Gem Hunters Found the Lithium America Needs. Maine Won't Let Them Dig It Up (time.com) 145
Mary and Gary Freeman, founders of a Florida-based lab supplies company, discovered a rich lithium deposit in Maine while searching for tourmaline, a striking, multi-colored gemstone found in the region. The timing of their find is significant as it could provide the United States with a domestic source of lithium for the clean energy transition and potentially be worth $1.5 billion. However, there's strong opposition to developing a mine. "Maine has some of the strictest mining and water quality standards in the country, and prohibits digging for metals in open pits larger than three acres," reports TIME. "There have not been any active metal mines in the state for decades, and no company has applied for a permit since a particularly strict law passed in 2017." Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an excerpt from the report: "This is a story that has been played out in Maine for generations," says Bill Pluecker, a member of the state's House of Representatives, whose hometown of Warren -- a 45-minute drive from the capital city of Augusta -- recently voted overwhelmingly in favor of a temporary ban on industrial metal mining after a Canadian company came looking for minerals near a beloved local pond. "We build industries based on the needs of populations not living here and then the bottom drops out, leaving us struggling again to pick up the pieces." "Our gold rush mentality regarding oil has fueled the climate crisis," says State Rep. Margaret O'Neil, who presented a bill last session that would have halted lithium mining for five years while the state worked out rules (the legislation ultimately failed). "As we facilitate our transition away from fossil fuels, we must examine the risks of lithium mining and consider whether the benefits of mining here in Maine justify the harms."
The Freemans' point out that they plan to dig for the spodumene, then ship it out of state for processing, so there would be no chemical ponds or tailings piles. They liken the excavation of the minerals to quarrying for granite or limestone, which enjoys a long, rich history in Maine. Advocates for mining in the U.S. argue that, since the country outsources most of its mining to places with less strict environmental and labor regulations, those harms are currently being born by foreign residents, while putting U.S. manufacturers in the precarious position of depending on faraway sources for the minerals they need. Though there are more than 12,000 active mines in the U.S., the bulk of them are for stone, coal, sand, and gravel.
There is only one operational lithium mine in the U.S., in Nevada, and one operational rare earth element mine, in Mountain Pass, Calif., meaning that the U.S. is dependent on other countries for the materials essential for clean energy technologies like batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. Even after they're mined, those materials currently have to be shipped to China for processing since the U.S. does not have any processing facilities. "If we're talking about critical metals and materials, we're so far behind that it's crazy," says Corby Anderson, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. "It's the dichotomy of the current administration -- they have incentives for electric vehicles and all these things, but they need materials like graphite, manganese, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper. The only one we mine and refine in this country is copper." Further reading: Federal Ruling Approves Construction of North America's Largest Lithium Mine
The Freemans' point out that they plan to dig for the spodumene, then ship it out of state for processing, so there would be no chemical ponds or tailings piles. They liken the excavation of the minerals to quarrying for granite or limestone, which enjoys a long, rich history in Maine. Advocates for mining in the U.S. argue that, since the country outsources most of its mining to places with less strict environmental and labor regulations, those harms are currently being born by foreign residents, while putting U.S. manufacturers in the precarious position of depending on faraway sources for the minerals they need. Though there are more than 12,000 active mines in the U.S., the bulk of them are for stone, coal, sand, and gravel.
There is only one operational lithium mine in the U.S., in Nevada, and one operational rare earth element mine, in Mountain Pass, Calif., meaning that the U.S. is dependent on other countries for the materials essential for clean energy technologies like batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. Even after they're mined, those materials currently have to be shipped to China for processing since the U.S. does not have any processing facilities. "If we're talking about critical metals and materials, we're so far behind that it's crazy," says Corby Anderson, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. "It's the dichotomy of the current administration -- they have incentives for electric vehicles and all these things, but they need materials like graphite, manganese, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper. The only one we mine and refine in this country is copper." Further reading: Federal Ruling Approves Construction of North America's Largest Lithium Mine
News outlets can't report worth a damn (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with lithium is not finding cost-effective, "pure" deposits. Some lithium concentrations don't even require destructive strip mining. The problem with lithium is the processing! It generates garbage byproducts as a result of refining and that also needs to be processed. The reason why China supplies a huge amount of lithium to the world is basically they don't give a rats ass about the processing byproducts. They just dump it in the desert, or just leave it the waste onsite.
Re:News outlets can't report worth a damn (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's also the main reason why, at small scale, you can order a dozen of PCBs from China for a few dollars/euros while the corresponding product in Europe (or in the USA, but I guess it-s mainly a problem of scale) has a cost in the hundreds. Producing electronics is one of the most environmentally unfriendly processes imaginable, with a quantity of very nasty stuff as a byproduct.
