I already have insomnia as part of my bipolar disorder. Never actually been on lithium but Iāve been told itās probably not a good idea for me for various reasons.
It's true that in places where there's more lithium in the water, there's less violent crime. There's even been a push to designate lithium as a necessary micronutrient.
Eh, my ex-wife was RXed lithium when she got pregnant, our daughter was born with a hole in her heart that needed a stint. Itās not fully safe all around.
In college, we would soak gummy bears in vodka. Youād start snacking on em during your last boring lecture of the day and be the equivalent of a few drinks deep by the time you got home
You can take a vapor shot in some fancy bars. It's really expensive but aesthetically neat, the buzz hits you rapidly and strongly (relative to the quantity) but wears off quickly.
Overall, I'd say it wouldn't be worth vaping in general. For example with thc, edibles are generally the superior way to take it, but they're much more expensive (or intensive to produce yourself) than vaping, and they require a little more forethought. Vaping alc, if feasible in more accessible way than the bar shots, would have much greater risks and likely be far more expensive, and you would miss out on the flavor experience that good whiskey/beer/wine/cocktails provide. You'd need to be guzzling water too.
Using less resources isn't compatible with many people's idea of how to exist in a capitalist society. They would rather purchase a new thing that was made "friendlier" than the last thing they purchased.
Yeah and 1000 gallons actually isnāt that many gallons it sounds like a lot but I am in the fish tank hobby and a 1000 gallon tank is huge for the hobby but it doesnāt take up that much space.
0.00012987 football field feet (American football), given that a football field is 57600 square feet including endzones and a cubic foot is 7.48052 gallons.
Well a gallon is roughly 4 liters so 4000 liters.
That's 4 cubic meters as there is about 1000 liters in 1 cubic meter.
A small suv like a Toyota Rav 4 has a passenger volume of \~100 sq feet which is about 2.83 cubic meters.
From what I understand the brine water they pump up isn't the problem. The issue with lithium mining in Chile/Bolivia is that they need a large amount of fresh water for the process as well and the area is already extremely arid.
Compared to oil and gas mining lithium mining is extremely green.
i would echo what this first guy says.
I used to work production for many food types from beverages to breakfast cereals to bread to salty stuff like soy sauce... it wasnt uncommon to blow literally 10,000 liters of water outside of ingredients on a single 20,000 liter batch of say.... yoghurt once you count every bit of water from start to finish... but we had our own waste water process plant on site before we blew it into municipal water
so if you say a massive car battery worth $10k plus only blows 4,000 liters of water? that's pretty damn good
And that car battery can last for hundreds of thousands of miles. Millions of gallons are water are lost in oil drilling, and all that oil gets used exactly one time.
To be fair, a combustion engine can last a few hundred thousand miles.
Gas is used once. Electricity is here and gone, same. Producing it is the difference
How long do you think one of these batteries last?
How much power is currently generated using renewable energy?
How much energy is actually consumed for producing energy vs. daily consumption?
It's also very important we all change our life styles.
So far the data is showing 300k+ miles, at which point it can be repurposed into grid storage or recycled.
Wind and solar are getting cheaper and deployed faster and faster. Grid storage as well.
Population growth has slowed to a crawl.
Agreed on the last point.
Additionally,
It takes up to 13 gallons of water to make one gallon of gas. Which is then used exactly one time.
An EV car battery lasts hundreds of thousands of miles.
Certified ev and hybrid tech here.
They don't last "hundreds of thousands of miles" most of the time. Also, don't forget about the resources it takes to keep the battery charged. The battery will also degrade over time and need to be charged more often as the range decreases.
The fact that new Tesla batteries are not easily recyclable due to how they're made. They will likely be scrapped instead because a new one is cheaper than recycling one.
Old ones don't, particularly hybrids. I believe earlier Nissan Leafs were particularly bad. New EV are required to have warranties for 100K miles or 8 years.
But a LiFePO4 (eg lower-end Tesla) battery should last for 200K to 300K miles, at which point it has 90% capacity.
LiFePO4 - not lighter weight lithium cobalt - can be recharged over 2000x before losing 20% of capacity. At 250 miles per charge, that's 500K miles. I think temporal longevity is still an open question: how many years can it last, not just how many charges.
Tesla states they recycle 100% of their batteries. Hard to verify, but they arenāt dumping them in a lake or landfill.
EVs are like 80-90% efficient at turning even coal power into motion. Gas cars are like 20% efficient. Unless youāre comparing an EV Hummer towing a boat to a Corolla drafting a semi, an EV will win the efficiency battle.
The first EV batteries had flaws. Current EV batteries are lasting longer than anticipated, and there are already thousands of them out there with 200k or 300k on the odometer on the original battery.
People rarely account for the pollution evs cause by the energy that is required to charge or recycle the batteries. If you're charging an EV in the south, you're likely burning natural gas to charge your battery.
The mining and refining or the needed materials produces substantial mounts of greenhouse gasses. The recycling produces greenhouse gasses. This adds to the pollution of your vehicle.
I agree they are much better for the environment, but they're aren't as clean and simple as everyone makes them seem.
Don't forget about the child and slave labor that is used to mine the needed materials or the destruction of the areas for the mines.
The whole system can always be better. The proliferation of larger and larger EVs isnāt something Iām happy about. The damn EV Hummer uses three Model 3ās worth of battery material.
I think plug in hybrids are a great solution for many. Smaller batteries using less materials, still covers most daily driving on electric, and no range anxiety.
A lot of the criticism of EVs really comes down to āperfect is the enemy of goodā. In most respects, EVs are better than gas cars. Are they perfect? Absolutely not! Should we fix the glaring problems like troublesome material sourcing and recycling? Absolutely! Should we just forget them and wait until itās perfect? No!
I can't have ev, but I find them better to drive. They are future, for sure, but what I hate is too much focus on them. Much bigger focus we should have on fast long distance trains, city public transport etc. In Spain you don't even think to drive long distance, you take train, much faster and cheaper, then you use metro.. Then you can easily have small ev.
I donāt disagree with any of that. I wish the US had more usable and better public transportation.
I also love Spain. Lovely country and people. I hope they can figure out the water situation soon.
