Re:Thailand finds 14.8M tonnes of lithium
by chefandy on Friday January 19, 2024 @07:46PM
(#39063437)
Roughly what how much volume would 15m tons of pegmatite take up? I have no intuitive sense of scale with these things.
Re:Thailand finds 14.8M tonnes of lithium
by Jensson on Saturday January 20, 2024 @02:05AM
(#39065374)
Rocks tend to be 5-10x denser than water, so assume 2 million cube meters. That is just 2 square kilometers 1 meter high, so not mountains or so. As a comparison, for a large iron mine they dig up many billions of tons of rock, and that is for very cheap iron, so you wouldn't need a very large operation to dig this up.
Re:Thailand finds 14.8M tonnes of lithium
by chefandy on Monday January 22, 2024 @11:09AM
(#39091036)
Useful tool to reason about this. Thanks!
Re:Thailand finds 14.8M tonnes of lithium
by hackernewds on Saturday January 20, 2024 @01:54AM
(#39065330)
curious how you know all this info, if you can share to the level you feel comfortable
First off it looks like they identified 15M tonnes of lithium hosting rock (pegmatite) which has a grade of 0.4% of lithium in the form of spodumene (which then needs ot be processed to extract the lithium out of).
But in general, how it works is they drill a bunch of holes in the ground and analyse the cores. From that that interpolate the size/shape of the ore body and calculate an estimate of size.
The more holes they drill the greater the confidence.
There is a lot of 'art' to this science