largest current chemical battery arrays. Pumped storage plants can’t be built everywhere, and are massively huge infrastructure projects, but as we switch more and more to solar energy we are going to need to make it through the nights somehow. They currently are often used to provide grid stability by discharging during peak hours, and buying cheap power to pump water back up during peak production/lowest demand when electricity is cheapest. This works especially well already with many renewables, including wind farms when you don’t have control over production. If they can build sodium ion battery arrays cheaply enough though, pumped storage plants could maybe just be obsoleted.
I would think sodium ion would particularly make sense in an EV, or a hybrid.
Even if they aren’t as energy dense, per weight and volume… the longevity, the rechargability, the cold weather effectiveness.
That addresses… so many of the problems that EVs as depreciating assets face, and it makes EVs make sense in areas that are currently too cold too often for them to make sense.
A sensible world could make this work so well with a decent charging network.
I have a running joke I tell my friends that one day, the rich will flatten mountains, so the only way to see their natural wonder will be in VR. That’s when they will become mainstream. Not because they offer some new technological advancement, but because they’ve managed to capture the spaces we use to get away.
There’s a video clip of a song in French with a similar concept from 2003. A child is frolicking and playing in nature until we discover that it’s all synthetic, her time is up, and other children are lining up for their time in “nature” too. Mickey 3D - Respire on YouTube.
From a description of the song on Wikipedia:
The text of the song addresses a “kid” to alert him about the state of the world that adults will leave to him. The first part of the song deals with the story of humans’ arrival on Earth and their disturbance of the whole balance of nature. The second part imagines the future of people if they continue to do so (referring to the disappearance of natural resources, animals and even genetic modification because of pollution) and how the “kid” will try to explain to his grandchildren why he did nothing to prevent it. The third part speaks about the state of slavery, misery, and shame of the human species as well as the unpredictability of its future.
They already take the tops off mountains in Appalachia because it’s more efficient to just straight up delete a mountain to get coal than to dig into it for it
this style of mining also requires fewer operators than a deep mine. it has had deeply devestating consequences to me and my neighbors
Well here in america we already have flattened mountains. And also maybe bombed our own citizens who felt some sorta way about it.
Wild, but this is already happening - Tuvalu is being “preserved” in vr as it’s going to be one of the first island nations wiped out by climate change.
I have a feeling they’ll have a much harder time pushing through mining operations in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire than they did in West VA. This will be received like proposals of mining the great lakes would in MI or WI, and many of the residents (Boston area professors) have the resources and energy to resist it.
Pennsylvania which has a lot of lithium that can be extracted without mining. Brine from fracking can be a major source. Lithium extraction from fracking brine can be relatively sustainable considering fracking is already being done.
For now.
Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all have different groups that individually disagree with mining once protected wilderness. The only selection of people pushing for this would be the rich who want the money.
I would not fuck with rights of New Hampshire. They will come after you. Never met one who wasn’t a bit off.
It’s like the push to deforest the western states. You’ll be surprised by the weird alliances that pop up when billionaires show up in the backyard. Wish we could find common ground broadly, but I guess I’ll take what I can get.
When the Civil War was breaking out and the governor of Vermont called for the state to raise $500k to support the war effort, the legislature passed a bill to raise a full million.
When they were called upon to send one regiment of men to fight, they organized seven.
Vermont, also, would not be a good state with which to openly fuck.
I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all, because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.
–Calvin Coolidge
They may be a bunch of hippie hillbillies, but they’re the most chaotic good state. They fought in the revolutionary war and then didn’t join the union for a while
Didn’t they just remove the mining protection from the BWCA?
Yep and they’re working on removing protections for other federal land which I have little doubt they’re accomplish given it was the fed previously protecting it. I’m just saying I think it will be difficult to actually implement projects in some places due to local opposition combined with the energy and resources to sustain that opposition.
Not a good thing overall btw, by my figuring it just means under-resourced regions will continue to shoulder the bulk of industrial waste and pollution because they’ll be the least equipped to resist. Tale as old as time.
Im a Canadian geologist so I obviously dont have any personal stake in this but I do want to share my thoughts.
I think anti-mining sentiment is understandable in most places but not always justifiable. Lithium mining is absolutely required to transition from fossil fuels. Unless the number of cars on the road is greatly reduced, replacing them with BEVs will require significant amounts of lithium or improvements to Na ion batteries. There is not enough lithium available to get by just on recycling.
The question then becomes: where should this lithium come from? If it is not mined in western countries like USA or Canada, it will be mined by China or developing countries. In this comparison, who has better environmental regulations? Which countries have more human rights abuse?
