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Bolivia Is the Saudi Arabia of Lithium
tcd004 writes "You can literally scrape valuable lithium off the ground of many Bolivian salt flats. The country is poised to be the center of world lithium battery production, reaping the benefit of the metal's skyrocketing value. 'The US Geological Survey says 5.4 million tons of lithium could potentially be extracted in Bolivia, compared with 3 million in Chile, 1.1 million in China and just 410,000 in the United States. ... Ailing automakers in the United States are pinning their hopes on lithium. General Motors next year plans to roll out its Volt, a car using a lithium-ion battery along with a gas engine. Nissan, Ford and BMW, among other carmakers, have similar projects.' However, the government fears foreign countries might exploit their natural resources, so for the time being, the salt flats remain untouched."
I hired some guy with a truck to drop me off out on those salt flats once, just for the hell of it. Incredible lightning shows kept me up most nights. Spectacular place. You could walk in any direction and feel like you weren't moving. It was utterly featureless, aside from the geometric pattern on the ground. I was pretty glad that the truck actually came back a couple of days later.
On one hand, I'd be sorry to hear that the flats were being mined. On the other, Bolivians need something like this; I hope their government acts wisely and on behalf of all of their people.
I'll be watching these events with interest.
Support is good. But maybe you should also be sending them a warning of what coal mining has done to your area?
If you're from Virginia, have you had a chance to witness any of the mountain top removal strip mining operations in West Virginia? There's an informative series on it at VBS.tv. Don't worry, they don't leave the non-fertile shale rock bare after they're done. They spray a grass seed in mutant green nitrogen fertilizer shit all over it so it can look unnatural for a year before transforming back into a Martian landscape.
My work here is dung.
There's a lot of concern from everyone about "peak oil".
Why is there not just as much of a concern about "peak lithium". If we really make a push to convert all cars to being electric, that's a ton of lithium required - and it's used in a lot of other applications too.
That's why solutions like hydrogen as truly alternative fuels make more sense to me that rushing to consume a metal which is truly a non-renewable resource, unlike even coal and oil (which are simply slow to produce but are produced over time).
Yes, lithium may be scarce, but you've got a deep misconception that may be coloring your view and comparison with oil. Oil is a fuel. Allowing it to burn produces energy. Lithium in car batteries is not a fuel. It's a storage device.
Comparing it to a gasoline system, you should think of it like the steel that makes up your gas tank. It stores energy, which must be produced elsewhere (like through burning oil or coal, for example). If we run out of oil, we need a new energy source. If we look to be running out of lithium, we can take worn out batteries and pull the lithium out of them to make new batteries.
Hydrogen, as you point out, is plentiful. However, it is also just another gas tank, not a fuel. Hydrogen is produced by cracking methane. Two years ago I interviewed with the company that does 90% of the hydrogen production in the world. They pointed out that per mile on the road, more CO2 is produced by hydrogen production than gasoline consumption.
Both hydrogen and lithium will be used as STORAGE for energy. Both can be reused basically unlimited times - managed well, we should never run out of either. Oil and coal, on the other hand, generate the power we can then store in lithium batteries or hydrogen, but that generation breaks the oil and coal permanently.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
They could consider following the same model the Norwegian government used when oil was discovered in the sea outside Norway; create a lithium fund managed by the government, paid by taxes and exploration fees from the companies wanting to mine the lithium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Oil_Fund. It worked for Norway, it might work for Bolivia too.
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
I also hope that money goes towards improving their infrastructure and fostering internal business instead of some bullshit palace for some bullshit dictator.
President Evo Morales of Bolivia is many things, but "bullshit dictator" he is not. He was democratically elected in 2005, and won a recall election in 2008 by a two-thirds majority. The Bolivian government has been a democracy since the 1980's.
I am officially gone from
I wouldn't really call lithium mining "exporting our pollution". It's pretty tame -- you take salt flat brines, selectively precipitate out the salts you want, and return the remaining salts. It's not like you're ripping off mountaintops or contaminating freshwater with lead or something.
Anyway, as with all discussions of "reserves", this whole discussion is incredibly misleading. The concept of a reserves figure also has a market price and technology level associated with it. As market prices change and technology changes, what "reserves" are available in each country changes dramatically. For example, at high oil prices, Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia. The same sort of thing is true with lithium. For example, one the Kings Valley, Nevada mine owned by Western Lithium Corp, which they're currently developing, has 50% more "reserves" at the minimum concentration they're planning to recover than the figure this articles gives for the entire United States. The entire Kings Valley was estimated back in the 70s/80s to have 11m tons LCE (lithium carbonate equivalent, the standard form for trading lithium).
By a scallop's forelocks!