Im sympathetic to the point that its fairly common but cant we overstate it’s abundance? As far as I know its not very evenly distributed and not everyone has good access to it.
Europe may've gotten the short end of the stick, but there's plenty
If need be plenty more could found in Europe.
If you process many things in the West, you can't leave toxic chemicals in pools any more, to leak into ground water and cause cancer and other problems for people. So processing costs are going to be way more expensive than in a place where it's still OK to process+pollute and therefore kill and maim your citizens to make money.
The West cannot compete with that.
Do you have actual evidence that lithium refining is a massively dirty industrial process that would cost multiple times more the West? Or are you speculating?
Tesla is building a lithium refining plant in Texas right now, they didn't seem to have massive environmental problems and delays so far.
In reality, the lead china has in these fields is more because of state investment policy and their drive to have an export car market. They saw the EV revolution as being able to make that happen, and it did.
Not every country is going to be self-sufficient in every natural resource, or be efficient producers of every product or service.
[1] https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/united-kingd...
I've no doubt that a sudden cataclysmic change to international trade would spike food prices and increase poverty-derived food insecurity. But I doubt there would be physical calorie shortages.
If there was a sudden change, there might be calorie shortages. However, I agree that if importing become more expensive over the longer run, or even if there was a quick change, but one that could be predicted years in advance, there would be no calorie shortages.
However, the same is true for lithium: the UK could mine its own lithium, if importing become infeasible. I am not sure though, if it would make commercial sense even then: you can make batteries (and other gadgets) without lithium, and for many applications you can make do without batteries at all.
Eg instead of solely driving electric cars with home-grown lithium batteries, on the margin I would expect more people to take the train.
Whether or not its paranoia is the issue so you can’t presuppose it. Also, there is no reason you cant be concerned about multiple dependencies at the same time. In this case the topic is lithium.
But generally speaking yes, there are 100s of junior lithium miners and all the big miners as well engaged in lithium extraction.
Clay is as of yet untouched in mass production of lithium with many companies wanting to exploit it.
Maybe most common is research on DLE, lithium extraction from brine where the brine is simply pumped back. This also exists in a deep brine variant where you pump water from super deep reservoirs.
The problem is the ev market is going gang busters and even established companies spend decades on getting new plants up and running.
Traditional brines are fine but need scale and time and still a surprising amount of process tuning.
Clays, lepidolite and alternative brine methods (DLE. Extractive beads, etc) are efficient media for extracting money from the public markets but that's about all.
Lithium comes in many forms, on a high level there are 3, hard rock, clay and brine.
Hard rock was initially common, when lithium was new and was mined in North Carolina. It turn out it was cheaper to produce lithium from brines in South America. This basically means pumping salty water from below the earth and using the sun to evaproate the water [2].
However since the battery revolution, Australia has been a leading miner of Spodumene [1]. This then shipped to China and turned into lithium chemicals.
Clay has not yet been exploited, but many are tying (like Tesla showed in their presentation). Another technology much talked about is Direct Lithium Extraction, that simple extracts lithium and releases slightly less salty water back into the environment.
From these mining operations two different chemicals are produced as input for battery cathode refining processes, lithium carbonate [3] and lithium hydroxide [4]. Different methods of mining and refining produce either of those. If my understanding is correct, most brine operations end up being carbonate and most hard rock operations end up as hydroxide. Often hydroxide is also produced from carbonate as a follow up process.
Depending on your cathode material and your process you need carbonate or hydroxide of specific quality. And because the material performance here is so important and the battery as a system is so sensitive, even the slight changes in source material and the process can have large impacts. Even the slight changes in source material and the process can have big effects.
So that means if you have a mine, you can't just mine do minimal refinement and then throw it on to the international standardized metals market the way it works for other materials. You need to build a highly sophisticated chemical processing facility that can handle your material specifically and produce high quality materials in a sufficient quantity that car makers can go threw the many rounds of testing that are required before a new source material ever makes it into a car.
Since the lithium industry is comparatively so small the necessary expertise to do these things is not at all common. A few companies can do it and that's not very many people. So getting a team together that can pull of a major project like that isn't easy.