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That's not the reason why Chinese small scale manufacturing is so cheap. It's because they make up for low margin with volume. They aren't making 5 boards just for you, they are making large panels containing dozens of different people's boards.
They have a very efficient workflow too. European manufacturers always want you to send over detailed specs for the PCB and will build to them exactly. The low cost Chinese manufacturers have a web interface with a limited number of options. If you want anything but
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The problem with lithium is not finding cost-effective, "pure" deposits. Some lithium concentrations don't even require destructive strip mining. The problem with lithium is the processing! It generates garbage byproducts as a result of refining and that also needs to be processed. The reason why China supplies a huge amount of lithium to the world is basically they don't give a rats ass about the processing byproducts. They just dump it in the desert, or just leave it the waste onsite.
There's also the even bigger problem of deciding who gets to make all the money from it.
I'm sure the rules can be adapted to open up the mine as soon as that little detail is sorted out.
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Re:News outlets can't report worth a damn (Score:4, Informative)
Re:News outlets can't report worth a damn (Score:5, Informative)
> The problem with lithium is the processing! It generates garbage byproducts as a result of refining and that also needs to be processed.
Such as?
The ore is spodumene. Traditional mining tailings would include things like feldspar, mica, iron oxides, and quartz, which is the bulk of the non-ore material dug up during mining. None of these are particularly hazardous.
Once you've recovered the spodumene from the bulk material, you roast it, grind it up into a fine powder, and react it with sulfuric acid. This converts the LiAl(SiO2)2 into an aluminum silicate and lithium sulfate in solution. Aluminum silicates are not particularly hazardous and even have lots of industrial uses.
Usually the lithium sulfate is converted to lithium carbonate by reacting it with sodium carbonate, resulting in sodium sulfate... a chemical often used as filler in powdered cleaning products and could be used to store heat energy with its low melting point and high heat capacity. Not considered hazardous...
The lithium carbonate is converted to lithium chloride by reacting it with hydrochloric acid, leaving CO2 and water.
The lithium chloride is then turned into metallic lithium via electrolysis as a molten salt, producing chlorine gas which can be turned back into hydrochloric acid.
While energy intensive in some steps, none of these processes inherently produces toxic byproducts. None of the intermediate products are especially toxic either. So what's this garbage you speak of that's so awful only China is willing to put up with it?
I propose instead that the reason so much of the refining is done in China is because they have the infrastructure in place to do it at large scales, making it cheap enough to bother shipping it across the globe rather that build local facilities.
=Smidge=
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:News outlets can't report worth a damn (Score:5, Informative)
That reference points to an article describing lithium mining by means of brine ponds, which is done in Chile and elsewhere. It doesn't apply to the hard rock mining under discussion here.
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> So who do I believe?
You can start by believing the chemistry.
Then, if a source doesn't explain what the toxic by-products are then perhaps you should find another source. Doesn't mean no toxins are produced, but if they are it shouldn't be hard to list examples of such. Dig into published research, because problems with refining and processing techniques are often the focus of studies.
Also check your sources credibility. There are a lot of sites and organizations that are literally just fronts for indu
Clean energy is not (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet, we continue referring to this as "clean energy", including in TFA:
and our government coerces us into [nytimes.com]
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Yep, because even with all that, it's still better than mining coal or oil and then just burning all of that
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This assumes there is zero environmental cost to petroleum extraction and refining and the toxic outputs of the combustion itself which is more than just CO2.
In a compairson of lifetime emissions through the entire lifecycle EV's so far are still coming out ahead even with the "dirty" mining.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-s... [iea.org]
Not to say EV production does not have work to do in cleaning up it's whole process but it's not like ICE vehichles and their engines environmentally free to build, ie, "don't let perfec
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And yet, we continue referring to this as "clean energy", including in TFA:
Lithium isn't used in the production of energy. It is used in the storage and transportation of energy. In relative terms, you need to compare that with the oil used to produce the plastic for the gas tank, the metal for the tank in the ground at the gas station, the trucks that haul around the gasoline and the fuel that they use, the energy expended digging up the tanks every few years to replace them when leaks are detected, the environmental impact of mitigating those leaks, the environmental impact of
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Lithium is mined and processed once, and the waste streams can be collected and stored / cleaned or diverted to secondary uses.
Petroleum is mined and processed once, and just all of it that comes out of the ground will either end up in the air as production byproduct, end up in the air as usage byproduct, or end up in the ocean as plastics.
The best case with petroleum is that it ends up in a landfill as plastic.
