Re:Thailand finds 14.8M tonnes of lithium
by defrost on Sunday January 21, 2024 @12:12AM
(#39075779)
Dull speculation is more on the nail.
Do you know how many billions of dollars worth of platinum group elements (platinum; Pt, palladium; Pd and rhodium; Rh) are literally lying on the roads and roadsides of G20 countries?
As dust from in use catalytic converters it's substantial. And unrecovered.
There's a problem with economic feasibilty - extraction costs (digging up and processing every road surface and road side) are prohibitive - greater than the value of the material.
From your [2]
The advance is still not likely cheap enough to compete with mining lithium on land,
In a nutshell this is still very much the issue with mining seawater for Lithium, Uranium, etc.
The 0.2 parts per million (PPM) is a problem, a literal ceiling on diminishing returns, the more you extract the less remains and it's tricky to keep processed seawater from mixing back with unprocessed.
Do you know how many billions of dollars worth of platinum group elements (platinum; Pt, palladium; Pd and rhodium; Rh) are literally lying on the roads and roadsides of G20 countries?
As dust from in use catalytic converters it's substantial. And unrecovered.
There's a problem with economic feasibilty - extraction costs (digging up and processing every road surface and road side) are prohibitive - greater than the value of the material.
From your [2]
In a nutshell this is still very much the issue with mining seawater for Lithium, Uranium, etc.The 0.2 parts per million (PPM) is a problem, a literal ceiling on diminishing returns, the more you extract the less remains and it's tricky to keep processed seawater from mixing back with unprocessed.