/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15251126
Lithium is fairly common. The known reserves that people base their "Lithium is rare" assumptions are because it hasn't prospected as much up until recently.
It was the same with oil with some projections saying we'd run out decades ago but we keep finding more once the price went up.

>>15251126
>Previously, it was stated that 35% of global lithium reserves was centralized in the triangle consisting of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.
lithium is everywhere, but no one was looking for it, now that they are they will find it all over the earth in different concentrations

thats enough to make 8.5 million teslas, how are you going to replace the 5 billion gas powered cars with only 8.5 million teslas?
will you own nothing and be happy?

>>15251299
>will you own nothing and be happy?
Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem

its over bros

>>15251299
1 metric tonne of lithium for 1 Tesla?

>>15251299
more like 115 million Teslas, but yeah
the current known reserves are enough for like 1-2 billion cars
Sodium-ion batteries are probably necessary for cheap commuter cars

>>15251299
>>15251321
lol, it's enough for 50-100 million EVs. Granted that's still nowhere close to enough.

>>15251329
yeah, and range would suffer a bit

>>15251126
>global lithium reserves
>>15251329
>current known reserves
This does not mean what you think it means.
There is a very large amount of lithium.
What you're concerned about with electric cars is nickel and cobalt.

>>15251299
Their goal for 2030 is 0% private car ownership.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsuYxFBHsiQ

>>15251361
and there's more concerning stuff than EVs

>>15251372
This is why we need space mining.

>>15251380
good way of dealing with the elements that are least concerning. zinc is gonna be a problem if it price matches with metals like platinum.

>>15251389
>lets scrape up and destroy the entire surface of the planet looking for minerals we can use to replace vehicles which can be powered without scraping the surface of planet clean greedily hunting for valuable minerals
clever plan, ruining the environment hoping to dig up profits when a cleaner and less destructive option is available. i fucking love soience too

>>15251415
what the fuck are you talking about?

Here's the elephant in the room.
What normies dont get is that private personal car travel will become reserved for only the very rich. Just like it was in the early days of the automobile, back at the start of the 20th century.

At the moment people are going around with their heads stuck in the sand thinking one day the existing global vehicle fleet will be replaced with electric cars. Haha, no, only a tiny fraction of it will be, and as government regulation and fuel prices continue to push up the cost of running a traditional car, more and more people will be forced to use public transport or get to work on electric scooters/bikes. The change is a slow process, year after year, think of it as a rising tide that gradually engulfs the lower income brackets first before beginning to swamp the higher earners.

But think on the bright side, now the great majority of us can enjoy embracing cultural diversity on a close up and personal level as we travel to work. There is of course the option to walk or bike, providing you are good enough to beat the competition for the few jobs that lie within close distance of your home. And providing of course you can pay the astronomically skyrocketing rents within an area that has jobs within close proximity.

Things are going to become so gosh darned jolly!

>>15251421
he thinks mining is a new invention that's never been tried before

>>15251372
As long as we have carbon oxygen hydrogen and silicon I don't care lol

>>15251299
The "carbon neutral" goal to completely replace oil has always been retarded as fuck but leftist populists know most of their followers are naive enough to convince them.

>>15251372
We're going to be fucked when the hafnium supply runs out. Wait, what the fuck do we even use hafnium for?

Every week Chile or Iran or Australia or Mexico the USA discovers the world's largest lithium reserve. I'm getting so bored of all of these lithium reserves.

>>15251529
high temperature alloys IIRC

>>15251467
You're against walkable "15 minute" cities? What are you, a chud or something?

>>15251126
Look at this consumer slave lol. Bless ya, u fukun wretch. I hope u ready 2 die.

>>15251529
It's used in control rod for reactors, so once it's used it's gone

a

>>15251467
That's not the elephant in the room. That's the overt agenda and normalnigger greentards applaud it.

>>15251126
Lithium is common, you have tons in the USA, the problem is that you don't have the industry, that's expensive and there are too mant restrictions, so that's why you have to buy it from other countries

>>15251372
Here's a larger image.

I can see silver becoming a big problem within 20 years. It's used in all electronics and with a growing global middle class more and more electronics will be purchased.

