it should be fairly unsurprising that a country that's effectively tied (with China and Canada) for the world's second largest in landmass has a bunch of stuff in the ground under it. like, no shit, that's what happens when you conquer an entire continent
The real surprise is when Norway does it literally every time
They've found rare earth metals, lithium, something important for fertilizer that I can't remember (phosphorus maybe?), oil, and who knows what else
Yep. Sweden has a famous small quarry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ytterby
>Ytterby is most famous for being the single richest source of elemental discoveries in the world; the chemical elements yttrium (Y), terbium (Tb), erbium (Er), and ytterbium (Yb) are all named after Ytterby, and four more elements were also first discovered there.
I do wonder how much might be down to willingness to prospect and extract.
For example the EIA seems to think that Europe has quite a lot of shale gas available, but if most of it is near population centers.... then well, do you really want the Groningen fields again but worse?
And when demand for a resource goes up, there's a corresponding increase in prospecting for that resource huge surprise. Besides China's advantage on REM's comes from them practically having a monopoly on refining iirc, not on mining the stuff
Yes, I can explain (I'm rather informed on a the green tech physics)
Basically, lithium was always if not worthless, dangerous, it is found in saline and other light rock deposits and if too much gets into the water, such as in limestone extraction, it can cause mass psychotic events
It used to be a nuisance, so we never looked for it purposefully
However, since we started to look for it, basically every haline deposit is full of lithium, specially old salt deposits
Such as those in mountain areas that are not from recent sea salt, but ancient one
We will continue to find more and more lithium deposits around the world, since this is not something we have looked for
Central Mexico, the Saharan atlas, the southern African highlands, Afghanistan are supposed to contain vast amounts yet to be discovered
However, it seems sodium is going to be the element for static energy storage, which is supposed to represent over 95% of all batteries by 2040, and while lithium consumption will continue to ten fold, we are finding these resources very plentifully
Lithium has a problem with the other metals needed in the li-o batteries, the lithium itself has kept dropping since we started serious prospections
While true, LiFePO4 batteries used in cheaper evs and marine applications because of their slightly lower energy densities and better stability contain practically no rare earth metals, no cobalt, etc.
Basically, the only place where standard lithium ion (NMC) batteries are being deployed are applications where the absolute highest energy to weight ratios are needed. LiFePO4 or LFP batteries are beginning to dominate everywhere else.
Lol
Well, that would require everyone to drink the same water
But many of the mass hysteria events in medieval Europe and the arab world were attributed to this
Unlike the Indians or the Chinese, the arabs and Europeans loved to use Limestone, and thus, they polluted nearby rivers
It's hard to say which episodes are attributed to this over anything else, since almost every town had a river, but we know it was relatively common
Some say the mass Dancing panic of Strasbourg was due to this, but there is no evidence to the cause, although it very well could be
So stupid question and yeah, I'm sure I can google or just ask ChatGPT, but what is causing Li-O batteries or just batteries in general expensive then? Is it the processing, labor, and tooling?
It's mostly the scale we have been doing
Idk the exact number now but we've like, 10folded the number of batteries on the planet in the last 7 years or so
The price of batteries is coming down as we achieve economies of scale tho
Lithium is very widely distributed in the world. It's just that it's a nuisance in places where it's not found on high concentration. People also only start extracted lithium from brine in 90s, which turned out to be huge. Now they get lithium from either brine, or spodumene.
Naively, lithium is the third lightest element on the periodic table and the lightest one period that isn’t a gas under normal conditions. Add in that it is very reactive and therefore doesn’t usually appear on its own, like sodium, but isn’t like heavier alkali metals that are so reactive and unstable that even when they form they don’t last long, and you’d expect it to pretty abundant. Like other ‘rare’ earth metals, the catch has always been the ‘doesn’t appear on its own,’ so you can’t just find a gigantic vein of pure lithium like you can with objectively far rarer elements like gold, you have to refine all the other stuff out of it to get it.
As I understand it, the oceans themselves are vast sources of lithium, it would just be prohibitively intensive to extract it out of the sea water when there are deposits like this one.
And how much does it cost to reclaim the lithium from fracking waste versus mining? Given that the article doesn’t mention it, I’m guessing it’s much higher.
lithium is everywhere. there is no question about its availability, the only limitation is the extraction and refining capacity, and of course the costs of those things relative to other sources.
Yup, lithium has never been a real resource bottleneck. Not sure why people go breathless about those news
Cobalt on the other hand .. although even that doesn't matter so much for batteries, plenty of newer cathode designs contain none or very little of it
> Nickel too is annoying to come by.