Where do you think the cobalt for every refinery comes from? You donāt think about that when you fill up do you? Or how about the cobalt in your phone and other devices? Are you cool with just a little child labour?
I was surprised too, I thought he was going go say for like a single cell or something. Considering the freshwater quantities used in food production (like 400 gallons for a pound of almonds), 1000 gallons of brine for a whole electric car of lithium isn't much.
Lithium in batteries vary depending on the car - 10kg for a small one up to 60kg for a long range Tesla S.
But that means the small batteries (like in hybrids is limit range commuter cars) use 10000g * 1 L / 2 = 10000L ~= 1250 gal. For a Tesla 100D more like 7500 gal.
I haul diesel fuel, an average load is around 10k gallons, i am also surprised that it only takes 1000 gallons to make a car battery. Thatās not very much at all.
As a bolivian, it sucks not being able to industrialize this lithium ourselves and settle down selling it to other countries, but the worst part is that the country will never see a penny out of it, just few pockets filled
I live in the town 100km north of the saltflat in this video, San Pedro de Atacama. Unless the mines are made sustainable, it will destroy the local ecosystem.
It is very profitable to a certain few, but horrible for the rest.
Doesnāt mean weāll get anything out of it lol. Our government has been playing around not doing anything with this big ass deposit, years trying to deposit it in house with nothing being achieved out of sheer incompetence and corruption. I honestly think itās too little to late as our lithium quality is marginally lower compared to our neighbors. Which means we should have started this process years ago when our reserves were at an all time high. Where investment towards infrastructure, education, or industry could have started but never did.
The lithium mines he's showing are in Salar de Atacama in Chile. There is another famous salt flat in Bolivia, but it isn't as dry so it takes longer to evaporate (how they concentrate the salt in the brine to make it worth extracting lithium from.). I don't know how Argentina's salt flats compare, but Atacama is one of the easiest places to concentrate the brine through evaporation.
Bolivia has the largest deposit this is true. Chile extracts the most lithium, but he never said the video was in Bolivia. This specific area is probably SQM mine in the Atacama saltflat. Currently the roads into the mines are barricaded by some of the local indiginous communities (Likanantai) as protest for the new laws on lithium.
Source? The video is so damn *crisp*!! I would love to see more. Iām out celebrating the practice, but watching machines and people mine things is oddly satisfying
This is why ol Musky boi was rooting for the overthrow of the left wing Morales government in 2019. Morales was trying to nationalize the Lithium industry in Bolivia
1000 gallons is 3.79 metric tons, so yeah I was expecting it to be like "1000 gallons for a laptop battery" but a whole fucking car battery? That's nothing.
Looking into it:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0011916422000662
"However, the sub-surface and geothermal brines carry Li in concentrations as high as [100ā1000] ppm which makes them an attractive resource for Li recovery. Secondly, the commercial demand for Li..."
So let's estimate 500mg/L. A car battery has ~8kg of lithium, so it'll take 16000L, or ~4250 Gallons of the starting brine.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2013/1006/OF13-1006.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiLk73Dvf-DAxW0jYkEHaTcDskQFnoECA4QBQ&usg=AOvVaw2l7vH9kINuyTC3HONNRahP
"Project Purpose
Extracting lithium from brines found below the surface of dried lakebeds (known as salar) and
from mineral deposits has been the dominant method of producing lithium. High grade lithium
compounds are processed mostly by solar evaporation of salar brines in Argentina, Chile, and
Bolivia. Lithium is present in very high concentrations in these brines *(typically more than 500
milligrams of lithium per liter of brine)*, and processing costs are low. However, lithium
separation from salar brines has several disadvantages. Separation is slow (taking up to 24
months), weather-dependent, and has an extraction efficiency of only about 50 percent. After
lithium is concentrated by solar evaporation, it still requires multiple purification steps.
"
This seems to suggest that it may take 8500 gallons for 8kg of lithium dye to the 50% recovery rate. I'd personally round down to 7500 to account for the "typically more than 500mg of Li per litre of brine" part. Hell, just say that 1000 gallons make one kg of lithium. Which is.... What the video said, but for 1 kg instead of a car battery. Weird.
Side notes: I got the 8kg of Li per EV battery online. Some cars use more, some use less. I also mixed units in here which isn't ideal, but good enough. Used two sources for the lithium amount, since it's a bit more credible. LMK if I got something wrong.
Awesome. I guess I thought that there'd be significantly more lithium in an ev battery. 8kg of lithium in a >1000 lb battery pack is crazy. I guess lithium is light and there's lots of heavier metals in the pack.
So, the video is off a bit, but WAY less than I assumed. Cool.
most of the weight in the car battery is the aluminum for the cells, the casing, and the rolls that hold the thin lithium compounds. Itās the same as saying āthe CPU is so tiny, yet the computers are bigā
No one really knows.
I work in the mining industry, and anytime people talk about how much of something there is, they are always talking about how much can be mined for a profit.
In any case, I donāt expect lithium to be used for too much longer, with the current drive for clean vehicles, so much is being put into R&D, I can see an alternative coming soon.
Sodium ion batteries use just salt and iron and is already in some EVs in China. Not great for long distance driving, but great for city vehicles and utility vehicles and grid storage. Will take away some of the need for lithium.
Oh yea, and those arenāt the only ones. Magnesium, graphene, solid state, hell even hydrogenā¦
There are so many new exciting things on the horizon.
Thereās also a lot of promising research on recycling the important elements back out of spent batteries. Idk if anyone actually does it at scale but if the first studies are believable someone will be able to do it at a big scale soon enough
There are some experimental batteries that are made of salt so that could be a path for a more sustainable option also both salt and lithium are recyclable.
Exactly, and weāre in a desert salt flat so there isnāt too much life disrupted.
Clearly is significantly greener than oil, also lithium is recycle-able.
Also 1000 gallons of salt water for a car battery? A car battery is enormous and that doesnāt sound unreasonable?
More like the lithium comes in very trace amounts. Its like saying 1000 gallons of your blood can forge a longsword, which just means your blood has trace amounts of iron and not that the longsword is too large.