Some media sources that do lot of good reporting:
Global Lithium Podcast - https://www.globallithium.net/podcast - Opinion-ed Insider and Interviews
The Limiting Factor - https://www.youtube.com/@thelimitingfactor/videos - Well researched videos on batteries but also lithium supply chains. Also some interviews with experts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodumene
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Lithium_...
- The world has enough lithium for our electric vehicles, decades into the future.
- The world is currently not producing enough of it to keep up with demand. This could be a major bottleneck this decade.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-v...
We are sitting on a huge pile of matter, the earth. We have enough of every mineral to last us more than just 'decades'. (Remember the 'peak phosphorus' panic a few years ago?)
Your second point is the more interesting question: what are the costs of extraction? Is available supply keeping up?
Grain of salt, but Jindalee claims 97-98% extraction rate on acid leeching cores at the McDermitt site on the northern caldera, on an inferred 21.5 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent. They're expecting 1400 ppm on 3 Bt. Cores from Lithium Americas's inferred 19 Mt LCE find at Thacker Pass on the southern caldera is extracting at 84% on acid leeching. (For context, Clayton Valley's brine project converts at 85%.)
Jindalee also claims they can also extract lithium phosphate from it and convert it to either carbonate or hydroxide. That's cool, but they don't really go into the cost of doing that, but I think the point is that it's supposedly a very flexible lode.
> Since the lithium industry is comparatively so small the necessary expertise to do these things is not at all common. A few companies can do it and that's not very many people. So getting a team together that can pull of a major project like that isn't easy.
GM and POSCO (the Korean cathode active material supplier for GM) are already working with Jindalee on feasibility of exploiting clay at scale, and GM already bought $650M of equity in Lithium Americas back in January for Thacker Pass. Probably know by February/March 2024 what the damage will be for processing clay, but Jindalee already expects to know whether they'll be shovels-in-ground by June 2024.
That is a very fast turnaround for something that hasn't really been done before at any scale, much less 30 Mt of LCE-scale. Which I think is also why this article is a bit more focused on whether they can learn enough from how this find came about to make more finds like it. They might not know how to extract clay for a while, but if they can learn how to find more similarly exploitable clay first, they can get more investment to catch up.
Inferring >30 Mt of LCE at 1400 ppm from just two sites in one caldera still seems like plenty of reason to fund figuring that out ASAP, though. Clayton Valley is like 6 Mt LCE; at this stage of the process, they were suggesting 1.3 Mt LCE at 900 ppm, on a feasibility target of 400 ppm. That was good enough for $700M in funding.
See: Preferred Lithium Extraction Process for McDermitt Project (24th March 2023)
https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20230324/pdf/45mzrdq...
It's part of the listing standards on mineral exchanges (such as the Canadian TSX, the Australian ASX, etc) that various levels of reports at various levels of accuracy be filed by independant third party mineral engineers.
The fascicle published above is a brief four pager outlining to investors where on track they are for now - expect within 12 months or so a meaty 400+ technical report rehasing the work that has gone into estimation and additional work outling scaled up extraction plans .. closely followed by an IPO | Prospectus to raise money for capital plant equipment for the project and potential spawning of a new sub company and listing.
My point is just that the additional found reserves don't change the situation all that much. Granted if they can find more location along this crater that has the same characteristics it could be simpler to replicate the mine and processing.
The author is focused on answering questions around Tesla's ramp up, but the explanations are pretty comprehensive and general.
And just 'subsidizing' things isn't a replacement for actually playing your energy grid and energy production.
The entire oil supply chain has no chance of ever becoming sustainable.
75% of all aluminum every smelted is still in use today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:text=....
We need to get lithium to that level before we make any more big, environmentally hazardous mines.
The lifecycle of the lithium that will come from this hypothetical mine is probably 20 years from now until the first time the material will be recycled.
The highly profitable recycling logistics will have been fully worked out a decade before it’s needed for a new mine’s output.
I'm proposing we put equal effort into both. My expectation is that we don't currently.
This also ignores the large number of those batteries that will be re-used in grid storage after being removed from a car, and eventually recycled.
>5% of lithium batteries are currently recycled
Whether something is currently recycled and whether it can be recycled are two different questions. For a long time, copper wasn't recycled very often. Then the price went up, and now it's very valuable trash.
Lithium is absolutely renewable. It may not be renewed, but it is renewable.
