[simondotau]

It might seem that way today, but scaling up the EV adoption looks very different to scaling up fossil fuel consumption. It won’t be long before demand for battery minerals is mostly satisfied by recycling — and the need for ongoing mining of virgin material is mostly eliminated.

Furthermore, lithium is an extremely abundant mineral. It's available pretty much everywhere, including the deserts of Nevada and Australia. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous.

[Retric]

Yes, Lithium is roughly as abundant in earths crust as Lead. A normal car’s lead acid battery has ~9kg of Lead, while a 100kWh battery pack needs ~16kg of Lithium which currently costs around 1,100$.

It’s not that Lithium is actually going to be in short supply, it simply collects in different areas.

[pkphilip]

The difference is that it takes very little lead to make a lead acid battery because the entire car is not powered only by that battery.. that is not the case with EVs. It is estimated that it takes 500,000lbs of ore needs to be mined to get enough material for a single EV car's battery

[celtain]

https://qz.com/2156463/why-elon-musk-wants-tesla-to-start-mi...

>the average electric vehicle battery requires around 10 kg of [lithium]. In turn, 5.3 tons of lithium carbonate ore yield one ton of lithium

This would suggest that 53kg of ore would be enough to provide one car's worth of lithium.

[RugnirViking]

thats wild, the idea you could fairly easily lift the ore needed to make a lithium battery. I thought electric cars were significantly heavier than ICE cars because of the battery? maybe its other minerals that make up the rest of the battery?

[simondotau]

Yes, the bulk of the weight are metals like nickel and manganese. Lithium is a critical component but isn’t the dominant component of the battery’s mass.

[cantaloupe]

Do you have a source for that estimate? Seems truly absurd. I found a source that you are perhaps misquoting: 400,000 gallons of water are used produce 1 ton of lithium from brine [1]. It also apparently takes 8 kilograms for an EV battery [2]. So 3500 gallons per vehicle.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mining-lithium-for...

[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...

[plantain]

You don't have to make lithium from brine. In Australia it's mined out of the rock, it's only South America that it's from brine.

[Sponge5]

Brines are being used in Silver Peak, NV. [1]

[1]: https://desertfog.org/aerial-of-silver-peak-nev-lithium-mini...]

[Fatnino]

The vast majority of lead used today is recycled. The rest is mined incidentally while extracting silver.

I could see this happening for lithium also. Get the quantity in global circulation to the level we need and then live off that for the future.

[mburee]

The volume of a kg of lead and lithium is also just vastly different

[elevaet]

In cas anyone else was curious, I just looked it up: Lead has about 21.3x the density of lithium.

[xhevahir]

I don't know. There are lots of other places where you can get tin and zinc and so on, but that hasn't stopped people from wrecking lots of Bolivia in order to mine them. If the demand is there some poor and/or corrupt countries are probably going to supply the metals regardless of the risks to the environment.

[simondotau]

Completely agree. My point is only that it isn’t necessary. And frankly it should be up to governments to provide leadership when there is a stark ethical choice that’s so many steps removed from consumer choice.

[sbaiddn]

Abundance doesnt mean its easy or clean to mine. Al is one the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust, but extracting it is brutally destructive.

Now, you can say the same thing for oil. Sure. But EVs are bad for the environment and its not obvious they're even a net good.

[shiftpgdn]

Destructive extraction of lithium is completely a myth. There is currently enough lithium in Texas oil wells that were capped because they were full of salt water that’s easily extracted and evap pooled to satisfy global lithium demand for 100 years.

[sbaiddn]

Im skeptical, so Ill need a reference, but consider:

- You're commenting on a thread about a collapsing water table due to Li extraction.

- Li's price has risen and projected to continue to do so for quite some time.

- You post that Li extraction is cheap, clean and widely available in TX (perhaps the most covetous state of the Union?). Money is literally in a capped oil well and Texans are too lazy to pick it up.

Perhaps Li isn't as easy and clean to extract as you were led to believe?

[simondotau]

The limiting factor on lithium isn't raw material availability or extraction, it's refinement. Approximately 80% of the world's lithium refinery capacity is located in China. Nobody is refining lithium at scale in North America, so I'd say it's obvious why nobody's rushing to pay American-level salaries to suck it out of wells in Texas.

Tesla has expressed interest in developing a lithium refinery in Texas, so we might see some hoses drinking from those old wells soon enough.

[shiftpgdn]

https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/customers/piedmont-lithium-cho...

Brine has to be pumped to evap pools and then refined.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

From your article.

>Piedmont Lithium .. will establish a lithium hydroxide processing, refining and manufacturing facility in Southeast Tennessee

I don't think Piedmont is getting into the ore, or brine extraction. They are processing the salts into hydroxide.

Funny enough, soon after this announcement, elon announced his intention to do the same with Tesla.

[scythe]

We extract way, way more aluminum than we ever will — or could — lithium. Annual aluminum production is about 64 million tons. Total lithium resources — the sum of all known economically viable deposits — are 86 million tons.

>its not obvious they're even a net good.

It is extremely obvious. Even if the relevant region of the Andes is completely desertified (which I would prefer not happen) the scale of impact is a pittance next to global warming.

[wiredfool]

That's about the numbers that I've seen - https://climateminerals.org/data-snapshot/lithium (disclaimer, I worked on this app)

For the most part, Countries are currently mining/producing about 1% of their reserves per year (roughly), and that's a fraction of the resources (which is the 86 MT number).

From the data though -- Reserves seem to be climbing over time, so while there is a dramatic uptick in lithium mining, it doesn't seem like we've hit peak reserve/resources yet.

[sbaiddn]

"Even if the relevant region of the Andes is completely desertified (which I would prefer not happen)"

My dad comes from that region so I really appreciate that you'd rather the area not become a desert just so some SV bro can virtue signal with a Tesla.

Personally, Id rather Californians used their own water to extract their own Li to power their own Teslas.

As to the obviousness of the net good, actually it isn't. Thats why studies are done. Even if it's a net environmental benefit (comparing different types of pollution is a massive value judgement, btw) it doesn't follow its ethically a benefit for the reason outlines above - why should by father's family become environmental refugees?

[scythe]

>As to the obviousness of the net good, actually it isn't.

You're comparing losing a small part of the Andes to half the Mediterranean basin (desertification), a third of the Amazon, the whole world's coastline below 2 meters AMSL, and we don't even know what to expect from the effects of heat stress on wildlife, but we can expect it to kill plenty of people directly. And that's just what I can fit in a sentence.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-what-climate-models-te...

Damage to the environment of the subtropical Andes is probably avoidable and should be avoided. There are other ways to get lithium. There are also alternatives to evaporation ponds that could let you put water back in the ground. But it's annoying when everyone thinks their pet issue is as important as the worst environmental threat humanity has faced in recorded history.

[Victerius]

> Furthermore, lithium is an extremely abundant mineral. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous.

1880 AD: Furthermore, oil is an extremely abundant resource. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous.

142 years later: Look how they massacred my boy

[smileysteve]

16kg of lithium lasts ~2000 (*200 miles) recharges and can be recycled into a new battery pack with little lithium loss and a some energy input.

16kg of gasoline lasts 1 "cycle" for 18-45 miles. The output requires significant energy input to capture and convert the co2 and H2O back into a fuel.

[lostlogin]

Are you saying you get 18-45 miles from 16kgs of gasoline? If so, that’s amazingly bad.

[smileysteve]

Good call-out, multiply by 4

[jjoonathan]

EVs don't work by burning lithium into the atmosphere.

[simondotau]

Equating a single-use combustion fuel with the metals/minerals in a reusable and very highly recyclable battery is ridiculous.