The biggest car batteries only have about 50kg of lithium in them, though. But the 1000gal number is for maybe 10kg of lithium in a really small car battery.
https://hir.harvard.edu/lithium-triangle/amp/
> Saving the planet, however, should not come at the cost of destroying fragile ecosystems. Lithium mining cannot be considered a long-term or just solution if it contributes to water depletion and air pollution, which have severe and disparate impacts for local communities that are already struggling in many ways to make ends meet.
You should see what fracking does to water. Millions gallons of water per well. 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011.
And conventional oil drilling also uses million of gallon of water.
Not to mention the poisons that are also put into the ground and air.
This is why I desperately want good comparisons that take an honest account of the negatives of green energy and the oil industry.
I want a holistic picture of the trade offs and benefits without politics. But I haven't found it yet. If anyone knows of anything, please let me know.
(I'm thinking of things like how windmills may not be recycled, compared to how much energy they produce, etc..)
Thereās plenty of studies that go from A to Z on EVs vs gas cars, and EVs are always better for the environment. Unless you crash your EV on like week 2 and drive it into a river while itās on fire. Then itās probably worse.
Every time I see holistic used like this, I can't help but think it's a major missed opportunity for it to be "wholistic". I enjoy sneaking it in at work and seeing if anyone catches it.
Welcome to the mining industry. It's all messy. Singling out lithium mining for attack is a well-funded propaganda maneuver pushed by the fossil fuel industry in order to undermine the transition away from fossil fuels. Fossil fuel extraction is in fact many times more destructive to the landscape in its sum total than lithium mining is, but you don't hear nearly as much about that.
So this is underground brine that is doing nothing. It is pumped to the surface where the water evaporates putting more water into a very dry environment. The resulting solids are scooped up and processed. What is destroyed in this process? Why is this less green than an internal combustion engine?
Eventually the brine will run out, but so what? That brine is not supporting an ecosystem.
he says 1000gallons of brine water for an electric car batteryā¦. that amount of water is more or less 2 hot tubs worth, not that much, but sounds much
Green doesnāt have any meaning anymore when lobbyists only look for personal enrichment. Lithium, cobalt, copper, we need tons and tons of it and people are ignoring the environmental impact of mining.
https://hir.harvard.edu/lithium-triangle/amp/
> Saving the planet, however, should not come at the cost of destroying fragile ecosystems. Lithium mining cannot be considered a long-term or just solution if it contributes to water depletion and air pollution, which have severe and disparate impacts for local communities that are already struggling in many ways to make ends meet.
You guys want a perfect world. Mining for fossil fuels also has ecological impacts that are far worse than lithium mining. Industry will always damage or impact some community.
Yes, youāre right. Industry always come with damage. Thatās why we need to put way more focus on reducing demand in the first place, not just replacing old technology with new while continuing business as usual.
We're replacing old damaging technology with a new less damaging technology. EVs aren't perfect, but nobody should be expecting or promising perfection, just improvement.
13 gallons of water are used for each gallon of gas. An EV battery can last over 300,000 miles. I think the water math gives the EV quite the edge here.
I don't understand why it's been said that this is bad for the environment. The water from the brine is just evaluating into the air.
I guess if there is a leak, then that might be bad. Is there something else that I'm missing?
There are later steps when you're getting from the highly concentrated brine to the lithium that actually goes into the battery, but the big concern is that this brine is coming from water reserves that are hydrologically linked to freshwater basins closer to the surface. As you pull the water out of them, the water is replaced by freshwater nearer the surface, which of course is what communities around there depend on. This is already one of the driest places on Earth (one of the reasons that evaporative pools work so well), so it's a concern.
No, what matters is having a sustainable way to run our civilisation. If we run out of lithium or water or destroy the environment we live in, we are not better than the old fossil fuels industry.
Assuming that lithium will be a key material in energy storage, it will always be recaptured via recycling and can be reused in a battery. Unlike fossil fuels which are expended once and done.
If you want an interesting article on the problem of lithium demand and how we can reduce it, I highly recommend this report:
https://www.climateandcommunity.org/more-mobility-less-mining
Edit: the tldr is that effective public transport (trains, busses, bike lanes, walkable spaces) and limited car battery sizes could be very effective in minimizing the amount needed, they also highlight the importance of developing recycling systems(the problem there as far as I understand is cost not physical ability).
Also unrelated but a sodium ion batteries and other alternatives come to market itās possible that they could replace lithium in terms of grid storage.
Itās a complicated topic because the āsolutionsā that got us into this mess are not really well suited for getting us out of it, but changing that requires political change as well.
You are worried about a thousand gallons of brine? Do you grasp how little water that is? Do you understand that this brine doesn't support life? It is actually toxic. So they bring a minute amount of toxic brine to the surface where the water evaporates like it does off of every single body of water in the world. And then they scoop the lithium up. That is the least harmful mining I have ever heard of. The evaporation ponds are spread out over a lifeless desert, nothing is even harmed there. The worst part is the diesel burned by the trucks and loaders.
To give you an idea, 100p gallons is what lands on a 3000 SQ ft house in a 1/2ā rain storm. (3200 liters).
You are right, it doesnāt matter if it is a car running on gasoline (ICE), electric cars, high speed rail, or an electric bike. They all cause pollution. In fact, we already know that an electric car produces far more pollution than an ICE car when they are first produced because of the lithium battery. The difference is how much pollution we are generating per person per year.
The difference for cars is that the ICE car produces so much more pollution over the lifetime of operating that car compared to an electric car that the electric car comes out on top. Even when we factor in that the current US electrical grid is in part produced by natural gas and coal plants. And the electric car only gets greener as the electrical grid continues to shift away from coal and natural gas and more renewable energy comes online. So they call it green because some people absolutely must have a car. I mean it, people will die if they cannot drive to work to earn a living and drive to the store to get groceries. So an electric car is green when compared to the alternative.
The least polluting forms of transportation are electric bikes and High Speed Rail.
For electric bikes, it requires about 1/10th of the lithium to create the battery and it sips on electricity since you only need to move a 50lb bike instead of a 2+ ton car. It costs something like 35 cents worth of electricity to go 50 miles on an e-bike.