Let's put more effort into getting that 5% up to 100%, that's where the real effort and headlines should focus.
75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:text=....
We need to get lithium to that level
When you include the very low tank to wheels efficiency of an ICE vehicle, the overall efficiency is even worse.
Self-correction: I meant electrolysis, not hydrolysis
So I don't think this analogy holds up.
But we demonstrably get more energy out of the useful life of a solar panel than we have to put in to manufacture it.
But it might be necessary for 'green' planes, if the energy density of electric batteries does not improve enough.
Energy density is steadily increasing. Hydrogen will be a short-term solution for medium/long haul flights, but will eventually be replaced by batteries.
Either go with an electric battery, or go with a hydrocarbon like kerosene or methane or so.
I made the original comment contemporary batteries ain't good for electric planes. And I would not bet on batteries becoming good enough anytime soon.
But I don't think physics prohibits anything here?
Things that involve metal-air reactions are basically fuel cells and don't count. If you go down that route, you'll quickly find yourself working with some kind of chemical fuel. They will suddenly look a lot like existing airplanes in terms of basic concept.
Ok, that definition works.
I would have gone with 'whatever people (in the future or now) use for powering their phones, laptops and electric cars' is by definition 'conventional' at that point in time.
Use biological solar panels AKA plants.
Using solar to power a process to make a fuel before burning a fuel that at best (way less in reality) uses 2x more energy than just powering an electric motor directly is not sensical.
Neither are photons [1] nor individual gusts of wind. Lithium has a theoretically closeable cycle in batteries in a way fossil fuels do not.
[1] If you want to be pedantic, the useful energy in a particular photon.
We are still early in the development cycle of recycling technology, which means we'll be closer to 99.x% in a decade when the first large wave of EV batteries (from the last decade) could start getting close to End of Life.
Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem.
It’s also one of scale. We don’t yet have enough EV batteries being retired to merit the recycling infrastructure. China is just reaching the point where it does.
There are people who "throw away" the coupon by not returning the old battery, but hey that's on them.
Sure there is a theoretical closable cycle in batteries, but guess what, the same can be said for fossil fuels. Just use energy to turn air and water back into fuel, boom cycle closed.
What matters is not if something is 'renewable' but if its a strategically correct thing to do in regards to climate and energy security.
Calling lithium 'renwable' is ridiculous. Its literally just a fixed resource on our plant like iron or copper or whatever.
On geological time scales involving massive deposition of organic material.
In contrast, lithium can be recovered from batteries with an industrial shredder and chemical processing.
Fossil fuels are non-renewable in a trivial sense but are grossly different in a practical sense; treating them as equivalent is a borderline specious argument.
Sure, if you want to be painfully pedantic. If you want to have a real conversation, lithium batteries are absolutely "renewable" in the sense they can be recycled, and some studies have shown that they actually perform better after being recycled.
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-lithium-...
That seems like a silly conclusion. It might still be vital for your country's future to subsidise renewables, but it doesn't follow from the observation.
If China wants to spend taxpayer money to give foreigners cheaper renewables (or cheaper anything), that's nice of them, but doesn't mean anyone should imitate them.
If you have insufficient local workers for a task, and you are the US, you can always open the floodgates of (skilled) migration.
Also you don't need to subsidize renewables. That's a sore game of trying to pick winners and introducing extra bureaucracy. Instead you can hit the same policy goals simpler by taxing fossil fuels (or carbon emissions). Distribute the proceeds amongst all voters, if you want it to be revenue neutral.
With a tax, someone can react by just driving less (eg by moving closer to work) and benefiting from that choice. With a subsidy, you'd actively have to go and buy eg a subsidised electric car to benefit.
People are not fungible resources. You can’t simply turn a programmer from Google into a Lithium miner by paying more.
20 yrs is a very long time.
The issue is that much of the work ends up being overseas or all over the world. If you go to any mine site in the world, I guarantee you will find American trained Mining/Geophysics/etc engineers
Source - I went to the Colorado School of Mines and most of my friends and acquaintances from school work in those 2 industries.
The Canadian TSX is the global centre for listed public mining, Anglo-Australian mining companies dominate there.
No one is going to deny the Colorado School of mines their little corner of the pie but they haven't hit "much of" in a clear majority sense by a long shot.
