There is endless amounts of lithium deposit everywhere. A lithium deposit is essentially worthless.
What matters in lithium industry, is chemical processing. Nobody cares about a lithium mining company. What matters is lithium processing.
Lithium is not like a base metal, its more like a specialty chemical. The output from every mine is unique, there is not overall standard. Each output from each mine has to be qualified with each major battery manufacturer.
Nevada has 100s of billion of dollars worth of lithium by itself probably.
This will almost certainty not be mined. Making money from this kind of rock is difficult in the first place and doing it in a place with little mining industry makes that even worse.
Edit:
If you want insight into lithium industry, I recommend 'Global Lithium Podcast' by a guy that has been in that business for many decades and has worked for all the many of the major producers.
But, seemingly, this one is "The richest known hard rock lithium deposit" so it's got to be worth something, at least it's newsworthy I guess.
Anyway, the article is not about the operation of mining lithium, how to earn money on lithium or even chemical processing, it's about regulation about mining in Maine, the deposit itself just being the driver of the story. It also goes into describing the supply chain around lithium and some other goodies.
It doesn't cost much to get a few inches of buzzword copy that makes people ask "why won't they just lift the regulations so we can have the free money?" without really writing anything that leaves readers better and truthfully informed about a topic.
We've got good responses by disinterested parties who know a lot about lithium and mining here, and it's the single sided argument funded by unknown sources that is generating the sticky "but what if"s.
I did find it interesting that the primary source for this article appears to be the couple who owns the land the deposit is on. They would obviously have an interest in making this deposit seem special, especially since it seems like they want to pressure the state to allow them to mine it.
Tesla’s suppliers are Ganfeng Lithium, China, mined in China and Australia. Kidman Resources, Australia, same, processed in China. Pure Energy Minerals, Canada, uses Chinese processing as of 2018.
Your Tesla’s lithium was likely mined in Australia, tanker shipped to China, it leaves China as lithium hydroxide and may be final assembled into batteries in USA or Canada. Like almost all materials for “green” products, lithium, composites, aluminum, microchips, the western world has boxed themselves out of making these things. So China does it where they set their own carbon standards, and can manipulate value, pay, trade, subsidies.
There is a ton more to the conversation when someone says “we just need stricter cap and trade” because China knows the grip over everyone else they have. I rarely see people who know how things are made make that argument with any practical effectiveness, unless it ends with “we go to war”.
EDIT: So, to the topic, does it make sense to mine in Maine and ship to China for processing? Is this new reserve that good?
In fact most of the hydroxide goes threw Korea or Japan (sometimes even both I think). There the hydroxide is made into cathode materials. This cathode materials are then shipped to Nevada, where Panasonic creates cells, hands them to Tesla to put into packs. Packs get put into cars.
Tesla always had the vision of doing cathode processing in house, but I think in Nevada they never went that far (unless this has changed).
In Austin Tesla is planning a plant to transform Spodumene ore into hydroxide. This ore would come from North Carolina. However this mine project seem to be delayed so for quite a while they will likely continue to buy hydroxide (they have to buy anyway but buy less at least).
They are also planning, and are already building a cathode materials plant. There they would bring together nickel, lithium hydroxide and co to make a cathode materials.
They are also already building a cell plant where they would use that material to make cathode and cells.
They are also attempting to mine their own lithium in Nevada, but that will take a quite a few years to come online (if ever).
There are quite a few companies trying to get into all of these markets in the US, but compared to China its still a small amount and they are way behind
That area of Maine has absolutely no infrastructure to be able to do anything with such a deposit, and there's no way that the sclerotic government and regulatory agencies would allow you to build such infrastructure to process it, or even transport it elsewhere to where it could be processed.
I don't like your description of sclerotic, implying the government is dysfunctional if it doesn't allow heavy industry open strip mining near "a few miles northeast of the ski slopes of Sunday River and not far from Step Falls, where swimmers can wade in shallow pools formed by hundreds of feet of cascading granite ledge." 50 years from now when the area is a wasteland with polluted rivers I'm sure the residents who remember going swimming in natural ponds will be grateful for the nimbleness of their government
It's basically on US2. That's not very rural as far as mines, logging and other resource extraction goes. You don't really need "infrastructure" to build a resource processing facility since everything is global these days anyway. You need a road that can handle truck traffic. The days of a paper mill having parts made by the toolmaker across town are long gone. Your specialty stuff will all show up in trucks that say Fedex or XPO on the side and the special people who help you get it running will all show up in cars with the little Enterprise sticker on them.
We have a deposit here in Portugal too. Didn't know Lithium production had all those complications. But wouldn't mine it and move it away to processing be an alternative? I don't know, the US has a lot territory and probably lithium, wouldn't mine it and move it be profitable?
Yes. This is what happens in Western Australia. Hard rock mining and selling is possible. Even then however the processor has to basically make the process specifically for the deposit.
So its not as easy as just selling it to the lithium ore market. You need a project partner that develops the project with you.
The only group currently processing spodumene to lithium are in China. Others want to make such project but I don't think they are online.
I'm not saying this deposit is worthless, I'm just saying 'this much lithium is there' is really not a good way to evaluate the actual value of a deposit like this.
Generally the location of mines like this is quite relevant, and a place that have bad regulation to begin with are very unattractive.