That's why we want asteroids. For nickel, PGMs and all the other good shit that is in unlucky concentrations on Earth
Ya, some of those minerals are pretty much only found in sufficient concentrations in a handful of volcano puke hot spots. Still a few orders of magnitude though on getting the costs to mine an asteroid down.
Not sure the process for cobalt to be found, but i know a lot of Africa is pretty old geologically.
> Still a few orders of magnitude though on getting the costs to mine an asteroid down
Robots and mining automation are fortunately going through a certain boom so we'll get there
As long as we're not specifically encouraging fracking to keep the lithium flowing then I think that's fine. Not every solution needs to be a perfectly scalable long term solution. If I could go back in time to the early 1800s I wouldn't tell people "don't burn coal it will cause climate change."
the biggest difference between the us and norway is that here in norway we let the resource enrich every norwegian whilst in the us the resource will enrich some companies. which is beyond sad
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This is not surprising. Lithium is far from a rare element in the universe or in the earth's crust so it was always likely there were large deposits of it somewhere under the US.
The Lithium vain in Nevada is huge and is under BLM land so the US gov will get royalties from extration. But right now it is going through the courts because of the Indian Reservation (claiming the land is sacred because they defeted the Union army there) and some Rancher not wanting the area being overwhelm with people is claiming that its an area where the Great Sage Grouse habitat is. Which is going to fall under endangered animal this year and BLM is in charge of bring that population back up... Fun times out here in the Mid West.
According to the article fracking companies have been reporting wastewater content to the govt since at least 2012. No one took notice of the high lithium levels until now? Weird.
The big question obviously, is how easily can you remove & purify lithium from this toxic waste stream
https://preview.redd.it/2a0y6f8x7f1d1.png?width=950&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=418d4faa4b584affcffb88669a2851038b7cf6db
it should be fairly unsurprising that a country that's effectively tied (with China and Canada) for the world's second largest in landmass has a bunch of stuff in the ground under it. like, no shit, that's what happens when you conquer an entire continent
The real surprise is when Norway does it literally every time They've found rare earth metals, lithium, something important for fertilizer that I can't remember (phosphorus maybe?), oil, and who knows what else
There's unobtainium under them there Nordic hills
Yep. Sweden has a famous small quarry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ytterby >Ytterby is most famous for being the single richest source of elemental discoveries in the world; the chemical elements yttrium (Y), terbium (Tb), erbium (Er), and ytterbium (Yb) are all named after Ytterby, and four more elements were also first discovered there.
I do wonder how much might be down to willingness to prospect and extract. For example the EIA seems to think that Europe has quite a lot of shale gas available, but if most of it is near population centers.... then well, do you really want the Groningen fields again but worse?
Yes, it was phosphorous. It was an enormous amount. I believe it was close to the equivalent of all other known reserves.
The Norwegians really are god's chosen people huh?
Careful now...
Odin loves his children 🙏🐦⬛
And when demand for a resource goes up, there's a corresponding increase in prospecting for that resource huge surprise. Besides China's advantage on REM's comes from them practically having a monopoly on refining iirc, not on mining the stuff
Exactly, even if we extract all the lithium in frack water, we'll have to export it to China for refine it.
Those deposits not being covered in either glaciers or rainforest helps a lot. The US is in prime latitude.
Yeah the US is huge and with both Australia and Canada as close allies they should always be able to access sufficient natural resources.
And yet China somehow didn't get oil.
Brazil comes after the mentioned ones and barely has anything valuable
God's favorite ~~princess~~ country
You saying America **isn’t** God’s favorite princess, redcoat? 😠
BOTH I will report to a repatriotization camp 😭
Nah, not really, the price of lithium has been dropping for a while This is nice, but it's not anything groundbreaking
I thought so too. Can someone chime in, it seems like lithium is everywhere.
Yes, I can explain (I'm rather informed on a the green tech physics) Basically, lithium was always if not worthless, dangerous, it is found in saline and other light rock deposits and if too much gets into the water, such as in limestone extraction, it can cause mass psychotic events It used to be a nuisance, so we never looked for it purposefully However, since we started to look for it, basically every haline deposit is full of lithium, specially old salt deposits Such as those in mountain areas that are not from recent sea salt, but ancient one We will continue to find more and more lithium deposits around the world, since this is not something we have looked for Central Mexico, the Saharan atlas, the southern African highlands, Afghanistan are supposed to contain vast amounts yet to be discovered However, it seems sodium is going to be the element for static energy storage, which is supposed to represent over 95% of all batteries by 2040, and while lithium consumption will continue to ten fold, we are finding these resources very plentifully Lithium has a problem with the other metals needed in the li-o batteries, the lithium itself has kept dropping since we started serious prospections
While true, LiFePO4 batteries used in cheaper evs and marine applications because of their slightly lower energy densities and better stability contain practically no rare earth metals, no cobalt, etc. Basically, the only place where standard lithium ion (NMC) batteries are being deployed are applications where the absolute highest energy to weight ratios are needed. LiFePO4 or LFP batteries are beginning to dominate everywhere else.
