[HN Gopher] The Supply Chain for Lithium (2020)
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The Supply Chain for Lithium (2020)
Author : lai-yin
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-01-14 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (clearpath.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (clearpath.org)
| deathanatos wrote:
| > just transporting completed battery cells from South Korea to
| Michigan adds a 4.1 kg CO2e/kWh footprint
|
| Some Googling says my phone has a storage capacity of 2800mAh, at
| 3.8V, or 10.64 Wh. Scaling the footprint, that's 43 grams CO2e,
| for a device I replace every several years? A quick Google says a
| car is 411 grams CO2 ... _per mile_. The phone seems
| insignificant?
|
| The EV usage is probably worse, though it'd be nice if the
| article didn't suddenly switch to pounds. Presuming the 10k
| phones number is accurate, we're up to 430kg. But that's 1046
| miles of travel for a normal car. If it can make that up in terms
| of cleaner energy usage over the life of the battery, that seems
| better than the current state?
| azinman2 wrote:
| There was also an active mine in CA (I forget the name), but it
| closed down a few years ago... not sure why. I'm guessing it's
| the fact that lithium requires many harsh chemicals to extract
| and is a very 'dirty' process. Probably why China does most of
| the processing -- they're far more willing to pollute their own
| environment than most countries currently. For independence to
| occur, we either need to accept the environmental wreckage, or
| find a better way to contain it and make it 'cleaner'.
| nickik wrote:
| I'm not aware of a lithium mine in California. North Carolina
| was where most of the world's lithium was mined and refined.
|
| Pretty much all mines for lithium closed in the US because it
| was simply cheaper to get from either South America brine and
| then Australian spodumene mining.
|
| While the US stopped mining lithium however there is still a
| lot of lithium refinement in North Carolina. And more
| refinement capacity is already planned both there and other
| places in the US.
|
| The main reason it is in China is because China made EV and the
| supply chain a priority.
|
| However, most of the downstream refinement of the downstream
| for actual battery materials actually happens in Korea. So a
| lot of lithium is mined in West Australia, transported to China
| and then the Korea/Japan until it is shipped to Nevada where it
| turns into a battery.
|
| In the next few years you should see the whole supply-chain
| from mining to battery in the US.
| Animats wrote:
| You're probably thinking of the Mountain Pass, CA rare earths
| mine. Molycorp finally got the process clean enough that even
| the Sierra Club approved. Then China cut the price on rare
| earths and Molycorp went bankrupt. Then China raised the price
| on rare earths.
|
| The Mountain Pass mine is operating again, but it's not clear
| who owns it now. Names involved are JHL Capital Group, QVT
| Financial, Shenghe Resources Holding Co. Ltd., and Fortress
| Value Acquisition Corp.
|
| The output has to go to China for processing because the plan
| to build US extraction facilities at Mountain Pass has slipped
| from 2020 to 2022.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > Molycorp finally got the process clean enough that even the
| Sierra Club approved.
|
| Being praised by a big NGO is in no way a marker of being
| "clean enough". Sierra Club (like Greenpeace) is well-known
| in ecologist circles to be eco-hostile and business-friendly.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I want to (and do) spend money to lessen our impact on the
| environment, and I want to do more, but I've met
| environmentalists who unironically wish that humanity would
| cease to exist. I am not interested in appeasing them.
|
| I am doubly uninterested in environmental policy that
| encourages bad options over much-better-but-still-imperfect
| options.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > Then China cut the price on rare earths and Molycorp went
| bankrupt. Then China raised the price on rare earths.
|
| Speaking of which, China loves projection.
|
| They recently accused Australia of dumping products such as
| wine in order to bankrupt the local Chinese vineyards.
|
| As you can imagine, the many independent Australia wine
| exporters were rather perplexed by this, because they are not
| centrally state-controlled. In fact, such price-fixing
| collusion would be illegal here.
|
| Any time China accuses another country of some sort of
| misdeed, just assume they're thinking that everyone acts the
| same way they themselves do.
| hristov wrote:
| Read this with a huge grain of salt. Clearpath is a conservative
| lobbying organization. In the end they use the article to sell
| several bills (most of them sponsored by republicans) even if
| some of the bills it touts (the ones by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio)
| have nothing to do with lithium but are about rare earth metals
| instead.
| wonnage wrote:
| I wonder what parallels we can draw with oil. The US resumed
| being a major oil producer in the last decade thanks to the
| fracking boom. I feel like we got a lot of propaganda about
| energy independence and not supporting brutal Middle East
| dictators (that our CIA set up). We got into a price war with the
| Saudis and Russia [1] and lost. With Covid killing demand this
| year, the US shale oil industry is on the verge of imploding.
|
| I can't see the US competing long-term with cheaper rivals in any
| natural resource production. We're hamstrung because the main
| tools for sustaining such industries (state ownership, tariffs,
| massive subsidies) are politically unpalatable/anticapitalist.
| "Energy independence" was just a cover for private industry to
| make a quick buck. Shale firms have not produced a profit [2],
| workers are being laid off left and right, but owners and
| investors benefitted massively from the grift [3].
|
| 1.
| https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6...
| 2. https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-
| and-f... 3. https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-
| fracking-boom...
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