The traditional lithium belt in the US is in North Carolina, lithium was mined there for decades. Starting a new mine there, is already incredibly difficult. Doing it in a place with no such history will be far more difficult.
Lithium mining isn't like gold/iron/other metal mining. It's more like salt harvesting. So trucking away loads of dirt/salt/rock/ore to a processing plant isn't viable. You have to process it on site which means huge ponds for evaporation.
The issue is that the further away from the mine you do your refining, the higher your transport costs are. All else being equal you’d rather transport a refined product a long way, rather than a product that’s 90% useless other rock.
> The manufacturing processes of lithium, including the solvent and mining waste, presents significant environmental and health hazards.[134][135][136] Lithium extraction can be fatal to aquatic life due to water pollution.[137] It is known to cause surface water contamination, drinking water contamination, respiratory problems, ecosystem degradation and landscape damage.[134] It also leads to unsustainable water consumption in arid regions (1.9 million liters per ton of lithium).[134] Massive byproduct generation of lithium extraction also presents unsolved problems, such as large amounts of magnesium and lime waste.[138]
> In the United States, there is active competition between environmentally catastrophic open-pit mining, mountaintop removal mining and less damaging brine extraction mining in an effort to drastically expand domestic lithium mining capacity.[139] Environmental concerns include wildlife habitat degradation, potable water pollution including arsenic and antimony contamination, unsustainable water table reduction, and massive mining waste, including radioactive uranium byproduct and sulfuric acid discharge.
> Lithium metal is corrosive and requires special handling to avoid skin contact. Breathing lithium dust or lithium compounds (which are often alkaline) initially irritate the nose and throat, while higher exposure can cause a buildup of fluid in the lungs, leading to pulmonary edema. The metal itself is a handling hazard because contact with moisture produces the caustic lithium hydroxide. Lithium is safely stored in non-reactive compounds such as naphtha.
I'm not a chemist so I can't tell you what is so hard about it.
I can only say that there are not very many companies that can do it and even those companies seem to struggle a fair bit bringing new supply to market. Many startup have for long time tried all kinds of ways of bringing new supply to market, and many have seen huge delay.
Lithium was (and still is) a tiny industry and these process are pretty immature. Most lithium never needed to be as high grade as is required now.
Every company seems to have a lot of its own secret sauce. The people that are really knowledge about the subject are very thinly distributed and given the growth of the industry I would assume there are very few veterans.
You can just go out get a bunch of veterans that have done it many times before, buy some standard equipment and get going.
Somebody in the comments here was involved in setting up such a project, so that person have some more insight.
Not an expert, or even an enthusiast tbh, but if I were to guess, I would say its because Lithium is way too reactive. It is basically impossible to find elemental Li and the compounds Li forms are difficult to break (I think). So unless the deposit is of some particularly easily collected and concentrated (removing the dirt and stuff, idk the technical term) or very easily broken, it probably won't be worth it to even try to get raw Li from the ore.
We have lithium and Jadarite[0] reserves in Serbia. Is potentially just trading the ore and/or moving the processing out of Serbia viable? However, with Rio Tinto investing, we're not looking solid environmentally.
1. Canada has a huge mining Industry and that’s right next door to Maine.
2. It’s possible to bring in multinational consultant teams specialized in mining industries. A location doesn’t have a mining industry until suddenly a big deposit is discovered and they do.
The price of Lithium seems to be extremely volatile. Currently it seems to be quite valuable. Probably highly dependent on how electric cars and general batteries are faring.
I think that logically, it doesn't make sense for Maine to change its laws to allow this to move forward. It's worth $1.5B and there are about 1.5M people in Maine. That's $1,000 per resident. Given that there are costs to extract the metal from the ground, let's say that 20% of that $1.5B could be profit (which I'm guessing is a very high estimate). That means $200 per Maine resident. Given that Maine doesn't own the land/mineral rights, let's say they can put a 30% tax on those profits. $60 per resident.
Realistically, $1.5B worth of lithium is a tiny amount of value for a US state. If I were Maine, I'd say no at $1.5B. You're probably going to get less than $60 per Maine resident - and that's a one-off $60, not even an annual $60.
The article keeps talking about how we need lithium. Ultimately, we don't seem to need it that much given how cheap it is. If I were Maine, I'd say "not now". If Lithium prices go up 100-1,000x in the future, then reevaluate. $6,000-$60,000 per Maine resident might be a useful amount of money. $60 isn't.
At current prices, any environmental damage is likely to cost more than the taxes on the profits would cover. $90M in taxes (30% of a 20% profit margin) won't clean up a lot.
I'm not saying that it's a global optimum for Maine to leave this lithium in the earth. I'm just noting that there isn't a lot of incentive for Maine to extract it. The article talks about other countries with less strict labor and environmental rules. That is true, but why should Maine risk its environment for such little money?
Why should Maine risk environmental damage for $60 per person? $90M in tax revenue is nothing compared to the cost to clean up environmental disasters. It's costing over $6M to clean up a single park in my town, never mind the type of environmental damage that might be caused by mining 11M tons of lithium. It seems like it would be foolish for Maine to alter the laws to allow the mining to take place at current prices.
Excellent analysis. People forget the economics of things from the state / people's perspective.
Also, a certain number of people, very small but not zero, will get sick and die. All of those nasty diseases that come from any mine operation, especially something nasty like lithium.