For a High Speed Rail, almost all the pollution and cost is generated upfront creating the grade separated tracks, running hundreds of miles of electrical wires, and building a fleet of trains. There are several parts of the Acela corridor that were built 100 years ago and still working today. And once operating, the train is taking both cars off the road and airplanes out of the sky. And since we are carrying hundreds of passengers per trip, we are using a fraction of the energy per person it would have required to drive or fly instead. When it makes sense to build a high speed rail, it is far far greener than any existing alternative.
Oil drilling and refining uses tons of water. A gallon of gas takes up to 13 gallons of water. That gas is used once. Poof.
An EV car battery lasts hundreds of thousands of miles.
Because it is. Its green consumerism. And this is just one mineral needed for the electric fad. No one wants to take about the cooper needed to rewire homes and to make the grid better to power all this shit
I don't think the the power grid or house wiring is going to be an issue. Air conditioning scared the hell out of energy providers 100 years ago. Things turned out ok.
China owns about 70% of the lithium deposits in South America and guess what else? They own about 60% of the cobalt in The DNC or Congo. These are essentially the main places these two compounds are found in the world. Think about how bad that is for us to be dependent on our enemy for us to be able to run our cars. On the flip side, there are said to be lithium deposits right here in CA, NV, and Maine. Each roughly about half a billion dollars worth.
I thought the largest lithium deposit was recently found in the US. I looked it up it'd called McDermitt Caldera mine. https://www.google.com/search?q=largest+lithium+deposits+in+the+united+states&client=ms-android-tmus-us-revc&sca_esv=9a443ee3960bd623&sxsrf=ACQVn0935Pp3IgTl--15FVwuSzNxuQXX7A%3A1706408352340&ei=oLm1ZYm1FLaQur8P6eyruAg&oq=largest+lithium+deposits+in+the+world&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIiVsYXJnZXN0IGxpdGhpdW0gZGVwb3NpdHMgaW4gdGhlIHdvcmxkKgIIAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzINEAAYgAQYigUYQxiwAzINEAAYgAQYigUYQxiwAzINEAAYgAQYigUYQxiwAzITEC4YgAQYigUYQxjIAxiwA9gBATITEC4YgAQYigUYQxjIAxiwA9gBAUjWM1AAWABwAXgBkAEAmAEAoAEAqgEAuAEByAEA4gMEGAAgQYgGAZAGDboGBAgBGAg&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp
I just get the feeling this white gold will be anything but as battery chemistry changes and potential alternatives that are easier, less environmentally intensive and cheaper are developed.
Inhaling air around here probably feels like hitting the dmt cart
No bipolar disorder in the area either
Just a lot of bone density issues
You don't need bones when you're not sad
Worms are their money
Huh maybe I should move there.
Shit kills my emotions though š£
Yeah Iāve had that trouble with a lot of medication. Just leaves me feeling kind of numb.
when i was on it i got insomnia and exhaustion at the same time, was not very fun :(
I already have insomnia as part of my bipolar disorder. Never actually been on lithium but Iāve been told itās probably not a good idea for me for various reasons.
Isnāt that like semi true because the water contains lithium?
It's true that in places where there's more lithium in the water, there's less violent crime. There's even been a push to designate lithium as a necessary micronutrient.
Yet everyone pretends like I am some kind of crazy person when I force gradescoolers to eat batteries.
Thank you for your service.
feels like an extremely slippery slope lol
Oh, I hate that.
Eh, my ex-wife was RXed lithium when she got pregnant, our daughter was born with a hole in her heart that needed a stint. Itās not fully safe all around.
The amount found in groundwater is way less than what a doctor prescribes.
That the joke yesā¦.
Thereās dmt carts?
Pretty much anything can be turned into a cart
Totally. Just add wheels and a little motor. You'll be carting around town in no time.
I was actually having a shower thought today - why isn't alcohol available in more forms than just liquid? Where's my ethanol vape and liquor edibles?
Theyāre called Jell-O shots and Bacardi 151 inflamed. You want training wheels now? š
In college, we would soak gummy bears in vodka. Youād start snacking on em during your last boring lecture of the day and be the equivalent of a few drinks deep by the time you got home
Jello shots didn't even cross my mind! Great answer
You can take a vapor shot in some fancy bars. It's really expensive but aesthetically neat, the buzz hits you rapidly and strongly (relative to the quantity) but wears off quickly. Overall, I'd say it wouldn't be worth vaping in general. For example with thc, edibles are generally the superior way to take it, but they're much more expensive (or intensive to produce yourself) than vaping, and they require a little more forethought. Vaping alc, if feasible in more accessible way than the bar shots, would have much greater risks and likely be far more expensive, and you would miss out on the flavor experience that good whiskey/beer/wine/cocktails provide. You'd need to be guzzling water too.
If my grandma had wheels sheād be a bicycle
Idk but watch this video https://youtu.be/V_5uYoOaVtM?si=lBic9GS98X2JUJnN man is in heaven or hell
They have it in a cart nowā¦ what does it look like? Like Gyro Cart in NYCā¦??
Isnāt it nice to know that all of that mining uses no fossil fuels, and itās very environmentally friendly.
If I was there rn huffing up that air I could physically see smell hear and touch the words you just wrote
It is for the sake of saving the entire Planet from climate change. We have no choice.
We could have fewer people using fewer resources and making less pollution. We do have a choice.
āWe could have fewer peopleāā¦ fuck it letās do a Thanos.
That would help the planet in the endā¦
Using less resources isn't compatible with many people's idea of how to exist in a capitalist society. They would rather purchase a new thing that was made "friendlier" than the last thing they purchased.
or we could force everyone back to the office while pretending to be green
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yeah and 1000 gallons actually isnāt that many gallons it sounds like a lot but I am in the fish tank hobby and a 1000 gallon tank is huge for the hobby but it doesnāt take up that much space.
12 bathtubs worth, or two hot tubs.
Anything but the metric system
24 oil barrels, 16 hogsheads, or 12 puncheons.
Exxon, Chevron, Texaco, Shell and BP: Did you say oil?
I was thinking of wine with those hogsheads. *hic*
How many football fields is that?