So yeah, I'll continue referring to it as "clean energy" because the alternatives are hideously d
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Re:News outlets can't report worth a damn (Score:5, Informative)
That is why the NIMBY obstructionism in Maine should be overruled. The processing won't even happen there.
But the destruction of what brings people to Maine will. People who live in such places don't want a company coming in and tearing up everything to make a few bucks, then, after a few years, leaves and the eyesore of a devastated landscape is left behind.
One can look at the natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. All the promises of good jobs, minimal impact, and so on have been a lie. The people working the drill sites come from out of state. The sites themselves are awash in devastation and people's wells are polluted from the drilling process itself. Then there's the constant drone of trucks going back and forth and the commensurate pollution, both from the diesel and dust.
In a few years, when the wells run dry, the companies will walk away to leave the taxpayers to clean up their mess.
If you want any of that, go for it. You are welcome to move to these locales.
Re:News outlets can't report worth a damn (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly this - it does bring in money though but the decision should belong to the land owners (eg eminent domain should not be allowed used) and the political choice of the people who live there.
Maine has a thriving tourist economy precisely because it is one of the only largely unspoiled places in the US east. Even if the paper industry did alter the forest ecology considerably from what nature designed for it, it is still a lovely place with abundant wildlife, that is great for almost all types outdoor recreation inland and coastal. For hikes etc there is something to be said for being able to actually go 50 or a 100 miles without hearing (many cars) or seeing (many) human structures and roads etc. You literally can't get that anywhere else east of the Mississippi besides Maine.
The people who live and work there should have the right to self determine, and if they want to keep it, they should be allowed to do so regardless of the consequences for the domestic EV industry or electrification in general.
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That's fine. But I do wish for one thing, though - that whenever communities choose to block some form of natural resource development, they should also be choosing to be among the first to have to curtail or forgo the thing that is intended to be produced. Anti-pipeline? That's fine, we all understand. But people along the denied route get trucked fuel and pay extra cost for it, and they are the first to get "not enough" fuel in the event of shortages. I'm not saying deprive them immediately and completel
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The people who live and work there should have the right to self determine, and if they want to keep it, they should be allowed to do so regardless of the consequences for the domestic EV industry or electrification in general.
The government, in Maine or anywhere else, should not be pushing people to buy BEVs if they don't want to be part of their own proposed solution. What they are saying is "EVs are great, as long as the dirty work is done by poor people in developing countries". Not that this attitude is not a common thing nowadays, but they should still not be surprised when people call them on their hypocrisy.
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well maybe you should read what I actually wrote. I said land owners AND the political choices of the people who live there.
A land owner should be free to say, no I do not wish to sell my property to you and no you can't dig on it.
State/County/town governments should be free to enact legislation like you can't dig a giant hole, exposing heavy metals without putting miles of silt fence around it, artificial wind breaks, and wild life barriers - if that makes it two expensive to operate to darn bad...
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well maybe you should read what I actually wrote. I said land owners AND the political choices of the people who live there.
A land owner should be free to say, no I do not wish to sell my property to you and no you can't dig on it.
State/County/town governments should be free to enact legislation like you can't dig a giant hole, exposing heavy metals without putting miles of silt fence around it, artificial wind breaks, and wild life barriers - if that makes it two expensive to operate to darn bad...
I'm generally an individual-freedom man, and despite the absurd (often arbitrary) political group alignments of the current era, I think aggressive environmental conservation and stewardship is not inconsistent with private property rights and decentralized local control. On the contrary, I think they are strongly linked.
It is entirely legitimate and consistent with individual property rights and local control for state and municipal governments to pass laws compelling persons, whether as private individual
Re:News outlets can't report worth a damn (Score:5, Funny)
So?
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Literally all of this land is stolen, so complaining about how someone might steal it from you is hypocritical.
Too bad. Vae victis, and all that.
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I see, so if I don't buy your land from you, I can just walk in and take it, right?
The usual GOP thinking, simple fascism
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You're the one who claimed it was stolen due to non-existent treaties. Now that you've been shown to be making stuff up you just make up more stuff. Such is the circle of discussion with a partisan hack.
That's obviously a distortion of what drinkypoo said. What they actually said was that all this land is stolen and then, in a later comment, provided broken treaties as evidence. That does not require that every piece of stolen land had to have a treaty protecting it in any way. It's just evidence of ill intent.
It wasn't stolen any more than the warring tribes 'stole' it back and forth from one another long before Europeans ever arrived. The world is and has always been a pretty rough place and no amount of huffing your own farts and patting yourself on the back for being virtuous is going to change that.