Those sick people will go on Maine's disability / unemployment insurance / LTC / Medicaid / Medicare's system. Some of those people will live decades with cancer, their medical care paid for by the state (as it should).
At current prices, like you said, it might literally cost Maine more to open the mine than to leave the lithium in the ground, especially once you factor in environmental cleanup and healthcare costs.
Another viewpoint to consider this is how long will it take to exploit this? 20 years, that is 75M in revenue per year, 30 years 50M and 50 years would be 30M. Not actually that high revenue numbers. 20% as profit from those, which sound optimistic would be 15, 10 or 6 million a year. Now tax those and on scale of state it isn't very big once again...
>The estimated $1 billion impact is on top of the income that lobstermen earn when they bring their catch to shore and sell it, which in 2017 was $433 million statewide.
According to this study Maine nets 1.5B per year from lobsters alone.
I don't disagree with your analysis, but it's important to remember that most states think of the 80% of that $1.5B that isn't profit as going to their citizens in the form of local spending.
This happens to be in the same vicinity as the most popular ski resort in the state, and a number of other popular outdoor attractions.
It's not quite your average rural economy that's desperate for any sort of new business/jobs/investment.
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A mine has to be weighed against the risk it represents to their existing economy - both in actual impacts of environmental disasters, and reputational if there's any negative stories coming out about it.
Tourists don't want to go have their destination wedding in the town that's in the news regularly because of X or Y pollution, even if they can't see it and it's not a risk to them on their visit.
Is it me being jaded or is a billion or two dollars not really that much money anymore? I mean sure, if someone were to give me a billion dollars I'd be excited (pending dealing with taxes etc). But I mean..theres what a couple thousand people with personal fortunes that could buy the entire deposit several times over, and even more companies that could do it...maybe it'd be a great windfall to the local economy? But if Maine is anything like North Carolina then the majority of the money will get earmarked for future infrastructure projects and then get slowly siphoned off by the politicians over a few years so it won't really matter.
We're exposed to billionaires and things priced in the billions all the time through news and media, but we forget that it's still an exceptional amount of money for a very, very limited few. Like how Instagram shows you all the exceptionally lucky people on holidays and with expensive cars and incredible beauty, so you get to feel like it's ubiquitous and you're just missing out. But the truth is that almost everyone just goes to work everyday, looking normal, driving normal cars, even the influencers.
A billion dollars worth of minerals is not a lot of minerals. It would be worth extracting if it were something readily shipped and processed like gold or crude. But from what I understand of lithium processing, just the equipment along might ring up in the hundreds of millions, and you still have to pay to get it extracted, processed, etc.
Billion dollar is lot even for a value of a company.
On other hand with deposits it's nothing. Reasonably considering the needed investment for exploitation from equipment, planning, permissions, workers etc. I really feel that currently it is nowhere near enough to justify exploitation. Big mines are not cheap to build or operate. I doubt 1,5B of material is enough to justify initial investment.
You're not jaded, the scale seems small in comparison to things like the Ring of Fire in northern Ontario or even just Sudbury on its own, where the value of mineral deposits are pitched in the 100s of billions.
It's not really surprising. The use of lithium batteries to replace fossil fuels is really just shifting where and what environmental impact is produced. It's not as clean as they claim to be. It's like coal plants with scrubbers saying they are clean. They are only relatively clean, just like lithium is only relatively clean.
At least the lithium deposit near the Salton Sea is already in an area that's an ecological disaster. It makes sense that Maine would want to protect their natural resources.
The issue is that while mines produce relatively localized environmental damage, climate change will produce globalized damage by ecosystem collapse and sea level rise. The sum total of this damage will be far greater than the marginal increase in mining required for battery production. Shifting, for sure, but the scale of destruction is the real question.
I'm not even convinced that there will be a "marginal increase in mining required for battery production," nor that there will be an associated increase in localized environmental damage.
Lithium mines produce localized environmental damage, _but so does fossil fuel extraction_. Think about environmental damage from mountaintop removal coal mining, fracking, offshore oil spills, etc.
With fossil fuels, you get localized environmental damage, _plus_ climate change.
With lithium, you get localized environmental damage, but you hopefully support a transition to renewables.
Scale is a good question. However, it might not matter if the residents (through the state) decide they don't want their local area to be destroyed. For example, climate change may not be as locally damaging as some massive strip mines.
Yes. The narrative that electrification just shifts around the pollution is so tired and untrue. The end to end pipeline of EVs is much more efficient than that of gas cars, so even if we start synthesizing fuels that are carbon neutral gas cars will lose. The only reason gas cars could ever exist is because of cheap and dirty fuel. The only car that makes sense in a sustainable system is an EV maybe with synthesized and carbon neutral hydrocarbon range extension for emergencies.
If people want truly green infrastructure, the only practical options are nuclear power and densification -basically turn as many cities as possible into Paris. LRTs don't need batteries because they're hooked into the grid with catenary lines, subways have 3rd rails, bikes run on human, and e-bikes use only tiny batteries.
And while nuclear power isn't ideal, it's the only tech that has fully decarbonized power grids at State level.
Otherwise we need battery power on an utterly insane level.
This was the common mantra ca. 15 yes ago on Slashdot that made you look extremely in-the-know, with that ineffable quality of genius that cynicism is often mistaken for.
Interestingly if we have significant excess production from intermittent sources we can reduce our battery needs. Last I read the best cost/benefit ratio was something like 7x the energy production.
