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.