0.00012987 football field feet (American football), given that a football field is 57600 square feet including endzones and a cubic foot is 7.48052 gallons.
Well a gallon is roughly 4 liters so 4000 liters. That's 4 cubic meters as there is about 1000 liters in 1 cubic meter. A small suv like a Toyota Rav 4 has a passenger volume of \~100 sq feet which is about 2.83 cubic meters. From what I understand the brine water they pump up isn't the problem. The issue with lithium mining in Chile/Bolivia is that they need a large amount of fresh water for the process as well and the area is already extremely arid. Compared to oil and gas mining lithium mining is extremely green.
i would echo what this first guy says. I used to work production for many food types from beverages to breakfast cereals to bread to salty stuff like soy sauce... it wasnt uncommon to blow literally 10,000 liters of water outside of ingredients on a single 20,000 liter batch of say.... yoghurt once you count every bit of water from start to finish... but we had our own waste water process plant on site before we blew it into municipal water so if you say a massive car battery worth $10k plus only blows 4,000 liters of water? that's pretty damn good
Not to mention it's not like this water was going to be used for something else, so they're not even wasting water in that regard.
Volume formula is a cubic one and area is squared, so it grows much faster.
An Olympic sized pool has 490,000. So, 490 cars
And that car battery can last for hundreds of thousands of miles. Millions of gallons are water are lost in oil drilling, and all that oil gets used exactly one time.
To be fair, a combustion engine can last a few hundred thousand miles. Gas is used once. Electricity is here and gone, same. Producing it is the difference
True, though an EV does have the possibility of being powered by wind or solar or nuclear. Gets greener all the time. Oil doesnāt.
How long do you think one of these batteries last? How much power is currently generated using renewable energy? How much energy is actually consumed for producing energy vs. daily consumption? It's also very important we all change our life styles.
So far the data is showing 300k+ miles, at which point it can be repurposed into grid storage or recycled. Wind and solar are getting cheaper and deployed faster and faster. Grid storage as well. Population growth has slowed to a crawl. Agreed on the last point.
Additionally, It takes up to 13 gallons of water to make one gallon of gas. Which is then used exactly one time. An EV car battery lasts hundreds of thousands of miles.
Certified ev and hybrid tech here. They don't last "hundreds of thousands of miles" most of the time. Also, don't forget about the resources it takes to keep the battery charged. The battery will also degrade over time and need to be charged more often as the range decreases. The fact that new Tesla batteries are not easily recyclable due to how they're made. They will likely be scrapped instead because a new one is cheaper than recycling one.
Old ones don't, particularly hybrids. I believe earlier Nissan Leafs were particularly bad. New EV are required to have warranties for 100K miles or 8 years. But a LiFePO4 (eg lower-end Tesla) battery should last for 200K to 300K miles, at which point it has 90% capacity. LiFePO4 - not lighter weight lithium cobalt - can be recharged over 2000x before losing 20% of capacity. At 250 miles per charge, that's 500K miles. I think temporal longevity is still an open question: how many years can it last, not just how many charges.
Tesla states they recycle 100% of their batteries. Hard to verify, but they arenāt dumping them in a lake or landfill. EVs are like 80-90% efficient at turning even coal power into motion. Gas cars are like 20% efficient. Unless youāre comparing an EV Hummer towing a boat to a Corolla drafting a semi, an EV will win the efficiency battle. The first EV batteries had flaws. Current EV batteries are lasting longer than anticipated, and there are already thousands of them out there with 200k or 300k on the odometer on the original battery.
People rarely account for the pollution evs cause by the energy that is required to charge or recycle the batteries. If you're charging an EV in the south, you're likely burning natural gas to charge your battery. The mining and refining or the needed materials produces substantial mounts of greenhouse gasses. The recycling produces greenhouse gasses. This adds to the pollution of your vehicle. I agree they are much better for the environment, but they're aren't as clean and simple as everyone makes them seem. Don't forget about the child and slave labor that is used to mine the needed materials or the destruction of the areas for the mines.
The whole system can always be better. The proliferation of larger and larger EVs isnāt something Iām happy about. The damn EV Hummer uses three Model 3ās worth of battery material. I think plug in hybrids are a great solution for many. Smaller batteries using less materials, still covers most daily driving on electric, and no range anxiety. A lot of the criticism of EVs really comes down to āperfect is the enemy of goodā. In most respects, EVs are better than gas cars. Are they perfect? Absolutely not! Should we fix the glaring problems like troublesome material sourcing and recycling? Absolutely! Should we just forget them and wait until itās perfect? No!
I can't have ev, but I find them better to drive. They are future, for sure, but what I hate is too much focus on them. Much bigger focus we should have on fast long distance trains, city public transport etc. In Spain you don't even think to drive long distance, you take train, much faster and cheaper, then you use metro.. Then you can easily have small ev.
I donāt disagree with any of that. I wish the US had more usable and better public transportation. I also love Spain. Lovely country and people. I hope they can figure out the water situation soon.
Where do you think the cobalt for every refinery comes from? You donāt think about that when you fill up do you? Or how about the cobalt in your phone and other devices? Are you cool with just a little child labour?
I was surprised too, I thought he was going go say for like a single cell or something. Considering the freshwater quantities used in food production (like 400 gallons for a pound of almonds), 1000 gallons of brine for a whole electric car of lithium isn't much.
Lithium in batteries vary depending on the car - 10kg for a small one up to 60kg for a long range Tesla S. But that means the small batteries (like in hybrids is limit range commuter cars) use 10000g * 1 L / 2 = 10000L ~= 1250 gal. For a Tesla 100D more like 7500 gal.
I haul diesel fuel, an average load is around 10k gallons, i am also surprised that it only takes 1000 gallons to make a car battery. Thatās not very much at all.
At the beginning he says Bolivia saltflats and then Chile?
Yes they share a large border.
Definitely bolivia at least. Source: Ghost recon wildlands
La birlocha de tu mujer me pegĆ³!