That said nuclear base load makes a _lot_ more sense.
We can't turn US cities into Paris. Turning into Paris requires infrastructure, like subways and the like! But between tariffs on things like steel, gross administrative incompetence, labor union shenanigans, and environmental review laws, the US is incapable of building such infrastructure.
Someone's going to complain "but environmental review is important to protect the environment!" which is why NYC's congestion charge is going to be delayed and litigated for the next 10-20 years in environmental review while cars stuck in traffic spew pollution into the environment.
And someone's going to complain about me mentioning labor unions, too, and admittedly they're sometimes a small part of the problem (when not suing under the environmental review laws) but the Second Avenue Subway still had to give the unions a six-figure payout for using a tunnel boring machine, and every crane has to have someone employed as a full-time oiler because it's still 1910 and we're on steam power. European labor somehow manages to avoid these levels of absurdity.
Not that this is necessarily the top problem. The notoriously free-market pro-business right-wing New York Times (cough, cough) brought over the guy who was in charge of Crossrail, and he was shocked at how many people were standing around the dig site doing nothing. The MTA had no idea why most of them were there getting paid. The MTA also has a bad habit of completing Phase 1 of a project, letting all the contractors who know anything about it go on to other projects, then starting again from scratch on Phase 2 a while later, so that there's absolutely no in-house expertise.
Suppose 150k mile car that averages 30mpg. That is 5,000 gallons of fuel weighing 30,000 pounds. The amount of crude to make that oil varies, so actual oil you have to extract and ship and refine will be a bit more than that, and the refinement process is also dirty.
So compare that 30,000 lbs of oil to the amount of lithium in a Tesla battery pack, which is about 138lbs. 138lbs < 30,000lbs
Then figure in that those 30,000lbs of oil all go into the air producing not only c02 which is changing our climate, but particulates which are bad for our health and cognitive function, vs the lithium in a battery pack which can be recycled and/or re-used
This seemm like a large net win to me.
All of that said, yes, all of the resource extraction industry, from the iron and aluminum to the oil and lithium, has a bad history of responsible stewardship of the lands they exploit, and I support forcing them to do a better job.
> So compare that 30,000 lbs of oil to the amount of lithium in a Tesla battery pack, which is about 138lbs. 138lbs < 30,000lbs
I think you need to account for the amount of material that was mined to get to that 138lb battery. My understanding is that it's orders of magnitudes more than what gets removed/disrupted for oil. I don't know the figure (and I welcome someone telling me) but I think it could well be in excess of 30,000lbs of raw material mined.
There's also battery recycling to consider.
I don't know which way the result swings; I'm just saying that it's much more complicated to figure out, and far less clear cut, than you suggest.
I wish that the damage of lithium mining would be specified and put into specific terms about what the damage is and what's it's doing.
For example, fracking in California results in 26 acres of toxic storage pools that are leaking and contaminating ground water with specific toxic chemicals:
However, every single story about the toxicity of battery production remains vague and I haven't been able to find any that specify what the damage is. I have found that indigenous people are having their land used without much permission or process, but the damage has never been specified.
Does anybody have some specifics about what's going on? Presumably there must be an environmental cost but it's really unclear what it is, or how it compares to the regular destruction that we embrace from fossil fuels.
Let’s hope it stays that way. But $1.5B is not a tiny sum and I’m willing to bet the government will bend over backwards to bring a bunch of “jobs” to the area at the expense of all environmental concerns.
Greedy lobbyists in the state capital would object to this. Ecotourism is seen by voters as one of Maine’s largest industries. Much of its real estate industry and its most well-known brand (LL Bean) relies on it.
You have a delusional believe in the power of lobbying. Establishing a mine in the US is incredibly hard. Even in places with existing mining, establishing a new mine is a major undertaking.
Mines even in mining friendly places is very, very hard. Doing it mining unfriendly places where you have real popular opposition is bordering on impossible.
Yes, neither option may be perfect. But just claiming that, therefore, they are equally bad is philistine. It's a full embrace of a talking point even ExxonMobile has retired.
It's a very misleading statement to bluntly compare a consumable Ressource with a recycle metal.
While it is known that lithium itself has environmental issues the potential reuse and benefit of pulling it out of the earth to make batteries will have a very long and positive outcome for us.
And to a certain degree the initial disruption might be totally worth it in the long run in comparison to stuff we just burn away.
“Yet lithium is a metal, and state regulations passed in 2017 prohibit mining for metals in open pits of more than three acres, which would be the only way to cost-effectively extract lithium at Plumbago North.
“I don’t know of any underground and manganese or lithium mines in the world,” said Dr. John Slack, a geologist who co-authored a separate upcoming paper on critical minerals in Maine.
“Because those metals have a relatively low cost, in terms of their concentration per ton or per ounce, you need to excavate large volumes of rock cheaply in order to economically and profitably produce the metal you’re interested in.””
Basically, Maine demands that whatever mining is done, is done underground, like coal. But open carrier mining is cheaper. If all this lithium is so important, someone will find a way to mine it properly underground, I guess.
"But [the lithium] reserves also would not present the same type of potential environmental issues as ... other base metal sulfide deposits in Maine, such as Bald Mountain. That’s because the Plumbago North deposit does not occur in, or contain, sulfide-rich rocks, said Slack and Simmons. Mining for lithium there would instead be similar to quarrying for granite or gravel."