If we decide that we can mine these deposits in the west, there is still a question about where they are mined. Do we extract lithium from basinal brines? My understanding is that these are generally more environmentally risky than extraction from pegmatites (the deposit type in New England).
The final question becomes, which communities will have to accept this mining? In Canada, most of the time it is indigenous communities that suffer most of the negative impacts of mining. There are many benefits to the communities too (usually), but the indigenous communities do not have nearly as much political sway as say rich cottage owners might, so their preferences and desires often get steamrolled by government in the name of “progress”.
The unfortunate reality is that if we want to get rid of fossil fuels, we need to do a lot more mining and extraction or come up with some serious technological and societal innovation. In a globalized economy, saying that you dont want mining near your home means that you want some other people to deal with the potentially negative consequences of it. I am not saying that we need to allow all mining everywhere, but these are important ethical considerations that we have to make when talking about how we want society to progress.
Sorry for the rant.
Sorry for the rant.
Nuanced point is not a rant!
This is a beautiful description of why the obvious move here is “fewer cars, way better public transit.”
Hard agree from me. Cars are such an inefficient use of resources its crazy. If I had it my way we would all get around by train, tram, or bike.
It’s also why the Department of Energy department EERE (Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy) was just renamed to CMEI (Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation)
At the same time the DoE lab NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) was renamed to NLR (National Lab of the Rockies)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Energy_Efficiency_and_Renewable_Energy
National Lab of the Rockets…? An acronym that sounds like it was made by a grade schooler. Which checks out, if we’re being honest.
Rockies. As in the Rocky Mountains.
Still stupid.
Original information source, not the tweet: https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/lithium-eastern-states-could-replace-imports-a-century-or-more
There is a very important sentence all the way at the end:
The USGS did not assess what amount would be economically recoverable.
Where will it get refined?
Well uh, China.
Untill they figure out that you can’t just cram raw ore into a battery or computer.
ETA on them figuring that out … 2-3 years?
Oh right, and then you actually have to build the refineries.
I’m goin with ‘within the next 2 years’, being said for approximately 8 years.
In America rich people must profit and everyone else must suffer. Everything is for sale.
What bullshit. The usa already has extensive lithium deposits. It’s not a question of supply, it has always been a question of how much it costs to mine it. Lengthy permitting processes, environmental concerns, high costs, and technological challenges.
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/white-gold-mapping-u-s-lithium-mines/
dont forget about refining, the us has basically no refining capacity
Lengthy permitting processes, environmental concerns
Those two don’t matter to the current administration.
Substitute those by corrupt assigning of contracts and public funds and pipedream “AI will extract Lithium for us” snake oil salespeople.
Tell that to the states where the mines are located. Because they will laugh themself silly.
No one has ever cared about the mountain folks :(
Until they shart shooting. I don’t know a single person in Maine that wants Plumbago mined
LOL that’s ridiculous campism.
Both sides of your uniparty are paid and work for the same companies.You have to be seriously delusional to not see the difference between the president routinely ignoring laws and all the other ones that at least pretended to want to follow them
That’s besides the point.
The infantile “but they do it much harder” is the same as with the aiding of zio genociders.
It doesn’t matter that there is a difference, but that both sides have the same policy.
It only matters to the dogmatic campists.
But I don’t expect anything better from the idiot country.
It has never been different and they don’t learn.
As long as they fuck up their own shithole for once I’m OK with it.Yeah, people don’t like the nuance of “both parties are functionally the same in some contexts, and different in others.” Like sure, it’s definitely better to steer the country toward the lesser of two evils when it’s the 11th hour and all you can do is use your single vote to make a minor change in the presidential election, but when we’re here in the space between, we need to be working much harder to actually make some real change.
Get some people in at the local level who actually care about their own integrity and the environment, and nurture them through the decades in more local and state elections until they finally get to that presidential campaign level. Then we can make some real change with that vote. Until that happens, yeah, both sides are going to allow the environment to get worse, even if one does it more egregiously.
Or we can topple the regime right now, but that’s a lot of work and sacrifice that I’m losing faith in our ability to scrounge up at the moment.
Well I know it’ s not going to happen.
You at least know how it is but also acknowledge not many people want to do the effort.
So again, sorry for the very few exceptions but that country deserves what it gets
Well that sucks. That whole area of the country is fucking gorgeous. Guess I gotta get back there soon one last time
And when the new batteries become standard, then what? Ruined mountains for nothing.
Visit national parks while you can.
Just like always USA fighting yesterday war. Lithium is already on the way out.
I would be extremely disappointed in the species if we’re still using lithium batteries in 328 years time. Not that I actually believe that estimate.