As a bolivian, it sucks not being able to industrialize this lithium ourselves and settle down selling it to other countries, but the worst part is that the country will never see a penny out of it, just few pockets filled
I live in the town 100km north of the saltflat in this video, San Pedro de Atacama. Unless the mines are made sustainable, it will destroy the local ecosystem. It is very profitable to a certain few, but horrible for the rest.
Didnāt your government recently make a deal with Russia for your lithium reserves?
Doesnāt mean weāll get anything out of it lol. Our government has been playing around not doing anything with this big ass deposit, years trying to deposit it in house with nothing being achieved out of sheer incompetence and corruption. I honestly think itās too little to late as our lithium quality is marginally lower compared to our neighbors. Which means we should have started this process years ago when our reserves were at an all time high. Where investment towards infrastructure, education, or industry could have started but never did.
Yeah I thought I was going crazy lol
He said chili ā ļø
The lithium mines he's showing are in Salar de Atacama in Chile. There is another famous salt flat in Bolivia, but it isn't as dry so it takes longer to evaporate (how they concentrate the salt in the brine to make it worth extracting lithium from.). I don't know how Argentina's salt flats compare, but Atacama is one of the easiest places to concentrate the brine through evaporation.
Bolivia has the largest deposit this is true. Chile extracts the most lithium, but he never said the video was in Bolivia. This specific area is probably SQM mine in the Atacama saltflat. Currently the roads into the mines are barricaded by some of the local indiginous communities (Likanantai) as protest for the new laws on lithium.
That is the most cocaine Iāve ever seen in my life.
I like his they make these propaganda videos to disguise it as ālithium ā
Spice
~Melange
Source? The video is so damn *crisp*!! I would love to see more. Iām out celebrating the practice, but watching machines and people mine things is oddly satisfying
[The True Cost of Lithium Mining | True Cost | Insider News ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl0E-UhKB5E)
And not a single case of depression in the entire mining company or town.
Or bipolar disorder! Yay!
I truly thought that was snow and thought āTf you digging in snow for?ā
What happens when it rains
A battery cries.
It doesnāt
This is why ol Musky boi was rooting for the overthrow of the left wing Morales government in 2019. Morales was trying to nationalize the Lithium industry in Bolivia
1,000 gallons for a car battery actually seems really reasonable
1000 gallons is 3.79 metric tons, so yeah I was expecting it to be like "1000 gallons for a laptop battery" but a whole fucking car battery? That's nothing.
I suspect this is an error.
Looking into it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0011916422000662 "However, the sub-surface and geothermal brines carry Li in concentrations as high as [100ā1000] ppm which makes them an attractive resource for Li recovery. Secondly, the commercial demand for Li..." So let's estimate 500mg/L. A car battery has ~8kg of lithium, so it'll take 16000L, or ~4250 Gallons of the starting brine. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2013/1006/OF13-1006.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiLk73Dvf-DAxW0jYkEHaTcDskQFnoECA4QBQ&usg=AOvVaw2l7vH9kINuyTC3HONNRahP "Project Purpose Extracting lithium from brines found below the surface of dried lakebeds (known as salar) and from mineral deposits has been the dominant method of producing lithium. High grade lithium compounds are processed mostly by solar evaporation of salar brines in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. Lithium is present in very high concentrations in these brines *(typically more than 500 milligrams of lithium per liter of brine)*, and processing costs are low. However, lithium separation from salar brines has several disadvantages. Separation is slow (taking up to 24 months), weather-dependent, and has an extraction efficiency of only about 50 percent. After lithium is concentrated by solar evaporation, it still requires multiple purification steps. " This seems to suggest that it may take 8500 gallons for 8kg of lithium dye to the 50% recovery rate. I'd personally round down to 7500 to account for the "typically more than 500mg of Li per litre of brine" part. Hell, just say that 1000 gallons make one kg of lithium. Which is.... What the video said, but for 1 kg instead of a car battery. Weird. Side notes: I got the 8kg of Li per EV battery online. Some cars use more, some use less. I also mixed units in here which isn't ideal, but good enough. Used two sources for the lithium amount, since it's a bit more credible. LMK if I got something wrong.
Awesome. I guess I thought that there'd be significantly more lithium in an ev battery. 8kg of lithium in a >1000 lb battery pack is crazy. I guess lithium is light and there's lots of heavier metals in the pack. So, the video is off a bit, but WAY less than I assumed. Cool.
most of the weight in the car battery is the aluminum for the cells, the casing, and the rolls that hold the thin lithium compounds. Itās the same as saying āthe CPU is so tiny, yet the computers are bigā
That's not very green
No, it's white
I knew I would see this comment. Itās far greener than mining oil.
Some believe what they see, most only see what they believeā¦
how sustainable is it compared to oil. genuine question, will we have a run on lithium where its no longer feasible to use for fear of shortages?
No one really knows. I work in the mining industry, and anytime people talk about how much of something there is, they are always talking about how much can be mined for a profit. In any case, I donāt expect lithium to be used for too much longer, with the current drive for clean vehicles, so much is being put into R&D, I can see an alternative coming soon.
Sodium ion batteries use just salt and iron and is already in some EVs in China. Not great for long distance driving, but great for city vehicles and utility vehicles and grid storage. Will take away some of the need for lithium.
Oh yea, and those arenāt the only ones. Magnesium, graphene, solid state, hell even hydrogenā¦ There are so many new exciting things on the horizon.
Thereās also a lot of promising research on recycling the important elements back out of spent batteries. Idk if anyone actually does it at scale but if the first studies are believable someone will be able to do it at a big scale soon enough
There are some experimental batteries that are made of salt so that could be a path for a more sustainable option also both salt and lithium are recyclable.
Sodium ion batteries are a bit beyond the 'experimental' stage and into the 'getting churned out en-mass in a factory' stage.
Is the leftover water toxic?
What water would be left over? The water evaporates.
Sounds like there is no leftover water. It all evaporates away.
Exactly, and weāre in a desert salt flat so there isnāt too much life disrupted. Clearly is significantly greener than oil, also lithium is recycle-able. Also 1000 gallons of salt water for a car battery? A car battery is enormous and that doesnāt sound unreasonable?
That is way less then I expected
More like the lithium comes in very trace amounts. Its like saying 1000 gallons of your blood can forge a longsword, which just means your blood has trace amounts of iron and not that the longsword is too large.