Are rock queries outlawed? I don't believe so. Thus, is this a lithium rock query or a lithium mineral mine?
3 acres, I'm assuming, is the issue. That's not really that big. It's actually really quite small.
The only open pit mine I'm familiar with is measured in the literal thousands of acres. Hell, the local gravel pit that supplies the VERY rural area I live in is over 70 acres.
So how common is lithium on earth anyway? Is it like the new oil? Can we make it in the lab? Will we wage war over it? Will we deplete it? Can we find it on the moon or Mars?
It is the 33rd most abundant element on earth. However, as it is highly reactive it is never found in its pure form in nature, and right now, we extract it from mineral rich brine from lakes. This process uses a lot of water, approximately 500,000 gallons of water goes into extracting 1 ton of lithium, enough to make 190,000 smartphones.
I think we’ll wage war over water before we wage one over Lithium.
Lithium is only created in stellar events (Big Bang, super novas). There’s no natural way for it form on Earth.
As a result all lithium deposits we’re created during the formation of the planet as it coalesced out of interstellar dust. Consequently the distribution of Lithium around the planet is pretty even. There’s no “hot spots” of high concentration, and every country has a supply proportional to its land mass.
That, plus the relative abundance of Lithium, means it’s unlikely that fighting a war for Lithium will ever make sense. Much easier and cheaper to just dig in your own backyard, than fight for someone’s backyard that has the same dirt in it.
'Naturally forming' elements on Earth are limited to uranium fission products.
Lithium (also aluminium, magnesium, sodium) distribution is due to it being light and chemically active, thus ending up in crust, while heavier metals (iron, nickel) end up in mantle and core. It takes specific geological circumstances to bring mantle material into crust, so there are 'hot spots'. Lithium is already there, so it is spread somewhat evenly.
One difference is that it can be recovered from worn out lithium batteries. So at some point we could theoretically
have enough lithium from recycled batteries that we no longer need to mine a significant amount of it.
It's fairly common. Known reserves amount to around 80 million tons. Yearly production is around 100k tons.
I think I saw a projection for a yearly consumption of around 1.7m tons in 2030.
I'd say the biggest issue is simply going to be environmental impact. This is a big reserve that can't be mined because of environmental regulation. That's a lot of money to just pass on, and I don't think that's going to hold.
Is it really that much money? It’s not like that’s pure profit; mining requires large up-front capital investment to even start. Break that down to 20 years (round number for illustration purposes only, seemingly on the quick side based on quick searching), and you’re down to $75mm/year which begins to sound like a lot less money when you start adding the recurring costs of operation to the initial capital cost. Add in the state mandates for damage escrow and you’re probably looking at a business that makes the owners wealthy, but otherwise produces only a handful of jobs and minimal tax revenue while permanently destroying some of the natural beauty of a state heavy on tourism that relies on that beauty.
Put another way: if it was a lot of money they’d find a way to do it underground.
There really isn’t that much lithium in today’s “Lithium ion” batteries. A few percent by weight. Much more Nickel, Cobalt, Aluminum, Carbon, Copper, and Iron than Lithium. Lithium metal anodes would push that number up but that flavor hasn’t really solved it’s lifespan problems yet.
Stating there isn't much lithium in a single cell isn't really meaningful; there are a lot of individual batteries, and the number keeps growing, so we still require a lot of lithium to be mined. Relatively less than other minerals, but still a significant amount and still destructive to the local area where lithium is mined.
my understanding is that it is super common, but not very concentrated in the earth. As a result it makes mining more difficult. You don't just find a ore vein in a cave, you have to dig up and process tons of stone in a wider area.
War over lithium would be totally insane. Every continent has basically unlimited amount of lithium.
Its not an energy source and the ratio of how expensive it is to mine and how expensive you can sell it is nowhere close to oil.
Fighting wars over lithium deposit would be insanely dumb and that will never happen.
Lithium is not a consumable, once you have it you keep it. We need it now to grow the fleet but once the fleet is replaced recycling will be the most economical way to get it.
Something about the economics of lithium, and other recently important minerals confuses me.
How is a $1.5bn deposit, a major, significant source? That's would be about 10 days worth of oil. The whole global lithium market is just $3bn-$4bn pa. The rare earth market is about $2.5bn annually. Seems super low, relative to headlines/concerns/etc.
How are these materials simultaneously of such importance, and also so economically minor. What am I missing here?
> How are these materials simultaneously of such importance, and also so economically minor. What am I missing here?
My guess is the amount of skill required to get these materials. Miners can be paid pennies and they'll still do the work. Something similar to how garbage takeaway is of very high importance, but economically pretty minor.
These elements are critical but tiny parts of a number of products. Downstream users and even governments make a lot of noise about ensuring affordable supplies, but major multinational miners are slow and cautious about developing new projects. The total addressable market isn't that large. Miners aren't interested in over-supplying these commodities as a favor to manufacturers of batteries, magnets, or light bulbs. Especially for rare earth elements, market demand is so limited that one new major producer could significantly reduce market prices.
Why doesn't someone just "solve this problem with money." I realize this is a simplification, but any number of actors could affordably silo a massive stockpile and make the risk of supply deficits go away entirely.
Some of the politicians bringing this stuff up as major future risks could personally afford to seriously mitigated on their personal accounts.