Recycling is gonna be key to maintaining adequate supplies but I still think prices will rise a lot.

>>15251126
It's called proven reserves or sometimes even economic reserves. Obviously new discoveries change the numbers. Lithium like most things is fairly common and found pretty much everywhere if you look hard enough, the question is where you can extract it economically. World will never "run out" of resources, it just runs out of economically available reserves that drive up the price and force the use of alternatives, new resource prospecting or replacement technologies.

>>15253128
>growing global middle class
pretty sure the middle class is shrinking in most countries, but yes electronics.

>>15253128
Asteroid might be a meme, but sea floor mining isn't. Uranium already isn't rare anymore now that sea water leaching got uranium is a thing. It costs 2x or 3x the pricing of mining, but considering uranium is a rather small cost of operation it doesn't effect nuclear power all that much.

>>15251372
>>15253128
>zinc is going to be in critically short supply
fuck

a

>>15251467
>Is this AMERICA FUCK YEAH?

>>15251569
If it was a matter of living among high trust individuals and walking through 15 mins worth of people who act in a civilized manner then I would have no problem with it at all.

The reality for most however will be living in a city where everything that isn't a concrete building will be stolen, otherwise vandalized or wrecked, where your neighbors are just as likely to rob you, where you are likely to be mugged or just randomly assaulted a regular basis, where you have to constantly look over your shoulder for threats, avoid multitudes of crazies, detour around "no-go" zones, be jostled and crowded by rude careless people with no manners,or sense of personal space, and where your senses are constantly assaulted by screaming, yelling, babble, loud awful "music" and the smells of pungent cooking, rotting garbage, and a combination of feces and urine. Because cultural diversity is such a wonderful thing and soon enough every city in the West will embrace it in its full glory. Then the towns will follow. Then the villages.

>>15251303
lithium sisters...

>>15251372
> Ag
> serious threat
Not my problem, I have kilos of it hoarded. I bought 300 gms this month

a

>>15251380
This why we need airborne Ebola

>>15251467
>Cities will once again become full of horses
YES YES YES I WANT THIS FUCK CARS DEATH TO CARS AND THEIR DEFENDERS HORSE HORSES HORSES HORSES

>>15251126
It's common.
But not easy to purify.
Lithium ore requires multiple energy and chemical intense steps to get the pure lithium out.
Same for mercury.
Same for most "rare" earths.
It's not that they are rare, but rarely pure and easily extractable.

Lithium can be found in forms of granite.
Or pyroxenes.
For example spodumene.
>picrel.
Have fun seperating the litihum from the silicon and aluminium and oxygen.

>>15256450
Why does everything have to be such a cunt? Why can lithium be free and easy and then we could all drive around in our e-cars and continue feeding into the ponzi scheme of unlimited economic and population growth?

>>15256450
Could lithium (either spodumene or pegmatite) be leached in-situ like in certain uranium deposits?

>>15253128
thanks anon
unironically wondering if stacking halfnium/silver/indium is a solid decades long investment strategy.

>>15253370
yeah it's gonna be a fucking clusterfuck. most of it is used for galvanizing. Both essential and inherently destructive use.
with a big cheap warehouse it might be worthwhile to hoard it indefinitely.

>>15256530
It isn't even easy to recycle (let alone worth the trouble) because it's mostly used in galvanizing. And it's a metallurgist's nightmare to add insult to injury. Recycling isn't going to solve any long term supply problems with regards to zinc.

>>15256579
>because it's mostly used in galvanizing
yeah that's what I said. it's intended use is to be oxidized away and diluted into the environment. And so the price is gonna spike causing all sorts of problems.

>>15256609
You don't suppose there are some major VMS or carbonate replacement deposit discoveries high in zinc just waiting behind the proverbial corner?

>>15251517
How much did that shitbag Al Gore make from exploiting this?

>>15256609
>yeah that's what I said. it's intended use is to be oxidized away and diluted into the environment.
I remember some connection between zinc and alzheimers

>>15256645
I'm sure they'll always be able to find and use some other source, for the right price.