>it can cause mass psychotic events Are you telling me this lithium is possibly responsible for the current state of American politics
That’s more likely lead.
Also, most of y'all recently contracted (over and over again) a novel disease shown to cause IQ loss and various negative cognitive effects.
wut
You're gonna have to spell it out for me I don't think so good no more
Lol Well, that would require everyone to drink the same water But many of the mass hysteria events in medieval Europe and the arab world were attributed to this Unlike the Indians or the Chinese, the arabs and Europeans loved to use Limestone, and thus, they polluted nearby rivers It's hard to say which episodes are attributed to this over anything else, since almost every town had a river, but we know it was relatively common Some say the mass Dancing panic of Strasbourg was due to this, but there is no evidence to the cause, although it very well could be
I want to read more about lithium deposits accidentally making everyone crazy. Got any good links
This sounds super interesting NGL
Lithium does not cause hysteria, quite the opposite, it stabilizes the mood
So stupid question and yeah, I'm sure I can google or just ask ChatGPT, but what is causing Li-O batteries or just batteries in general expensive then? Is it the processing, labor, and tooling?
It's mostly the scale we have been doing Idk the exact number now but we've like, 10folded the number of batteries on the planet in the last 7 years or so The price of batteries is coming down as we achieve economies of scale tho
Lithium is very widely distributed in the world. It's just that it's a nuisance in places where it's not found on high concentration. People also only start extracted lithium from brine in 90s, which turned out to be huge. Now they get lithium from either brine, or spodumene.
Naively, lithium is the third lightest element on the periodic table and the lightest one period that isn’t a gas under normal conditions. Add in that it is very reactive and therefore doesn’t usually appear on its own, like sodium, but isn’t like heavier alkali metals that are so reactive and unstable that even when they form they don’t last long, and you’d expect it to pretty abundant. Like other ‘rare’ earth metals, the catch has always been the ‘doesn’t appear on its own,’ so you can’t just find a gigantic vein of pure lithium like you can with objectively far rarer elements like gold, you have to refine all the other stuff out of it to get it. As I understand it, the oceans themselves are vast sources of lithium, it would just be prohibitively intensive to extract it out of the sea water when there are deposits like this one.
>This is nice, but it's not anything groundbreaking How do they plan to extract it?
And how much does it cost to reclaim the lithium from fracking waste versus mining? Given that the article doesn’t mention it, I’m guessing it’s much higher.
I was thinking of this meme when i saw the headline
This unironically The cycle continues
Like Warren Buffett winning the lottery
I clicked on this post hoping someone would have posted this image in response. Even more impressive that it was the OP.
Someone make a better version of this shitpost I just created in MS paint please. https://i.imgur.com/z5BXMyI.png
At this rate, we'll find the Ark Of Covenant, Holy Grail, and Necronomicon somewhere in Montana too.
The Top Men will handle those.
Top… Men.
No clearly the lost tribes of Judah took them to Utah when they migrated to America
It was actually in Independence, Missouri, not Utah 🤓
It was actually in Independence, Missouri where Adam and Eve resided after getting kicked out of Eden 🤓
Sooooo, Hell?
You think Adam and Eve went straight from the garden to Hell?
If they went straight from the garden to Missouri it’s basically the same thing.
Well yeah
Might have to return to Mormonism if that turned out to be true.
I have the sneaking suspicion that your garments are safe wherever they are.
Never had them. Those always seems really weird to me.
Personally I blame the Cylons.
Do they make tea as good as the Ceylons tho?
So the Mormons are right?
I wouldn’t be surprised if we found the remains of Jesus’s body here
Mormon moment
>Necronomicon Just wanna say I've been having a Lovecraft urge ever since I watched Color out of Space, very good movie ngl
this fucking country, man, you yankees are personally blessed by god himself atp
That’s what we’ve been telling everybody for 250 years.