Readit News
What matters in lithium industry, is chemical processing. Nobody cares about a lithium mining company. What matters is lithium processing.
Lithium is not like a base metal, its more like a specialty chemical. The output from every mine is unique, there is not overall standard. Each output from each mine has to be qualified with each major battery manufacturer.
Nevada has 100s of billion of dollars worth of lithium by itself probably.
This will almost certainty not be mined. Making money from this kind of rock is difficult in the first place and doing it in a place with little mining industry makes that even worse.
Edit:
If you want insight into lithium industry, I recommend 'Global Lithium Podcast' by a guy that has been in that business for many decades and has worked for all the many of the major producers.
Anyway, the article is not about the operation of mining lithium, how to earn money on lithium or even chemical processing, it's about regulation about mining in Maine, the deposit itself just being the driver of the story. It also goes into describing the supply chain around lithium and some other goodies.
We've got good responses by disinterested parties who know a lot about lithium and mining here, and it's the single sided argument funded by unknown sources that is generating the sticky "but what if"s.
Deleted Comment
Your Tesla’s lithium was likely mined in Australia, tanker shipped to China, it leaves China as lithium hydroxide and may be final assembled into batteries in USA or Canada. Like almost all materials for “green” products, lithium, composites, aluminum, microchips, the western world has boxed themselves out of making these things. So China does it where they set their own carbon standards, and can manipulate value, pay, trade, subsidies.
There is a ton more to the conversation when someone says “we just need stricter cap and trade” because China knows the grip over everyone else they have. I rarely see people who know how things are made make that argument with any practical effectiveness, unless it ends with “we go to war”.
EDIT: So, to the topic, does it make sense to mine in Maine and ship to China for processing? Is this new reserve that good?
Tesla always had the vision of doing cathode processing in house, but I think in Nevada they never went that far (unless this has changed).
In Austin Tesla is planning a plant to transform Spodumene ore into hydroxide. This ore would come from North Carolina. However this mine project seem to be delayed so for quite a while they will likely continue to buy hydroxide (they have to buy anyway but buy less at least).
They are also planning, and are already building a cathode materials plant. There they would bring together nickel, lithium hydroxide and co to make a cathode materials.
They are also already building a cell plant where they would use that material to make cathode and cells.
They are also attempting to mine their own lithium in Nevada, but that will take a quite a few years to come online (if ever).
There are quite a few companies trying to get into all of these markets in the US, but compared to China its still a small amount and they are way behind
So its not as easy as just selling it to the lithium ore market. You need a project partner that develops the project with you.
The only group currently processing spodumene to lithium are in China. Others want to make such project but I don't think they are online.
I'm not saying this deposit is worthless, I'm just saying 'this much lithium is there' is really not a good way to evaluate the actual value of a deposit like this.
Generally the location of mines like this is quite relevant, and a place that have bad regulation to begin with are very unattractive.
The traditional lithium belt in the US is in North Carolina, lithium was mined there for decades. Starting a new mine there, is already incredibly difficult. Doing it in a place with no such history will be far more difficult.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8-YDMzg2bY Interesting video on the Lithium extraction
I've heard a lot about the difficulty in processing lithium into "battery grade" metal. Is there merit to this claim? If so, what's so hard about it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Environmental_issues :
> Environmental issues
> The manufacturing processes of lithium, including the solvent and mining waste, presents significant environmental and health hazards.[134][135][136] Lithium extraction can be fatal to aquatic life due to water pollution.[137] It is known to cause surface water contamination, drinking water contamination, respiratory problems, ecosystem degradation and landscape damage.[134] It also leads to unsustainable water consumption in arid regions (1.9 million liters per ton of lithium).[134] Massive byproduct generation of lithium extraction also presents unsolved problems, such as large amounts of magnesium and lime waste.[138]
> In the United States, there is active competition between environmentally catastrophic open-pit mining, mountaintop removal mining and less damaging brine extraction mining in an effort to drastically expand domestic lithium mining capacity.[139] Environmental concerns include wildlife habitat degradation, potable water pollution including arsenic and antimony contamination, unsustainable water table reduction, and massive mining waste, including radioactive uranium byproduct and sulfuric acid discharge.
Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Precautions :
> Lithium metal is corrosive and requires special handling to avoid skin contact. Breathing lithium dust or lithium compounds (which are often alkaline) initially irritate the nose and throat, while higher exposure can cause a buildup of fluid in the lungs, leading to pulmonary edema. The metal itself is a handling hazard because contact with moisture produces the caustic lithium hydroxide. Lithium is safely stored in non-reactive compounds such as naphtha.
I can only say that there are not very many companies that can do it and even those companies seem to struggle a fair bit bringing new supply to market. Many startup have for long time tried all kinds of ways of bringing new supply to market, and many have seen huge delay.
Lithium was (and still is) a tiny industry and these process are pretty immature. Most lithium never needed to be as high grade as is required now.
Every company seems to have a lot of its own secret sauce. The people that are really knowledge about the subject are very thinly distributed and given the growth of the industry I would assume there are very few veterans.
You can just go out get a bunch of veterans that have done it many times before, buy some standard equipment and get going.
Somebody in the comments here was involved in setting up such a project, so that person have some more insight.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadarite
Realistically, $1.5B worth of lithium is a tiny amount of value for a US state. If I were Maine, I'd say no at $1.5B. You're probably going to get less than $60 per Maine resident - and that's a one-off $60, not even an annual $60.