This argument you're making here only supports drinkypoo's assertion that it's all stolen land. You're not claiming here that it's not stolen land, you're claiming that it's ok to steal land. You're
Re: News outlets can't report worth a damn (Score:2)
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Not an unreasonable position. However it doesn't matter who would have done the same if the tables were turned. Ultimately, the ownership of the property can be traced back to some form of adverse possession, which makes claims about the sanctity of property rights a little disingenuous.
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Your statements on natural gas drilling shows your bias. Good jobs are available and made available to everyone willing to work in that location. That pe
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The people working the drill sites come from out of state
So it's the company's fault that locals can't or don't want to work for them? What do you suggest, just not developing their mineral lease because Pennsylvanians aren't looking for those jobs?
Guess what - if people want to get the fuck out of Mississippi in favor of a good paying job in Pennsylvania, then they can do that. And Pennsylvania still wins, because they get tax money on those wages, tax money on the mineral lease, tax money on the sale of what's mined, and tax money from all the new people comi
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Or perhaps the companies will just need to find cleaner ways to collect and process that material.
My family is mostly from Maine, they live primarily around a post-industral city. During the last family gathering last year, I heard many stories about family members, and their friends being ill, getting cancer from the polluted water supply from a hundred+ year old industry where many of those polluting companies have long been out of business. Now that area, has a hard time growing and recovering economica
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That is why the NIMBY obstructionism in Maine should be overruled. The processing won't even happen there.
They can do it in your backyard instead then.
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Um, perhaps you should talk to folks in Appalachia, where they strip-mined, then left the area with no jobs and environmental disasters, and see how they felt about that.
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Hyrdogen! Not mining! (Score:2, Troll)
We need to stop with the mining for batteries. This electric car trend is heading down the wrong path. The right path was Hydrogen, but when someone built an easier-to-develop battery operated car they sent us down one of the more destructive “green” paths possible - in terms of mining and human rights. And then there are charge losses, oh glorious charge and transmission losses!
Another slashdot article shows Hydrogen has been made in a lab with 90% efficiency. Even without this technology,
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https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
I'm not opposed to H2 research, but I'm opposed to burning gas until we can crack that H2 nut. When fuel cells become a better battery we'll use them, till that time we'll just have to use what's actually viable.
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I agree the BEVs are a dead end, and are going to be this centuries environmental calamity where 50 years from now everyone is going to be asking the grey-beards WTF were you thinking.
I'll may or may not live just long enough to find out if I am correct before they bury me. However I think when we factor in the impacts of mining, processing, manufacturer, disposal, of the these batteries, and extend that to other things like there mass leading increased road maintenance (extremely carbon intensive BTW), the
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Road damage is modeled to be approximately proportional to the fourth power of weight per axle. A Tesla Model S is maybe 2,400 pounds per axle. A maximally loaded semi is up to 16,000± pounds per axle. A loaded garbage truck is about 12,000± pounds per axle. So, really, the amount of road damage an electric car does is less than 0.2% of the damage that gas and diesel trucks do.
(And I kn
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Plus the people who are going out and buying an EV are typically going for the smallest one that will do the job to minimise cost and maximise range. Folks who dislike EVs are typically going out and buying some huge Wankpanzer SUV.
It's very interesting that this talking point about weight is starting to crop up EVERYWHERE only a month or so after it simultaneously hit a group of newspapers owned by folks who are heavily invested in oil.
No downsides! (Score:2)
The other day I couldn't see a pedestrian because the A pillars in the borrowed car are about 6 inches wide! Why? "It's got to handle the unlikely event of a rollover." Every car's got to have a rear camera now and all the supporting electronics, wiring and power. Why? "Peopl
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I'm not necessarily against all the fancy-pants electronics that have proliferated into cars these days. But they should be tools to reduce the driver workload; not crutches to hold up incompetent drivers who don't belong on the road in the first place.
And I think that's the elephant in the room here. There are too damned many incompetent drivers on the road. I guess you could argue that there are just too many drivers. But if we expelled the incompetent ones, that'd improve the total numbers too. But
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1970s+ cars may not have b
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It's pretty clear that the future of transportation is going to be electric, at least for land vehicles. The challenge is the energy storage, but luckily that's an easier thing to change.
