Lithium discovery in US volcano10 Sep 2023 09:08
'Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found'
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/lithium-discovery-in-us-volcano-could-be-biggest-deposit-ever-found/4018032.article
The link was from Y-Combinator's news page. Sometimes the comments from their readers can be more enlightening than the article, which is certainly the case here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37450915
The first 2 comments:
As with all the 5000 news articles talking about lithium discovers, please remember, lithium is very common, discovering it is easy, there is plenty around and plenty of known location.
However lithium operates more like a advanced chemical then a base metal. Each mine lithium mine is different and has to be separately qualified for each battery manufactures/car company.
There are very, very few companies who have actually managed to produce battery grade lithium and many, many company who have been struggling for years to achieve it.
We simply don't have a lithium problem, what is lacking is the expertise to actually bring deposits like this to use.
reply
jillesvangurp 47 minutes ago | parent | next [–]
It's not so much an expertise problem but more a problem of having to tailor the process to the supply of lithium. We're talking typically low quantities of lithium mixed with a lot of other materials in either some kind of clay, brine, or rock. Or recycled lithium batteries. Those sources of lithium require different approaches and there are multiple companies working on all of those.
Historically, lithium was not interesting to mine at scale until the invention of lithium batteries thirty years ago. And only about ten years ago we figured out that we needed a lot of lithium to power things like cars, trucks, planes and electricity grids.
We've only been looking for lithium for a relatively short amount of time. Before we started looking, it was a relatively low value by product of mining other stuff. There's this perception that we have to go to places like Bolivia, Australia, etc. because that's where the known, easy to access deposits are. But as this article shows, there are probably loads of other places that might have rich lithium deposits.
The market for refining lithium is basically expanding at the pace we can build refineries. It's apparently a big reason Tesla chose to build their own refinery in Texas because the rest of the industry was not moving quick enough. Supplying lithium to the refinery isn't the issue. There's plenty of it. And if you start looking, you'll find some more. Rich deposits like this are of course nice and rare. The high concentration of lithium means extracting it is relatively cheap. But you can get it out of ocean water, there are natural brines in various places that have it, clay and rock deposits all over the place. By mass, it's one of the more common elements on this planet.
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