The vast majority of new deposits are leveraging different technology to enrich yields or extract it from challenging environments. Seems like a common problem for resource extraction that gets solved with time and investment.
The end result of this is that it's harder to take advantage of economies of scale where you can have a handful of processing facilities working on a very specific type of ore.
Here is a recent article about this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/business/australia-lithiu...
So in oil its very worth it to build the right refining capacity for large resources and there are tons and tons of experienced people to do those things.
There are some domestic companies further along in the process. But existing sources like South American brine and Australian hard rock will continue to be a huge part of the market.
The US companies that originally mined in North Carolina are still around on the processing side.
So its not really clear if having the mining domestically makes much of a difference. China is refining mostly things from Australia.
Tesla is setting up a huge lithium refining factory on US soil but most of the material won't be mined in the US.
But again, there was already plenty of lithium in the US, this discovery changes nothing. The US already has competent lithium companies.
The US already has good relationship with South America and Australia where the resources are coming from. But currently 90%+ of refining is in China.
Controlling the 'raw' resources is mostly uninteresting in this case.
Same here, it's not like there is big chunks of Lithium just waiting to be picked up. It's a small percentage of dirt, and you need to process huge amounts of that dirt to extract it. That processing takes resources. Those resources are the limiting factor, not the raw ore. In the case of aluminum its electricity. In the case of lithium I gather it's also energy (to do the heating) and sulfuric acid, and the associated containment snd cleanup of such.
Source: "After the ore is mined, it is crushed and roasted at 2012°F (1100°C). It is then cooled to 140°F (65°C), milled and roasted again, this time with sulfuric acid, at 482°F (250°C), a process known as acid leaching."
https://www.sttsystems.com/industries/lithium-extraction/#:~....
If it could be as simple as “we produced this much aluminium from all the excess energy we had last summer! Go use it in residential construction, shelters, tools, whatever, heck even mounts for further more solar panels”
Or ceramic cladding for an iron pole, depending.
Either way it's a rebuild, not a restart.
I love that way of describing it.
Float glass plants work by literally floating a thin sheet of molten glass on top of a giant tank of liquid tin. They have a swimming pool of liquid tin, float molten glass on top, and then push it along the tank length wise.
The glass and tin is then gradually cooled until the glass is solidified. It's then cut into pieces, cooled and stacked.
If the thing suddenly stops, or there is a hiccup of some kind, the thermal expansion of the glass, along with its extreme hardness (lack if strength) it will just shatter the whole mile long sheet of glass. My understanding is that it takes the better part of a year to recover from something like this.
In aluminum, its basically electroplating. They basically electroplate the aluminum out of the ore onto the ingots. My understanding is that takes a few weeks to a month to recover from a similar incident.
About 75% of all aluminum ever produced is currently is use, because we're so good at recycling it.
We need to get lithium from 5 to 75%
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:text=....
As long as you store your old batteries (and other lithium containing gadgets), I shouldn't make too much of a difference if you recycle them now or in ten years?
In landfills?
This brings up an aside I've been wondering about for years, when are we going to start mining our old landfills?
You could probably just stick them in a warehouse? Or a specialised landfill that only keeps electronics or batteries. (Most just to keep the overall volume down, so it's more economical to make whatever special arrangements you need to keep everything safe enough.)
No, absolutely not. Aluminum refining, like all industrial processes at scale, takes a long time to get going and needs to run (hence be fed electricity) continuously, not just whenever the wind feels like blowing.
While it is an excellent business opportunity for electricity that is cheap because it is renewable- and why Canada produces more refined aluminum than any other Western country thanks to its electric generation being overwhelmingly renewable for the entire time it's even had a grid- it's not something you can turn on and off whenever you want and not a good candidate to burn off excess power ("just not using as much naturally-pumped stored power" is not an "excess" of power by definition).
The problem I’ve always seen with this sort of plan is that the refinery is extremely expensive and so you don’t want it idle; it’s cheaper to overbuild solar than to turn off your refinery for 25% of the day. But interested if this applies here, maybe the energy-intensive bits can be made cheaply?
https://aluminiuminsider.com/trimet-aluminium-betting-enpots...