The article keeps talking about how we need lithium. Ultimately, we don't seem to need it that much given how cheap it is. If I were Maine, I'd say "not now". If Lithium prices go up 100-1,000x in the future, then reevaluate. $6,000-$60,000 per Maine resident might be a useful amount of money. $60 isn't.
At current prices, any environmental damage is likely to cost more than the taxes on the profits would cover. $90M in taxes (30% of a 20% profit margin) won't clean up a lot.
I'm not saying that it's a global optimum for Maine to leave this lithium in the earth. I'm just noting that there isn't a lot of incentive for Maine to extract it. The article talks about other countries with less strict labor and environmental rules. That is true, but why should Maine risk its environment for such little money?
Why should Maine risk environmental damage for $60 per person? $90M in tax revenue is nothing compared to the cost to clean up environmental disasters. It's costing over $6M to clean up a single park in my town, never mind the type of environmental damage that might be caused by mining 11M tons of lithium. It seems like it would be foolish for Maine to alter the laws to allow the mining to take place at current prices.
Also, a certain number of people, very small but not zero, will get sick and die. All of those nasty diseases that come from any mine operation, especially something nasty like lithium.
Those sick people will go on Maine's disability / unemployment insurance / LTC / Medicaid / Medicare's system. Some of those people will live decades with cancer, their medical care paid for by the state (as it should).
At current prices, like you said, it might literally cost Maine more to open the mine than to leave the lithium in the ground, especially once you factor in environmental cleanup and healthcare costs.
>The estimated $1 billion impact is on top of the income that lobstermen earn when they bring their catch to shore and sell it, which in 2017 was $433 million statewide.
According to this study Maine nets 1.5B per year from lobsters alone.
This happens to be in the same vicinity as the most popular ski resort in the state, and a number of other popular outdoor attractions.
It's not quite your average rural economy that's desperate for any sort of new business/jobs/investment.
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A mine has to be weighed against the risk it represents to their existing economy - both in actual impacts of environmental disasters, and reputational if there's any negative stories coming out about it.
Tourists don't want to go have their destination wedding in the town that's in the news regularly because of X or Y pollution, even if they can't see it and it's not a risk to them on their visit.
A billion dollars worth of minerals is not a lot of minerals. It would be worth extracting if it were something readily shipped and processed like gold or crude. But from what I understand of lithium processing, just the equipment along might ring up in the hundreds of millions, and you still have to pay to get it extracted, processed, etc.
On other hand with deposits it's nothing. Reasonably considering the needed investment for exploitation from equipment, planning, permissions, workers etc. I really feel that currently it is nowhere near enough to justify exploitation. Big mines are not cheap to build or operate. I doubt 1,5B of material is enough to justify initial investment.
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At least the lithium deposit near the Salton Sea is already in an area that's an ecological disaster. It makes sense that Maine would want to protect their natural resources.
Lithium mines produce localized environmental damage, _but so does fossil fuel extraction_. Think about environmental damage from mountaintop removal coal mining, fracking, offshore oil spills, etc.
With fossil fuels, you get localized environmental damage, _plus_ climate change.
With lithium, you get localized environmental damage, but you hopefully support a transition to renewables.
Yet here we are talking about a lithium mine, which is not clean.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/10/tesla-jb-straubel-redwood-ma...
And while nuclear power isn't ideal, it's the only tech that has fully decarbonized power grids at State level.
Otherwise we need battery power on an utterly insane level.
Have you read anything in the intervening decade-and-a-half? Battery and solar power prices have come down by 90%+. Wind by 70%. (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/li-io... for batteries, https://static.dw.com/image/56696354_7.png for the rest). Nuclear power is more expensive than ever, and easily 3x as much as the alternatives.
That said nuclear base load makes a _lot_ more sense.
The city of Milan built a new subway line, and some of the cheaper subway stations cost €8 million. The city of New York added a single wheelchair ramp to Avenue H which cost $14 million. https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/8/17/22629915/mta-looks-to-ramp...
Someone's going to complain "but environmental review is important to protect the environment!" which is why NYC's congestion charge is going to be delayed and litigated for the next 10-20 years in environmental review while cars stuck in traffic spew pollution into the environment.
And someone's going to complain about me mentioning labor unions, too, and admittedly they're sometimes a small part of the problem (when not suing under the environmental review laws) but the Second Avenue Subway still had to give the unions a six-figure payout for using a tunnel boring machine, and every crane has to have someone employed as a full-time oiler because it's still 1910 and we're on steam power. European labor somehow manages to avoid these levels of absurdity.
Not that this is necessarily the top problem. The notoriously free-market pro-business right-wing New York Times (cough, cough) brought over the guy who was in charge of Crossrail, and he was shocked at how many people were standing around the dig site doing nothing. The MTA had no idea why most of them were there getting paid. The MTA also has a bad habit of completing Phase 1 of a project, letting all the contractors who know anything about it go on to other projects, then starting again from scratch on Phase 2 a while later, so that there's absolutely no in-house expertise.
So compare that 30,000 lbs of oil to the amount of lithium in a Tesla battery pack, which is about 138lbs. 138lbs < 30,000lbs
Then figure in that those 30,000lbs of oil all go into the air producing not only c02 which is changing our climate, but particulates which are bad for our health and cognitive function, vs the lithium in a battery pack which can be recycled and/or re-used
This seemm like a large net win to me.