>>15256659
I thought that was aluminium

>>15251126
The problem with Lithium, like with Rare Earth Elements, is that while they're pretty common in the earth's crust ores containing them that are economically viable to mine are not. Such that there's only a few places where in their in high enough concentrations to profitably extract

>>15256517
How?
With toxic flouride based acids? And then let the excess chemicals drain into the groundwater supply?

Everything has a price.

>>15257661
Yes, using cyanide or some other solution that could leach the lithium. Would that be feasible like in some uranium mines or are the chemical properties of lithium ores such that it isn't feasible? I'm not asking about groundwater, I'm asking about feasibility.

>>15256666
>I thought that was aluminium
Yes aluminium is definitly a factor.
All metals can cause neurotoxicity.

aluminium, lead, lithium, bismuth, arsenic, osmium, cadmium, iron etc.
All enhance oxidative stress and ionisation of tissue which leads to degradation, especially of nerves.

Even zinc.
Yes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28889274/

Even if zinc is required by the body, to have excess will lead to deposits, and then cause nerve damage.
Also not all sources of "zinc" are equal, meaning shitty zinc compounds will degrade and will be accumulated instead of incorporated in amino acids, lipids and other tissue components.

>>15251529
We will soon only have HALFNIUM left!

US alone has enough lithium to convert every single car into electric vehicle today and then some. Then canada has fuck ton. So does Australia. So does Argentina, and so on and on.

"rare lithium" is a bullshit argument. On top of that, 95 percent of the battery gets recycled and be used back in the factory to produce batteries again. So its not like you have to constantly mine lithium over and over again. Once you convert the entire system to lithium, the lithium mining requirement will drop by a factor of 100 or so.

>>15258113
I too live in a fantasy world where I can ignore economics..

>>15251467
You are wasting your time posting anything intelligent on this forum
Proof in point.
>>15251569
>>15252829
>>15255080
>>15256367

>>15258136
Tesla go BRRRRRRRR

>>15251467
>fuel prices continue to push up the cost of running a traditional car
Duh, if the EROI of oil keeps dropping its obviously not going to be as affordable to run cars. But this only really a problem in the US, Canada, and Australia. Post-war style suburbs were only viable in the generation after world war two when per capital oil consumption grew unfettered before the 1973 oil crisis.

>>15256367
I concur

>>15258106
epic

>>15251467
>What normies dont get is that private personal car travel will become reserved for only the very rich. Just like it was in the early days of the automobile, back at the start of the 20th century.
Dumb. This is what the WEF and globalists are pushing for. Its what the socialists are pushing for. Because they want "equity" which means everyone must not own anything. "You will own nothing" is part of the propaganda you're repeating. Its not an inevitablity. Next gen EVs are going to be ~25K. Solar/wind/battery will bring full control of electricity/power/transportation to people.

>>15251467
https://youtu.be/lKCgmgPXR9c

>>15251380
https://youtu.be/mSrbOAUvBhE

>>15251380
Space mining will not be (economically) feasible in at least a century. And besides, why try to mine in space when we still haven't figured out how to mine the seabed? Which by the way is quite rich in minerals thanks to all the black smokers depositing massive sulphides all over the place. Of course once we figure it out it will be extremely destructive towards life but hey that's resource extraction for you

>>15258571
Your mother sure smoked a lot of crack.

>>15259641
>but hey that's resource extraction for you
What life is threatened by resource extraction off-world? No cheating with talk of throwing rocks down our gravity well.

>>15259393
Hasn't the first trillionaire already existed in a country like Zimbabwe with hyper-inflation?

>>15259641
We are going to have to do it for Helium and other rare substances regardless. You might as well include Lithium in that.

>Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, but here on earth, it's rather rare.

https://youtu.be/HZPy8hH86LY

>>15259875
Won't be feasible in a long while mate. Seabed mining will happen first.
>>15259904
>Helium and other rare substances
Fair enough, perhaps those won't be available even on the seabed.
>Lithium
Somehow I doubt we will need to. Lithium reserves may seem low now but lithium exploration and development has started only very recently and reserve growth has been quick to meet surging demand. Large discoveries are being made on practically every continent. Googling "[country/continent] lithium discovery" without fail produces exciting articles about significant finds.