> The “virtual battery” concept relies on installing adjustable heat exchangers that can maintain the energy balance in each electrolysis cell irrespective of shifting power inputs. Since aluminium production requires a constant energy supply, any fluctuation could have heavy consequences for the molten metal. The technology also ensures that grid power fluctuations do not affect the magnetic fields in the electrolysis cells.
This seems to be solving the even-harder problem of handling on-demand/dynamic fluctuations rather than planning for a diurnal cycle. I wonder if there is scope to use a heat reservoir (molten salt or similar) as a buffer for these sorts of process; basically if you need to dump heat into a process perhaps you can shift the heat production but leave the process itself unchanged.
Amusingly I was reading the wrong Wikipedia last night and it’s mentioned right there too:
> Particularly in Australia these smelters are used to control electrical network demand, and as a result power is supplied to the smelter at a very low price. However power must not be interrupted for more than 4–5 hours, since the pots have to be repaired at significant cost if the liquid metal solidifies.
How it works: https://enpot.com/assets/pdfs/enpot-how-it-works.pdf
Energy modulation: https://enpot.com/assets/pdfs/Enpot-Energy-Modulation-of-Alu...
First was operational since 2019. If you push past the “virtual battery” marketing nonsense, a summary of the tech is… they modulate the cooling fans for closed loop thermal regulation, regardless of processing rate (+/- 20% long, 30% short term).
Talk about low hanging fruit.
As we get to higher total renewable contribution, presumably we’d see a more dramatic price difference in energy at different time of day.
This tech suggests to me that, as you say, there is low-hanging fruit that could be harvested, and which perhaps isn’t cost-effective yet with a small diurnal energy cost-delta, but with a higher peak-to-trough cost difference might become viable to extract.
It’s worth noting here that seasonal variations seem harder to deal with, and varying the energy intensity of industrial processes doesn’t seem helpful for that issue due to capex/utilization concerns.
And for diurnal fluctuations, batteries are actually not too expensive these days.
The idea that we’ll do industrial chemistry with intermittent energy surpluses is unrealistic unless we are okay with yield per unit of energy being very poor relative to continuous processes.
Have a read about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akosombo_Dam
Then watch this documentary on the devastating effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(British_TV_se...
As Wikipedia says about the dam:
"The Ghana government was compelled, by contract, to pay for over 50% of the cost of Akosombo's construction, but the country was allowed only 20% of the power generated."
- Yes, it has had a severe impact on the ecosystem, and also on agriculture.
- Yes, Ghana itself only gets about 20% of the power generated by the dam (or apparently a bit more in recent times).
- OTOH, the dam gives Ghana access to at least some power – much more in fact than what's available to any of its neighboring countries. I have heard people say that this is one of the major reasons for Ghana's relative economic & political stability.
It's exactly the opposite. The pots[1] in the smelter get their lifetime reduced if they have to be restarted, and if restarted multiple times that can be quite significant[2]. They can survive without power for a few hours, but they freeze over after a day or so which leads to the most damage.
As such they really want stable and cheap electricity, like hydro.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting#Layout_of_a...
[2]: https://aluminiumtoday.com/content-images/news/Oyeweb.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/us/politics/american-comp...
You can also run electric furnaces intermittently because they are inherently a batch process.
Sibling comment mentions, correctly, that these things need to be running at full utilization for a long time to make sense. So, you'd need batteries to smooth wind or solar, which is still economical (and will become increasingly so).
That article snippet doesn't fully do it justice. They sell electricity to aluminum smelters at 1/4th the price of the EU, and a surprisingly large portion of their total energy consumption is industrial.
Iceland has done it correctly, though, in that in order to tap into their natural resources, you need to be an Icelandic company investing in Iceland. Some want to build a cable to Iceland to help the European electricity market, even though it's never been done at that length before. Some in Iceland are (rightly!) worried that would increase demand for hydropower and further industrialize Iceland, etc.
> ... with China being responsible for the refining of 90% of REEs and 60-70% of lithium and cobalt.
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-technology-perspectives-2...
Lithium and lithium batteries are a critical resource. If the US can mine the lithium, refine it, and turn it into batteries all domestically, that has big geopolitical implications.
Are we sure US can anymore? Last I checked we couldn’t build a high speed rail despite spending billions of dollars and lots of time. I would not be so optimistic. Even for things as crucial as defense supply chain we can’t seem to figure out how to build things at scale.
