U.S. Gearing Up To Become World's Supplier Of Lithium

"It is estimated that there’s about 63 kg of lithium in a 70 kWh Tesla Model S battery pack"

Still not a lot if we're going to mandate millions of electric cars per year.

The world may not have enough lithium to go all electric on cars and trucks, much less utility storage to back up wind and solar for days and weeks.

They say its 10x the current demand, and that's just from the Salton Sea plant. USGS has identified potentially 1000s of extraction sites: "DLE could be a game-changing extraction method, potentially delivering 10 times the current U.S. lithium demand from California’s Salton Sea known geothermal area alone."

They already have a dozen geothermal power generating plants on the Salton Sea, so they're already 3/4 of the way to DLE there: The Salton Sea sits on the seismically active San Andreas Fault. Molten rock heats the underground water beneath the lakebed into a pressurized brine as hot as 500 degrees Fahrenheit. The brine is already used in nearly a dozen geothermal power plants to create electricity, and these same facilities can serve as an important part of DLE development.

They say lithium is "vast" and they really mean it.

You just stick to your obsessing over CMEs.

And the price is going to drop like a rock. Compare the brine extraction methodology to conventional mining practices with all its labor, heavy equipment, equipment operators, and truck train transport to the end users.

Or skyrocket if demand is huge.

We could have OLEC, like OPEC, once enough doofuss politicians mandate electric everything.

Invest in emergency generator companies.

What, each? Hardly. 24 ktons (~24 million kg) is enough for 3 million BEVs with 8 kg per car. That's not the full amount required long term, but it's a good start!

There are no knowledgeable people who doubt there is enough lithium to make all the BEVs we wish. The only issue we have concern about is how rapidly we can develop those resources. I believe lithium is 33rd most abundant element on the Earth. The problem is only that it is not concentrated much. However, we have the technology. We just need to ramp up production and not get behind the curve, because it can take a long time to increase production, much like semiconductors.

Here is another estimate:

"When fully operational, the plant will produce 30,000 metric tons of lithium per year, making it the largest lithium refining facility in the U.S, according to the company. Piedmont said it will churn out enough material to supply roughly 500,000 electric vehicles annually."

Typically these brines contain many other minerals that are also profitable to extract. So the concentrating costs are shared across a range of minerals.

A man with two watches, never knows the correct time.

One problem is counting the weight of the lithium only, or what they call the lithium carbonate equivalent, which is heavier. These reports seldom distinguish.

Regardless of the weight discrepancy, this proposed largest mining is going to provide 500,000 vehicles, not millions.

Which is pretty much all the BEVs sold in the US last year.

Somebody who thinks that z Tesla battery contains seven times as much lithium as it actually does isn't a reliable source.,

The world is certain to have enough lithium. It may not be in the cheapest and most readily available deposits, but if the market is there, people will find it and extract it.

Solar cells and wind turbines don't stop working for weeks at a time, particularly when they are spread out across a whole country. Even somebody as stupid as Gnatguy realises that the capacity of the national grid has to be boosted to carry the extra currents involved, though he's convinced that no Democrat administration has the planning skills to make it happen, which is pretty stupid.

Well, they could just frack to get more brine. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Maybe the world needs to realize that it doesn't need all that many cars, and if electricity were used smarter, not as much storage.

There are alternative to getting around in cars. In densely populated areas, public transport works are great deal better - there isn't enough room in a big city for the road area to accommodate all the cars, or the parking stations to put them while the owners go about their business in the city.

In less densely populated areas cars are lot harder to replace, and it makes sense to store the electric power in batteries that travel around in the cars. Since the average car is parked for 95% of the time and rarely needs to be recharged rapidly their batteries could provide a lot of the storage that intermittent renewable energy sources need.

If all cars were electric, the batteries in the parked cars could deliver about a three times as much power as the grid as a whole (if only for a couple of hours).

Rich C does have an emotional objection to the idea, but if the car owners were paid enough for the service they might feel better about it.

We just need more reliable chargers around and we can carry smaller batteries.

If and only if they are tied to the grid.

He won't object as long as it works for Tesla.