All of that said, yes, all of the resource extraction industry, from the iron and aluminum to the oil and lithium, has a bad history of responsible stewardship of the lands they exploit, and I support forcing them to do a better job.
I think you need to account for the amount of material that was mined to get to that 138lb battery. My understanding is that it's orders of magnitudes more than what gets removed/disrupted for oil. I don't know the figure (and I welcome someone telling me) but I think it could well be in excess of 30,000lbs of raw material mined.
There's also battery recycling to consider.
I don't know which way the result swings; I'm just saying that it's much more complicated to figure out, and far less clear cut, than you suggest.
For example, fracking in California results in 26 acres of toxic storage pools that are leaking and contaminating ground water with specific toxic chemicals:
https://grist.org/accountability/fracking-waste-california-a...
However, every single story about the toxicity of battery production remains vague and I haven't been able to find any that specify what the damage is. I have found that indigenous people are having their land used without much permission or process, but the damage has never been specified.
Does anybody have some specifics about what's going on? Presumably there must be an environmental cost but it's really unclear what it is, or how it compares to the regular destruction that we embrace from fossil fuels.
Greedy lobbyists in the state capital would object to this. Ecotourism is seen by voters as one of Maine’s largest industries. Much of its real estate industry and its most well-known brand (LL Bean) relies on it.
Mines even in mining friendly places is very, very hard. Doing it mining unfriendly places where you have real popular opposition is bordering on impossible.
No shot.
While it is known that lithium itself has environmental issues the potential reuse and benefit of pulling it out of the earth to make batteries will have a very long and positive outcome for us.
And to a certain degree the initial disruption might be totally worth it in the long run in comparison to stuff we just burn away.
“Yet lithium is a metal, and state regulations passed in 2017 prohibit mining for metals in open pits of more than three acres, which would be the only way to cost-effectively extract lithium at Plumbago North. “I don’t know of any underground and manganese or lithium mines in the world,” said Dr. John Slack, a geologist who co-authored a separate upcoming paper on critical minerals in Maine. “Because those metals have a relatively low cost, in terms of their concentration per ton or per ounce, you need to excavate large volumes of rock cheaply in order to economically and profitably produce the metal you’re interested in.””
Basically, Maine demands that whatever mining is done, is done underground, like coal. But open carrier mining is cheaper. If all this lithium is so important, someone will find a way to mine it properly underground, I guess.
"But [the lithium] reserves also would not present the same type of potential environmental issues as ... other base metal sulfide deposits in Maine, such as Bald Mountain. That’s because the Plumbago North deposit does not occur in, or contain, sulfide-rich rocks, said Slack and Simmons. Mining for lithium there would instead be similar to quarrying for granite or gravel."
Are rock queries outlawed? I don't believe so. Thus, is this a lithium rock query or a lithium mineral mine?
The only open pit mine I'm familiar with is measured in the literal thousands of acres. Hell, the local gravel pit that supplies the VERY rural area I live in is over 70 acres.
*) Lithium on Mars? https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012arXiv1208.6311D/abstra...).
I think we’ll wage war over water before we wage one over Lithium.
As a result all lithium deposits we’re created during the formation of the planet as it coalesced out of interstellar dust. Consequently the distribution of Lithium around the planet is pretty even. There’s no “hot spots” of high concentration, and every country has a supply proportional to its land mass.
That, plus the relative abundance of Lithium, means it’s unlikely that fighting a war for Lithium will ever make sense. Much easier and cheaper to just dig in your own backyard, than fight for someone’s backyard that has the same dirt in it.
'Naturally forming' elements on Earth are limited to uranium fission products.
Lithium (also aluminium, magnesium, sodium) distribution is due to it being light and chemically active, thus ending up in crust, while heavier metals (iron, nickel) end up in mantle and core. It takes specific geological circumstances to bring mantle material into crust, so there are 'hot spots'. Lithium is already there, so it is spread somewhat evenly.
I think I saw a projection for a yearly consumption of around 1.7m tons in 2030.
I'd say the biggest issue is simply going to be environmental impact. This is a big reserve that can't be mined because of environmental regulation. That's a lot of money to just pass on, and I don't think that's going to hold.
Put another way: if it was a lot of money they’d find a way to do it underground.
I don't see why wars wouldn't be fought over it, certainly has been the case for oil.
Its not an energy source and the ratio of how expensive it is to mine and how expensive you can sell it is nowhere close to oil.
Fighting wars over lithium deposit would be insanely dumb and that will never happen.
Lithium is not a consumable, once you have it you keep it. We need it now to grow the fleet but once the fleet is replaced recycling will be the most economical way to get it.
How is a $1.5bn deposit, a major, significant source? That's would be about 10 days worth of oil. The whole global lithium market is just $3bn-$4bn pa. The rare earth market is about $2.5bn annually. Seems super low, relative to headlines/concerns/etc.
How are these materials simultaneously of such importance, and also so economically minor. What am I missing here?
My guess is the amount of skill required to get these materials. Miners can be paid pennies and they'll still do the work. Something similar to how garbage takeaway is of very high importance, but economically pretty minor.
Some of the politicians bringing this stuff up as major future risks could personally afford to seriously mitigated on their personal accounts.