Lithium mining is more like the shale oil boom, when the US went from an net importer to a net exporter of fossil fuels, environmental damage be damned.
When it's for private industry's profit, the US is quite competent at eliminating any oversight of environmental and societal concerns.
https://www.consumerreports.org/water-contamination/how-frac...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/frack...
https://www.propublica.org/article/scientific-study-links-fl...
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/fracking-oil-gas...
Etc etc
Japan is not China either, yet Japan has little trouble building new bullet trains. We're building a new maglev train right now between Tokyo and Nagoya which should be finished before the decade is over, and 90% of the route is underground.
The US just doesn't really want to build high speed rail.
Yes, the US can lose lots of money building a lithium industry. But what would be the point?
Why is corn vital to the national interest? And what's the national interest you want to protect by subsidising lithium?
Most of those 'national interest' justifications are pretty flimsy, and there's almost always a better and more targeted approach to protecting the stated national interest than the subsidies and protectionism they are used to justify.
Details obviously depend on the specific case. But have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendshoring for some inspiration.
Although apparently Australia is a big lithium producer so it must be possible to do in an environmentally conscious way. Or Australia's lithium mines have managed to fly under the radar of the environmentalists. It looks like Australia's lithium deposits are unusual being hard rock deposits, and we have it processed in China because I assume that part of the process is illegal in Australia.
Sadly, both don't seem to be true. Australia's lithium mining has a higher carbon footprint than others (3.4): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...
We has some of the highest CO2 emissions per capita, so it's not much of a surprise we are doing this inefficiently too.
That's a large assumption to make without any investigation.
Lithium has been a trendy commodity for years. If the US doesn't have a lot of active lithium mines - which it does not - it is going to be because of legislative impediments. Probably environmental ones. There aren't a lot of other reasons. It is common for environmental restrictions as the root cause of mines not being started, particularly in lithium from what I gathered.
You're not going to get a citation, this is literally just stuff I happened to know quite well a few years ago.
Historically, lithium was not interesting to mine at scale until the invention of lithium batteries thirty years ago. And only about ten years ago we figured out that we needed a lot of lithium to power things like cars, trucks, planes and electricity grids.
We've only been looking for lithium for a relatively short amount of time. Before we started looking, it was a relatively low value by product of mining other stuff. There's this perception that we have to go to places like Bolivia, Australia, etc. because that's where the known, easy to access deposits are. But as this article shows, there are probably loads of other places that might have rich lithium deposits.
The market for refining lithium is basically expanding at the pace we can build refineries. It's apparently a big reason Tesla chose to build their own refinery in Texas because the rest of the industry was not moving quick enough. Supplying lithium to the refinery isn't the issue. There's plenty of it. And if you start looking, you'll find some more. Rich deposits like this are of course nice and rare. The high concentration of lithium means extracting it is relatively cheap. But you can get it out of ocean water, there are natural brines in various places that have it, clay and rock deposits all over the place. By mass, it's one of the more common elements on this planet.
Rather than being used to bail out Banks & Airlines...and in America, Churches apparently.
If it were up to me, I wouldn't just ban plastic straws. I'd ban almost all disposable packaging. Go to the supermarket, buy products and get them in sturdy plastic containers that you pay a deposit on. The next time you return you drop them back where they're cleaned for reuse at the location. Products like say a Coke are delivered in bulk format to the supermarket and dispensed into the relevant container at the location.
After moving to the UK (from NZ), it's fucking disgusting how I go to the supermarket and _everything_ is in a disposable plastic container with a "sorry we don't recycle that yet" plastic film over _everything_. And the UK isn't even the worst place for this behaviour.
We really are going to kill our planet at this point.
I’m a bit on the fence about whether Zeihan is a crank or a prophet (and there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground), but serious people pay green money to have him speak. If he’s right, the difference between “expensive lithium even amortized” and “unreliable lithium at best even if someone has a gun to your head” is existential.
However lithium operates more like a advanced chemical then a base metal. Each mine lithium mine is different and has to be separately qualified for each battery manufactures/car company.
There are very, very few companies who have actually managed to produce battery grade lithium and many, many company who have been struggling for years to achieve it.
We simply don't have a lithium problem, what is lacking is the expertise to actually bring deposits like this to use.