>>15251372
>>15253128
what reference amounts are these based on? i know they can't be anywhere near a consistent baseline because there's no way we have less zinc than oganesson.

>>15261706
It think it's based around known reserves divided by the yearly consumption rate.

>>15261789
so it's more about economics than science?

>>15261801
>>15261706
It's about supply and demand.

>>15259904
>helium is generated deep underground through the natural radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium

Thorium is "common", no? We can just helium from that.

>>15251165
It's exactly the same thing. There is a fairly smooth gradient of oil or lithium, from easy to get to very hard to get. Early oil wells were like poking a hole in the ground and letting it spurt out for days or weeks. Then it had to be drilled. Then it had to be drilled deeper. Now we're doing "unconventional" oil like extreme deep ocean drilling, fracking, oil sands, shale oil. These oils are not only more difficult to reach, but of worse quality, requiring vastly more processing to become usable. It doesn't matter at all how much oil there is on Earth; the only thing that matters is at one point it will take more than a barrel's worth of oil to get a barrel's worth of oil. That has nothing to do with the cost of oil, which may still keep it profitable in some cases where energy in the form of local electrical generation is cheaper than the cost of extraction/refinement, but it's still important (and also doesn't mean "peak oil", which is just when the amount of oil extracted begins to decline in gross volume). It's the moment when the energy production of human civilization begins to fall beneath it's consumption, which is the equivalent to a starvation state.

With lithium, it's more about basic economics at this point. But just like oil it's mostly being consumed and then destroyed, so gradually it's going to be more difficult to mine. There will be probably 99% of the stuff left somewhere in the crust, or dissolved in ocean water, or whatever else, by the time it becomes so expensive to get that nobody wants to bother anymore. And that will happen LONG before even a significant fraction of the cars in the world become Teslas. The fact is: it's an unsustainable grift, and all the people at the top know it. Electric cars have a useful lifetime of only like 5 years, after which the costs are already almost the cost for a total replacement, to get a new battery. But the billionaires will have gotten rich by the time people realize.

>>15263410
>lithium is consumed and destroyed
WUT

An electric car battery dead is worth a fuck ton. Its like lithium ore to battery manufacturers who want those lithium. Each of those dead lithium car batteries would net someone ~$3K easily. With a 1000 dead car battery, thats a million dollar. If a small car recycling center processes 20 cars a day, 6 days a week, thats 480 cars a month or $1.4M dollars each month in revenue just from recycling those batteries. Anyone would be willing to buy/sell those lithium batteries. Its a gold mine.

>>15263410
>mostly being consumed and then destroyed
lithium does no undergo any nuclear reactions in the battery and can be 100% recovered from even a totally dead cell. The battery does not get lighter as you use it.

>>15263410
>Early oil wells were like poking a hole in the ground and letting it spurt out for days or weeks. Then it had to be drilled. Then it had to be drilled deeper. Now we're doing "unconventional" oil like extreme deep ocean drilling, fracking, oil sands, shale oil. These oils are not only more difficult to reach, but of worse quality, requiring vastly more processing to become usable. It doesn't matter at all how much oil there is on Earth; the only thing that matters is at one point it will take more than a barrel's worth of oil to get a barrel's worth of oil. That has nothing to do with the cost of oil, which may still keep it profitable in some cases where energy in the form of local electrical generation is cheaper than the cost of extraction/refinement, but it's still important
Maybe eventually that will happen but seeing as oil reserves have kept up with populaton for over fifty years and actually increased quicker than population for the past twenty years, I would say there is no danger of economically extractable oil running out for the foreseeable future. As a reminder, reserves are known accumulations that are at the moment considered economically feasible to extract.

Apparently lithium isn't all that rare.

China is extracting lithium carbonate from brine water, which is a byproduct obtained after desalination. So something that was going to be waste can in turn be further extracted for resource.

200,000 tonnes of sea water (pre-desalination) can be turned into 0.25 tonnes of lithium caronate.

>>15264940
that's... not very much
what's a typical yearly throughput for desalination?

>>15264977
It's not much, big the brine was going to be waste anyways. Why not further extract it? And lithium isn't the only thing extracted. You can extract potassium and nitrogenous wastes from it, which will help as fertilizers. It also helps reduce algae bloom in oceans.