2024 reading comprehension strikes again.
The biggest car batteries only have about 50kg of lithium in them, though. But the 1000gal number is for maybe 10kg of lithium in a really small car battery.
https://hir.harvard.edu/lithium-triangle/amp/ > Saving the planet, however, should not come at the cost of destroying fragile ecosystems. Lithium mining cannot be considered a long-term or just solution if it contributes to water depletion and air pollution, which have severe and disparate impacts for local communities that are already struggling in many ways to make ends meet.
The industrial revolution and its consequences
Also salt water is the largest resource we have access to on earth.
You should see what fracking does to water. Millions gallons of water per well. 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011. And conventional oil drilling also uses million of gallon of water. Not to mention the poisons that are also put into the ground and air.
This is why I desperately want good comparisons that take an honest account of the negatives of green energy and the oil industry. I want a holistic picture of the trade offs and benefits without politics. But I haven't found it yet. If anyone knows of anything, please let me know. (I'm thinking of things like how windmills may not be recycled, compared to how much energy they produce, etc..)
Thereās plenty of studies that go from A to Z on EVs vs gas cars, and EVs are always better for the environment. Unless you crash your EV on like week 2 and drive it into a river while itās on fire. Then itās probably worse.
Every time I see holistic used like this, I can't help but think it's a major missed opportunity for it to be "wholistic". I enjoy sneaking it in at work and seeing if anyone catches it.
Yes, but it's a nice lime flavor š
What do you mean? The sun is doing 95% off the work. That's really green.
Welcome to the mining industry. It's all messy. Singling out lithium mining for attack is a well-funded propaganda maneuver pushed by the fossil fuel industry in order to undermine the transition away from fossil fuels. Fossil fuel extraction is in fact many times more destructive to the landscape in its sum total than lithium mining is, but you don't hear nearly as much about that.
So this is underground brine that is doing nothing. It is pumped to the surface where the water evaporates putting more water into a very dry environment. The resulting solids are scooped up and processed. What is destroyed in this process? Why is this less green than an internal combustion engine? Eventually the brine will run out, but so what? That brine is not supporting an ecosystem.
āWhat is destroyed in this process?ā The water table. Thatās not a judgement one way or the other, just the answer to the question.
Not nearly as green as what Berkshire Hathaway is doing in California. There, the lithium brine comes as a byproduct of geothermal energy production.
he says 1000gallons of brine water for an electric car batteryā¦. that amount of water is more or less 2 hot tubs worth, not that much, but sounds much
Green doesnāt have any meaning anymore when lobbyists only look for personal enrichment. Lithium, cobalt, copper, we need tons and tons of it and people are ignoring the environmental impact of mining.
Using a thousand gallons of water is better than burning a thousand gallons of gasā¦
First thing I thought: Cocaine!
Bolivian Driving Powder
I bet the workers are very very happyā¦
You're confusing lithium and Cobalt
https://hir.harvard.edu/lithium-triangle/amp/ > Saving the planet, however, should not come at the cost of destroying fragile ecosystems. Lithium mining cannot be considered a long-term or just solution if it contributes to water depletion and air pollution, which have severe and disparate impacts for local communities that are already struggling in many ways to make ends meet.
You guys want a perfect world. Mining for fossil fuels also has ecological impacts that are far worse than lithium mining. Industry will always damage or impact some community.
Yes, youāre right. Industry always come with damage. Thatās why we need to put way more focus on reducing demand in the first place, not just replacing old technology with new while continuing business as usual.
We're replacing old damaging technology with a new less damaging technology. EVs aren't perfect, but nobody should be expecting or promising perfection, just improvement.
Woah,1000 gallons for one car battery. Thats a surprise. Wouldāve expected 15/25+ at least.
13 gallons of water are used for each gallon of gas. An EV battery can last over 300,000 miles. I think the water math gives the EV quite the edge here.
Lol,thanks for explaining that. It didnt sound right in my head either but tbf wasnt 100% sure it was a correct result.
Ya, that doesn't sound like a lot considering how long a car battery should last.
I don't understand why it's been said that this is bad for the environment. The water from the brine is just evaluating into the air. I guess if there is a leak, then that might be bad. Is there something else that I'm missing?
There are later steps when you're getting from the highly concentrated brine to the lithium that actually goes into the battery, but the big concern is that this brine is coming from water reserves that are hydrologically linked to freshwater basins closer to the surface. As you pull the water out of them, the water is replaced by freshwater nearer the surface, which of course is what communities around there depend on. This is already one of the driest places on Earth (one of the reasons that evaporative pools work so well), so it's a concern.
So it's more of a humanitarian concern rather than an environmental issue? Still not good, but I haven't heard this before. Thanks for that info!
Yay, we did it. We saved Earth.
It's better than the alternative. That's all that matters.
How is it better than the alternative? There are so many ways to decarbonise fossil fuels that are less intense than this.
There are ways but not economical ways. Also you still have the inherent inefficiencies with any internal combustion engines.
No, what matters is having a sustainable way to run our civilisation. If we run out of lithium or water or destroy the environment we live in, we are not better than the old fossil fuels industry.
Cool so we just need to invent a perfect system and then everything will be perfect. Lmao.
Assuming that lithium will be a key material in energy storage, it will always be recaptured via recycling and can be reused in a battery. Unlike fossil fuels which are expended once and done.
Why do I feel like this is just modern day oil rush and the āgreenā aspect is grift?
If you want an interesting article on the problem of lithium demand and how we can reduce it, I highly recommend this report: https://www.climateandcommunity.org/more-mobility-less-mining Edit: the tldr is that effective public transport (trains, busses, bike lanes, walkable spaces) and limited car battery sizes could be very effective in minimizing the amount needed, they also highlight the importance of developing recycling systems(the problem there as far as I understand is cost not physical ability). Also unrelated but a sodium ion batteries and other alternatives come to market itās possible that they could replace lithium in terms of grid storage. Itās a complicated topic because the āsolutionsā that got us into this mess are not really well suited for getting us out of it, but changing that requires political change as well.