Cars are much safer and more reliable than they were 100 years ago, but even all that isn't why cars are so large and heavy. People want to buy a big-ass SUV instead of the smaller, lighter cars. Car companies love this because they can sell the large vehicles for more money so they actively push these to customers. Cus
Re:Hyrdogen! Not mining! (Score:4, Informative)
However I think when we factor in the impacts of mining, processing, manufacturer,
The impacts are only slightly more for an electric car than for a normal car. The reduction in wasted energy that an electric drivetrain provides quickly exceeds the extra energy spent creating it, and over the lifetime of the car, the savings are substantial (unless you wreck it after 15,000 miles).
disposal, of the these batteries,
There is no disposal. Right now, failed batteries get stored in warehouses waiting until there are enough of them to make it worth setting up recycling plants. After that, they're relatively easy to recycle, and approximately 100% of the metals are recoverable and can be used in making new batteries (or whatever). So the environmental impact of building these things is a cost that gets taken once per car on the road, not once per car that is built. Once all the cars on the road are BEVs, there will be approximately no further environmental impact to the BEV transition, at least beyond the energy spent melting the old batteries down and turning them into new ones.
and extend that to other things like there mass leading increased road maintenance (extremely carbon intensive BTW),
BEVs are not believed to increase road maintenance significantly. They don't weigh *that* much more than gasoline-powered cars. A Model 3 is about the same size as an Audi A4, and it weighs only about two to three hundred pounds more than the Audi, depending on configuration. When the Audi is full of fuel, that modest difference in weight goes down further by about a hundred pounds. Yes, the battery is much heavier than a fuel tank, but the rest of the drive train is much, much lighter. In the end, the difference in weight is the equivalent of adding only about one extra passenger in the car, i.e. it is a tiny enough difference that it is almost entirely lost in the noise.
their mass leading to social consequences increase injuries, etc..
Again, if one extra passenger in a car would increase injuries, you'd have a point, but that's just not realistic. Also, most EVs have much more advanced navigation than your average gasoline-powered car, so on average, you'll have way fewer injuries. That's not anything inherent about EVs, of course — it is just a side effect of them tending to compete with a higher-than-average class of vehicles — but it tends to be the case more often than not.
That said you should study hydrogen. Look for "Why Hydrogen Engines Are A Bad Idea" on the Engineering Explained youtube channel. Its really not a practical fuel choice for consumer automobiles. Its really not going to be without major materials sciences advances either. Which is not to say those don't happen, show someone from 1930 modern plastic polymers. However its not going to arrive in time to address the problem we have now.
It isn't ever going to happen. The energy loss in a battery is ~1%. The absolute minimum theoretical possible loss of converting electricity to hydrogen and back with a fuel cell is something like 17%. And that's if the conversion to hydrogen is 100% efficient and you find some way to use energy that would otherwise be wasted to compress the hydrogen. The real-world expectation is more like 40% to 50% loss, and even though you might be able to incrementally improve that a little, you're not going to get it down to the point where it isn't utterly ridiculous.
The REAL answer has to be change in what people expect from an automobile. In the 50s manufacturers had light weight vehicles that had not awful performance and could deliver 50+ mpg. There is no reason we can't make car that seats four or five, and delivers 100+mpg today with internal combustion, no reason except all the heavy stuff we mandate be included.
You mean power steering, air bags, crumple zones, e
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For quite a few years now you have been able to buy used automotive batteries on AliExpress. The Chinese have been reusing them for a while. The manufacturers themselves supply them, e.g. BYD.
Lots of hobbyists buy them for DIY home battery systems, because they are very good value. They are sold on the basis of having a minimum capacity, but often you get much more.
That's the bottleneck. Businesses could build them into products, but would have to sell those products as having a lower minimum capacity, and
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Hydrogen is great but it's very difficult to deal with. Unfortunately hydrogen it seems is not a panacea. See here [youtube.com] for the lowdown.
Storage: Having to compress it to 700bar and store it is a massive challenge and expensive af. The smallest atom in the universe likes to seep through stuff.
Emissions: currently 90+% of hydrogen generated from flossil fuels so dirty hydrogen won't solve the geenhouse gas problem
Clean hydrogen: generated from wind and solar is great but wind and solar is unstable power
Fuel
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Clean hydrogen: generated from wind and solar is great but wind and solar is unstable power
Generally agree, but this statement is weird. If you are using it explicitly for hydrogen extraction, then you wouldn't care about stability, just average power output. If hypothetically hydrogen turned out to be a good strategy for short term energy storage, it would be a good addition to wind/solar to provide stability. Currently other strategies look better than hydrogen for energy storage, but just pointing out stability is not a key concern when applying it to store energy.
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Way more stable than radioactive water heaters, which go down for months or sometimes even years for maintenance. Like much ballyhooed France where more than half their plants were down at the same time for repairs.
https://www.france24.com/en/fr... [france24.com]
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stored hydrogen wonâ(TM)t dissipate over time like energy stored in a battery.