Saudi Arabia has one of the biggest desalination plants on the planet, and it goes through 1M tonnes of water per day. So 1.25 tonnes of lithium per day, or just under 500 tonnes of lithium per year. But we're talking about just 1 plant, and just lithium.

>>15264940
>0.25 tonnes of lithium carbonate.
So what 25kg of lithium metal? for 200k tonnes of water? lol, lmao even.

>>15264986
So what's your proposal to do with the brine?

>>15265008
Not saying it's a bad idea, but the thread is about shortage of lithium which that tech wont meaningfully address.

>>15264986
Israel's largest Water Desalination Plant processes ~620K ton each day. 620/200 = 3.1 x 0.25 t of lithium carbonate = 0.77t of lithium each day, as byproduct of regular desalination water. X 365 = 281 ton of lithium per year. There are ~5 kg of lithium in a Tesla car. That gives us ~51K cars worth of lithium. Per year.
If we had say, 100 of these desalination plants in the world that's 5.1M cars a year. Thats ~25% of cars in America per year.

>>15265257
What will you be using to power those desal plants?

>>15265259
Hydro? Coal? Solar? Wind? Nuclear? Gas?

Lithium isn't a power source. Its a power storage. I think you're confused here.

>>15265259
since it's a byproduct of another process, it doesn't matter. I can't wait to hear how you'll cry otherwise though.

>>15251303
Remove BBT from the equation and replace with the Steady State and rerun the numbers.

>>15265271
>since it's a byproduct of another process, it doesn't matter.
Deflection isn't an answer. You're adding to the energy budget without any proposal for how to pay it off.

>>15264986
>a quarter of a ton is 25 kilograms
is this your new weight loss plan

>>15264940
You’re underestimating based on how much we will need in the future. Remember, every single vehicle will be electric.

>>15265973
>every single vehicle will be electric.
absolutely will not happen by 2050, probably not even by 2100

>>15265976
People actually tend to upgrade their cars because of efficiency improvements. How many people out there are using cars that were made before the 90s? Not a lot.
Poorer people will buy used electric vehicles eventually.

>>15251126
Why aren't you asking how much you can reuse?

>>15266031
Something definitely has to change.

>Today, only 5% of the world's lithium-ion batteries are thought to be recycled across the globe, with dramatic environmental and financial implications for the projected 8 million tons of waste.

>Battery materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt are infinitely recyclable. The critical materials in lithium-ion EV batteries can be recycled over and over without performance loss.

>>15266085
>muh waste
Landfills of today are the mines of tommorow, nigger.
What next, are you going to mention nuclear """waste""" ?

>>15266028
At least in the U.S., 90s vehicles are semi rare because President Obama used public money to buy them and have them destroyed as part of his Cash for "Clunkers" program.

>>15265605
>.25 tons of lithium carbonate = .25 tons of lithium

>>15265973
>every "green" car will be electric
>every electric car will have lithium batteries

Nah. Even if half of all cars sold by 2030+ are lithium electric cars, we'd have enough based on >>15265257

>>15266505
see >>15266142
and also not convinced that the batteries have only 5kg of (pure) lithium, I want to see a reliable source.

>>15266085
I could see consumer/toy lipo usage being a drain, since people will throw those away without thinking. But for something like a car, you can bet anyone disposing those is gonna salvage the battery if nothing else

>>15266091
Also because the roads are so heavily salted that they rust out.

a

>>15269468
if you have nothing to say then why bump?

>>15269474
>b-b-but muh vanity thread was on page 10!!!

>>15269499
kek, he even deleted it so no one would notice
i noticed anon
shame on you

a

>>15251126
electric vehicles are a meme, hydrogen cars are the future, and car companies already invested in it.

>>15263418
I'd lose a million just so I can keep throwing them into the ocean.

>>15251126
This is because reserve does not mean what you think it means.
Reserve means the amount that we know we have and are economically viable to exploit. So it is always an underestimated and very often by a very large margin.

Overall it is an economist concept and you cannot trust those guys to be correct about anything.

What you need to check is the estimated resources. Nwavyj