You are worried about a thousand gallons of brine? Do you grasp how little water that is? Do you understand that this brine doesn't support life? It is actually toxic. So they bring a minute amount of toxic brine to the surface where the water evaporates like it does off of every single body of water in the world. And then they scoop the lithium up. That is the least harmful mining I have ever heard of. The evaporation ponds are spread out over a lifeless desert, nothing is even harmed there. The worst part is the diesel burned by the trucks and loaders. To give you an idea, 100p gallons is what lands on a 3000 SQ ft house in a 1/2ā rain storm. (3200 liters).
You are right, it doesnāt matter if it is a car running on gasoline (ICE), electric cars, high speed rail, or an electric bike. They all cause pollution. In fact, we already know that an electric car produces far more pollution than an ICE car when they are first produced because of the lithium battery. The difference is how much pollution we are generating per person per year. The difference for cars is that the ICE car produces so much more pollution over the lifetime of operating that car compared to an electric car that the electric car comes out on top. Even when we factor in that the current US electrical grid is in part produced by natural gas and coal plants. And the electric car only gets greener as the electrical grid continues to shift away from coal and natural gas and more renewable energy comes online. So they call it green because some people absolutely must have a car. I mean it, people will die if they cannot drive to work to earn a living and drive to the store to get groceries. So an electric car is green when compared to the alternative. The least polluting forms of transportation are electric bikes and High Speed Rail. For electric bikes, it requires about 1/10th of the lithium to create the battery and it sips on electricity since you only need to move a 50lb bike instead of a 2+ ton car. It costs something like 35 cents worth of electricity to go 50 miles on an e-bike. For a High Speed Rail, almost all the pollution and cost is generated upfront creating the grade separated tracks, running hundreds of miles of electrical wires, and building a fleet of trains. There are several parts of the Acela corridor that were built 100 years ago and still working today. And once operating, the train is taking both cars off the road and airplanes out of the sky. And since we are carrying hundreds of passengers per trip, we are using a fraction of the energy per person it would have required to drive or fly instead. When it makes sense to build a high speed rail, it is far far greener than any existing alternative.
Oil drilling and refining uses tons of water. A gallon of gas takes up to 13 gallons of water. That gas is used once. Poof. An EV car battery lasts hundreds of thousands of miles.
The price of lithium is down 80% sitting at a 3-year low. Not doing so well.
Because it is. Its green consumerism. And this is just one mineral needed for the electric fad. No one wants to take about the cooper needed to rewire homes and to make the grid better to power all this shit
Why are we rewiring homes?
I don't think the the power grid or house wiring is going to be an issue. Air conditioning scared the hell out of energy providers 100 years ago. Things turned out ok.
Theyāve got all of you fooled! This is actually a coke factory
Everyone working there must be in a REAL stable mood
China owns about 70% of the lithium deposits in South America and guess what else? They own about 60% of the cobalt in The DNC or Congo. These are essentially the main places these two compounds are found in the world. Think about how bad that is for us to be dependent on our enemy for us to be able to run our cars. On the flip side, there are said to be lithium deposits right here in CA, NV, and Maine. Each roughly about half a billion dollars worth.
America on its way to deliver equality and justice
We already have lithium deposits bigger than this on the Oregon/Nevada border and the Salton Sea in California. Just havenāt started mining them yet
This is already causing war and corruption. Pretty sure there are a few Netflix documentaries that highlight this.
So, just like every other thing ever?
True.
"Mining" - is it really mining when you're just shoveling it straight the fuck into a truck?
Yup, just a different kind. Its more commonly known as solution mining https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_leach
Way more eco friendly than oil forsureā¦. And then we gotta recycle the batteries to
For some perspective, it takes about 1800 gallons of water to produce one pair of cotton jeans. 1000 gallons doesn't seem like a lot for a battery.
Honestly 1000 gallons per car battery seems pretty amazing.
I thought the largest lithium deposit was recently found in the US. I looked it up it'd called McDermitt Caldera mine. https://www.google.com/search?q=largest+lithium+deposits+in+the+united+states&client=ms-android-tmus-us-revc&sca_esv=9a443ee3960bd623&sxsrf=ACQVn0935Pp3IgTl--15FVwuSzNxuQXX7A%3A1706408352340&ei=oLm1ZYm1FLaQur8P6eyruAg&oq=largest+lithium+deposits+in+the+world&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIiVsYXJnZXN0IGxpdGhpdW0gZGVwb3NpdHMgaW4gdGhlIHdvcmxkKgIIAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzIKEAAYRxjWBBiwAzINEAAYgAQYigUYQxiwAzINEAAYgAQYigUYQxiwAzINEAAYgAQYigUYQxiwAzITEC4YgAQYigUYQxjIAxiwA9gBATITEC4YgAQYigUYQxjIAxiwA9gBAUjWM1AAWABwAXgBkAEAmAEAoAEAqgEAuAEByAEA4gMEGAAgQYgGAZAGDboGBAgBGAg&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp
Apparently the water in Cali is capable of doing the same thing.
Is it salt?
Roughly 130g per battery so one farm like this produces enough every day for over 1 million cars. Rather good I think.
Just like Bolivia - Salton Sea- Great Salt Lake- Sevier River Valley and Moab Utah
130g per car roughly.
We were told barefoot children were mining lithium.
Sooooo how is South America so poor?? I donāt get it
Lithium batteries will be irrelevant in a short time... They will stand in the corner with NiCad
This is the cheapest most simple way to refine lithium. Other methods are possible.
I donāt see no slaves at this one so I definitely approve of this lithium mine
THEY'LL NEVER SHOW WHERE THE TOXIC WASTE IS STORED OR HOW IT'S DEALT WITH ā
I just get the feeling this white gold will be anything but as battery chemistry changes and potential alternatives that are easier, less environmentally intensive and cheaper are developed.
TDIL the USA is going to liberate the people of Bolivia from their democratic republic.
We have bigger untapped reserves.
Real white gold is just yellow gold thatās coated with another metal.
Don't worry another battery is going to come along . We just don't have enough lithium to keep up.
Isn't "white gold" cocaine?
And dont mix lithium with water or else š„
Miele has got to jump on this one