Unless you actually store it with good energy density, in cryogenics, in which case it totally will dissipate. You either need to keep it cooled, which takes energy, or it leaks off.
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We need to stop with the mining for batteries. This electric car trend is heading down the wrong path. The right path was Hydrogen, but when someone built an easier-to-develop battery operated car they sent us down one of the more destructive “green” paths possible - in terms of mining and human rights. And then there are charge losses, oh glorious charge and transmission losses!
If one is going to discuss H2 as an option (and it is), we should also consider carbon-neutral synthetic fuels. The technology to make them is available, but expensive due to its niche market and small scale. However, if we scaled it up, it is debateable whether in the long run it would be more costly than massive new mining and refining for battery materials, extensive upgrades to the electrical grids and creation of an all new EV charging infrastructure, complete overhaul of production lines for automobi
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The right path was Hydrogen
The right path is synthetic fuels. Hydrogen is hard to store and needs an entirely new infrastructure. Hydrogen storage longer than a few days actually requires a non-trivial amount of energy input to keep the Hydrogen cold. Hydrocarbon fuels don't need that and if the carbon in them doesn't come from extraction, they are just as good as Hydrogen from a CO2 emission POV and better than Hydrogen in all other measures (density, efficiency, etc). The materials to make fuel cells at scale just don't exist.
Difficult for some to imagine (Score:5, Funny)
That not everything is for sale.
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We should all be content that lithium mining remains in the parts of the world with zero care for the environment or the workers. That way we can all be as guilt-free as you using our electronics while burying our hands in the sand. Screw those brown and yellow people amirite!
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Unless we are pointing the cruise missiles in their direction and saying produce lithium or else, yes - we are not screwing anyone.
They are making a choice, they are exploiting their local resources and risking the environmental consequences in exchange for wealth. They should enjoy the right to make that choice, just as we enjoy the right to chose not to do so and pay them to do it. if they elect not to do it than we have to chose if we wish to do or go without certain products, that will also be our choic
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2) A Racist assumption that they are incapable of knowing what is good for them, and need us to decide what is best.
3) A Racist assumption they choices they make are morally inferior to our own.
It's racist to think race dictates political system or economics.
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" They are making a choice, they are exploiting their local resources and risking the environmental consequencesÂ"
are you fucking stupid? There is no "we" and "they", we live on the same fucking planet
do you need your brain jump-started?
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But muh states rights!
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What about the rights of the property owners?
Maybe Musk ought to prohibit sale of Teslas in states that don't want to support battery independence.
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"America Needs" (Score:5, Insightful)
"America Needs" is an emotionally charged phrase with a lot of assumptions packed into it.
Who decides what we need? Maybe we should examine that question a little more, because that's a position of power.
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The country does need the resource. That should be uncontroversial.
That is exactly the "should" that I'm calling out here. You may be right. But all the assumptions behind that statement need to properly unpacked and defended.
I would start the discussion with the need for rules and limits, and that it's a false choice to say you can either have those or prosperity.
Talk about a charged headline! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Gem Hunters Found the Lithium America Needs. Maine Won't Let Them Dig It Up"
Apparently us poor Americans so desperately need lithium that only Maine can provide, and those stubborn Maine people are getting in the way with a silly want to protect their clean water, natural landscapes, and clean air! They just need to roll over and let some faceless corporation destroy all that, leaving a desolate wasteland behind when its no longer profitable to strip what they want out of the land. Capitalism baby! Burn everything to the ground, destroy everything beautiful so we can make a little bit more money!
I'm glad the people of Maine have made it clear they do not want that. Just look what mining has done everywhere else when allowed to proceed unchecked in any way they want.
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Well said.
Now excuse me while I get a bid on those Maine granite kitchen counters.
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Mining is a short-term solution (Score:3)
All mining is, literally, pulling a finite resource out of the ground. After a hundred years, thousand years, etc, it's all gone. What do we do then?
The answer, always, is "we don't care." Let the next generations deal with the ramifications. I want my cheap batteries *now*.
Wouldn't it be better to plan for the next thousand, or ten-thousand years? To put solutions in place that are renewable, and stand the test of time?
It's not a crazy idea. Ancient peoples built structures that we still use, thousands of years later. They used technology that was renewable, like water and solar power. They had natural batteries, natural refrigeration, "less toxic" agriculture.
I get why we want batteries. But if we think really hard, we'd probably find that we don't actually need them for most things in our lives. We can generate power without batteries, and without consuming finite resources. We can make more use out of less technology. We can change the way we live to reduce our dependence on energy. We can live a little bit closer to the rest of the natural creatures on the planet.
