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A comment on Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion Coming Soon. Parent comment

Re:Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion ... by winter_blue on Saturday April 06, 2019 @01:54PM (#19592033)
It's probably down to the labor cost of smelting. Unskilled labor is prohibitively expensive in Australia compared to China. If they manage to fully automate smelting, end to end, I don't see why the smelting wouldn't be done locally in Australia.
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Re:Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion ... by vbezhenar on Saturday April 06, 2019 @02:03PM (#19592102)
You have an assumption that automatics is always cheaper than human labor. This is not obvious to me. You can have humans working 8 hour/day for as cheap as $100/month in some poor regions. And automatics still require R&D, service, electricity.
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Re:Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion ... by jcampbell1 on Saturday April 06, 2019 @02:31PM (#19592247)
I don't think Australia has much metallurgical coal. Steel making is dirty, though Australia has plenty of places to make steel where it wouldn't cause a serious local air quality problem.
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Re:Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion ... by dredmorbius on Saturday April 06, 2019 @02:38PM (#19592288)
Australia does have a lot of coal, also exported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia

Metallurgical coal tends to be biuminous, which AU has much of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgical_coal Also:

http://minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/181012%20Commodit...

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Re:Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion ... by andy_ppp on Saturday April 06, 2019 @05:16PM (#19593048)
They export the coal and the iron ore which I thought was super weird, different sides of the country but still...
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Re:Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion ... by throwaway2048 on Sunday April 07, 2019 @12:01AM (#19594756)
China also massively subsidizes its steel industry, and produces it below cost.
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