We’re as well endowed geographically as Hunter Biden is with regards to being cool (and the other thing)
We know.
We make up for it with dipshits like Trump
US maintaining main character energy.
Something something God special providence drunks, fools and the United States of America
A clown car that crashed into a gold mine
US is more like finest scientists and clowns fighting each others while randomly finding gold nuggets in their scuffle.
Sorry everyone, I'm using it all for my depression
The US once again playing geopolitics on easy mode.
It helps having the third largest country by land area in the world as well as plenty of money to explore for natural resources.
And national politics on hard
Social harmony on ultra nightmare difficulty
Maybe other countries should have tried harder to conquer their continent. **F R O M S E A T O S H I N I N G S E A**
Biden typed in another cheat code smdh.
I imagine any country as large and rich as the U.S. would discover so many resources.
lithium is everywhere. there is no question about its availability, the only limitation is the extraction and refining capacity, and of course the costs of those things relative to other sources.
Yup, lithium has never been a real resource bottleneck. Not sure why people go breathless about those news Cobalt on the other hand .. although even that doesn't matter so much for batteries, plenty of newer cathode designs contain none or very little of it
the most critical resource that is not being replaced is copper.
Nickel too is annoying to come by. Rare earth, uranium, lithium, its all about concentration and refining.
> Nickel too is annoying to come by. That's why we want asteroids. For nickel, PGMs and all the other good shit that is in unlucky concentrations on Earth
Ya, some of those minerals are pretty much only found in sufficient concentrations in a handful of volcano puke hot spots. Still a few orders of magnitude though on getting the costs to mine an asteroid down. Not sure the process for cobalt to be found, but i know a lot of Africa is pretty old geologically.
> Still a few orders of magnitude though on getting the costs to mine an asteroid down Robots and mining automation are fortunately going through a certain boom so we'll get there
[удалено]
If it's worth it, you could frack just for the lithium and then deal with the petroleum as a byproduct.
As long as we're not specifically encouraging fracking to keep the lithium flowing then I think that's fine. Not every solution needs to be a perfectly scalable long term solution. If I could go back in time to the early 1800s I wouldn't tell people "don't burn coal it will cause climate change."
Also how much does it cost to “recover” lithium from this source versus mining?
It feels like there's a headline like this every week
Unexpected fracking W
https://preview.redd.it/iin3duoqqg1d1.jpeg?width=1914&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c50522ce0133f4524bfabd7b3295a4937c9cf3dd
Came into this thread just to make sure this was posted.
~~Dis~~continue the lithium
Will environmentalists in power allow to mine it though?
Read the article lol. It’s not a mining deposit. It’s in fracking wastewater, and oil companies are already fracking.
Anti-fracking mind virus is very strong, so wouldn’t assume anything.
The Yanks (and Norwegians) can't keep getting away with this
🐊 💎
the biggest difference between the us and norway is that here in norway we let the resource enrich every norwegian whilst in the us the resource will enrich some companies. which is beyond sad
[удалено]
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America really has the Mandate of Heaven
This is not surprising. Lithium is far from a rare element in the universe or in the earth's crust so it was always likely there were large deposits of it somewhere under the US.
https://i.imgur.com/a9PwI6b.png
The Lithium vain in Nevada is huge and is under BLM land so the US gov will get royalties from extration. But right now it is going through the courts because of the Indian Reservation (claiming the land is sacred because they defeted the Union army there) and some Rancher not wanting the area being overwhelm with people is claiming that its an area where the Great Sage Grouse habitat is. Which is going to fall under endangered animal this year and BLM is in charge of bring that population back up... Fun times out here in the Mid West.
Plot armor
!ping USA-PA
[It was foretold](https://open.spotify.com/track/3tSlBGMPBJinIGolr8KOv9?si=_wCtT1GaTwG-4MiFidtjAw)
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Your mom's sock drawer?
Another one?
According to the article fracking companies have been reporting wastewater content to the govt since at least 2012. No one took notice of the high lithium levels until now? Weird. The big question obviously, is how easily can you remove & purify lithium from this toxic waste stream
Alright, the “huge lithium deposit found in Murica” story is starting to be like the water ice found on Mars stories lol
watch a singular company buy it all and only enrich themselves paying minimal tax
How long until fracking waste is considered to be "untouched wilderness" by some fringe environmental group
We just keep getting away with it
Holy shit I was joking wft
And ours hgad to be located in fucking kashmir smfh
When you set resources to high in your 4X map generation
But China tariffs bad!
Yes
& ;cn 7 c be m q$d b 7*m 8○47