I think this would solve a ton of problems we have, and take us out of the constant cycle of churning from one disaster to the next. Less dependence on technology, and more dependence on *ecology*, is good for everyone.
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Wouldn't it be better to plan for the next thousand, or ten-thousand years? To put solutions in place that are renewable, and stand the test of time?
It's not a crazy idea.
It's a crazy idea.
Ancient peoples built structures that we still use, thousands of years later. They used technology that was renewable, like water and solar power. They had natural batteries, natural refrigeration, "less toxic" agriculture.
"Natural" batteries. Wtf "natural" batteries? Ancient peoples didn't use electricity. If by "natural battery" you mean "store of energy", yes, they burned a lot of wood. We can't do that anymore.
As for "less toxic" agriculture, in case you hadn't noticed, there are more than 8 billion of us now. Ancient agriculture couldn't feed 8 billion. Are you volunteering to starve to death? No? Then shut up about modern agriculture. If you're so ignorant as to advocate for the death of billi
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> "Natural" batteries. Wtf "natural" batteries?
Dams, which stored energy in the form of water, released to power windmills. And the Baghdad Battery, a galvanic cell made 2,000 years ago. And weights used to store energy to offset pulleys to lift things on demand. And more simple batteries.
> If you're so ignorant as to advocate for the death of billions, you shouldn't open your mouth at all.
It's not ignorance, it's common sense. If the only way to sustain an overpopulation is to slowly destroy the ecos
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It's not a crazy idea. Ancient peoples built structures that we still use, thousands of years later. They used technology that was renewable, like water and solar power. They had natural batteries, natural refrigeration, "less toxic" agriculture.
Some of them even lived into their 40s.
Just buy it from Alberta (Score:5, Informative)
$1.5B is just 40,000 tonnes. The recently found 1.6M tonnes in Alberta, in lithium carbonate brines. Alberta is already messed up by 4.2M oil wells, and just re-elected a Conservative government that was happily bribed to let the oil companies out of well-remediation. Since they're already screwed by oil, the lithium wells won't do much more damage, and Alberta seems to actually like it.
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$1.5B worth of spodumene ore, not lithium carbonate (and it's hard rock ore, not brine).
The deposit contains an estimated 11 million tons of spodumene [boston.com], which assuming a typical composition of 7% Li2O (770,000 tons) would produce 1.9 million tons of Li2CO3, worth over $7 billion in 2022 prices.
Newry, Maine has more lithium than Alberta, Canada.
=Smidge=
If we can ignore the rights of Native Americans (Score:2)
I guess we should be able to ignore the rights of white folks in Maine...Right?
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/17... [npr.org]
I'm Ambivalent About This (Score:2)
$1.5 billion value? that's it?? WTF! (Score:2)
Leave it in the ground; it's not worth the environmental hassle of digging it up.
Maine's GDP is $65 billion USD; the theoretical max value of this entire deposit is a mere 2.5% of a single year of Maine's economic output?
This will make a few people very rich but will do sweet fuck all to satisfy America's demand.
"needs" (Score:2)
Oh yes, Maine will. (Score:2)
Eventually. For a hefty sum.
Mother Nature to the rescue! (Score:2)
But, isn't Mother Nature uncovering it for us?
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About 3 weeks.
Re:how long until (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like this is from a person who is all about States Rights, until a state does something they don't like, then they want the Federal Government, Supreme Court to jump and and tell the states to Stay in line!
Feds: We order the state of Maine to pollute its water supply killing of communities and families who had been their longer than the formation of the United States just so we can save $100 on a price of an Electric car, which there are many bills running in the congress which trying to stop as well, because the Democrats seem to like them.
Re:how long until (Score:5, Interesting)
"just so we can save $100 on a price of an Electric car"
And the common straw man argument comes forth.
Not just that, not even that, but a primary goal of this proposed mining of Lithium in Maine would be to secure a native source. This could lead to;
- more reliable supplies, not subject to the whim of foreign actors, nor those suppliers who may have reason to deny these supplies based on political or military considerations. Such interruptions of supply could have wide-ranging consequences.
- more control over the means of production, enforcing local and federal rules regarding operation, and minimizing pollution, ecological damage, etc.
Maine is my home state, and I know that area well enough. It is a treasure, forests and wildlife largely unspoiled by development, excepting the skiing resorts which have a significant interest in preserving their environment. I'm torn on this, the minerals are sufficiently valuable for us to consider the project, but the impact would never be zero. Proponents must make a compelling case, not based on need, but on their ability to mine these minerals with minimal and tolerable changes to the area.
I'm equally interested in the transportation impact. This is indeed Western Maine, with an east-west road, Route 2, but that threads through rural Maine to New Hampshire, reaching an Interstate no closer than 60-70 miles. Big rigs will ruin this road unless it is improved, a project regularly proposed to enable truck traffic between the Maritimes (New Brunswick/Nova Scotia) and Southern Quebec, but never getting enough traction due mostly to objections to the likely increased truck traffic. Rural Maine does not much like trucks back and forth all hours after all...
But Maine has a heritage of commerce. Before the Revolution Maine supplied the British Navy with old-growth pine trees, making masts that were not available from European or British sources, sending them down rivers and shipped across the Atlantic. This did not denude the forests, but it did lead to the first significant pollution of Maine's big rivers, with sunken logs and bark falling to river bottoms and causing organic decomposition and reduced oxygen levels. The paper industry, centuries later, furthered that with even more, not to mention wastewater pollution. A few hydro dams on the Penobscot river stifled the Atlantic Salmon runs, compounding the harm done to this species, leading to the near destruction of the species. Hydro dams are huge impacts on the ecology they are within, we fail to recognize that often enough. And Maine has, thankfully, allowed lobster fishermen to largely self-regulate, preserving a unique resource through the enlightened self-interest of the industry.
I wish we could see this lithium resource mined responsibly, but history shows this is not likely. You do not need straw men to argue against this. The need for lithium extend beyond 'lectric cars and on to most portable electronic products we enjoy, and even to airliners.
ps - Wanna know where people actually live in Maine? Consult cell phone coverage maps. These also show where people regularly travel for recreation. Those huge swaths of no service? Forests where paper comes from, and refuge for much wildlife. Unique. And not at great risk from this project.
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This sounds like this is from a person who is all about States Rights, until a state does something they don't like, then they want the Federal Government, Supreme Court to jump and and tell the states to Stay in line!
Feds: We order the state of Maine to pollute its water supply killing of communities and families who had been their longer than the formation of the United States just so we can save $100 on a price of an Electric car, which there are many bills running in the congress which trying to stop as well, because the Democrats seem to like them.
Read the Kelo ruling -- no, not just the Wikipedia summary, the actual SCOTUS documents.
The "left" justices ruled in favor of a big developer against small powerless humans, and based their ruling on trickle-down economics.
The "right" justices voted in favor of middle and working class people, and based their dissent on not wanting to give this much power to big corporations and developers.
It's one of the most fascinating displays of how arbitrary and imaginary the left/right political factions in the USA a
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the needs of the nation overpower the policy of the state of Maine,
How long? As long as it takes them to fight over the percentages.
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They are NIMBYs, not Luddites.
Luddites oppose technological progress.
NIMBYs favor progress but want all the costs to be borne by someone else.
Re:Luddites (Score:5, Informative)
Luddites oppose technological progress.
Not exactly. The Luddites opposed the fact that the benefits of progress only went to the upper class. Cory Doctorow has a podcast [archive.org] about them.
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Ignoring Maine's deliberate efforts to diversify their economy, focusing on technology, which can be surprisingly low-impact but profitable.
I have my complaints about Maine's political landscape, but I don't live there any more, so I watch and worry. But Maine has been NIMBY for a long time, rejecting some terrible and some not-so-terrible ideas, and from experience, mostly because of general suspicion. Which is not always wrong.
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People want to go their on vacation, because their home is polluted ugly wasteland.
Maine isn't as backwater as you would expect. Its population density is still greater than 23% of the other States in the United States, as well it is near by some decent cities in like Boston, and Quebec so I wouldn't quite call it backwater. Nevada is mostly a burnt out desert while it does have some fragile ecosystems that should be protected a lot of it is mostly a lifeless hunk of rock. And if it weren't for Los Vegas
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What? Diverse economy? The feds own 80% of the land. Without Vegas it’s a few desert dwellers and military bases.
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This attitude is why Nevada is going to keep growing its diverse, vibrant economy while Maine will continue to be a quaint little backwater where people from other places go to vacation.
Nevada is about as diverse as any desert landscape where almost nothing can survive for 24 hours. Not without water and air conditioning, and psychedelics. There is actually lithium in other American deserts, but you also need lots of water to ruin in the process. Don't worry about lithium, shortly we'll be too hot and thirsty to care about it. Denial is not just da river in Egypt.
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https://fred.stlouisfed.org/re... [stlouisfed.org] disagrees thoroughly: Maine, $59,463 per capita personal income in 2022 (was $58,272 in 2021); Nevada, $61,282 per Capita in 2022 (was $60,167 in 2021).
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