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We May Not Have Enough Minerals To Even Meet Electric Car Demand (jalopnik.com)
Citing two reports from Reuters and Bloomberg, Jalopnik reports on the scarcity of metals necessary for electric cars. From the report: [W]hile demand for nickel keeps increasing, half the world's nickel supply is too low in quality to use for car batteries. All of which is going to have seismic effect on the world's suppliers. In short: There will be winners and losers, and the winners will be the ones with the highest-grade stuff -- not unlike, I suppose, the illicit drugs market. "Some of the biggest producers of the higher-grade ores, including BHP Norilsk Nickel, Vale and Sumitomo Corp, are moving quickly to take advantage and seal long-term supply deals with battery producers," reports Reuters. "Among those losing out would be lower-grade nickel mines like Cerro Matoso in Columbia, owned by South32 Ltd and Glencore's Koniambo in New Caledonia, as well as Anglo American's mines in Brazil producing ferronickel."
What of cobalt? Bloomberg sent a writer and photographer to Cobalt, Ontario, about 300 miles north of Toronto, to find out. The town, which began life as a silver town, also is believed to have some cobalt, though no one's really found much yet. The search for a new source of cobalt isn't taking place in just Cobalt, Ontario, of course, as mining companies worldwide try to capitalize on the our electric car future. But the search is ramping up as the world's biggest source of cobalt -- the Democratic Republic of Congo, where about half of all cobalt comes from -- is increasingly unstable, making car manufacturers nervous and cobalt all the more valuable.
What of cobalt? Bloomberg sent a writer and photographer to Cobalt, Ontario, about 300 miles north of Toronto, to find out. The town, which began life as a silver town, also is believed to have some cobalt, though no one's really found much yet. The search for a new source of cobalt isn't taking place in just Cobalt, Ontario, of course, as mining companies worldwide try to capitalize on the our electric car future. But the search is ramping up as the world's biggest source of cobalt -- the Democratic Republic of Congo, where about half of all cobalt comes from -- is increasingly unstable, making car manufacturers nervous and cobalt all the more valuable.
Why is always the MOSLEMS do these attacks?
The KORAN says JIHAD is a duty of ALL MOSLEMS. It does not make any exceptions, whatsoever. ALL MOSLEMS **MUST** do JIHAD. End of discussion.
These aren't minerals, but elements.
The ore which they elements may be extracted from are minerals - several different kinds, none of which are mentioned in TFS.
The elements themselves are not rare. It''s just a matter of paying for the extraction. It won't make batteries hard to find, just expensive.
At minimum, to handle the increased grid transmission demand we'll have to construct additional pylons.
We simply developed improved technology to recover and refine the oil that was left between the mantle and the surface, and future generations of humans may discover recoverable quantities of petroleum products in the mantle.
All we know for sure, is that the earth's most intelligent species is ever more clever in a crisis.
Short supplies of nickel and rare earth metals? Increased profit margins for successful innovation? We'll be roping asteroids at some future price point.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I guess they expect that the groups mining the high-quality nickel will serve the battery industry *and* all other nickel-using industries? Because that seems dumb, like even a middle-schooler could probably figure out that the high-end nickel will go to expensive high-end uses, and the prices of low-end nickel will rise because the high-end nickel is no longer available for low-end uses.
But that's just me, I'm some weirdo who doesn't even feel the need to tie nickel prices to illicit drugs for a headline.
It's not going to be okay this time.
Stop wasting this stuff (it might be useful for something more important in the future) on consumable car batteries and go straight for hydrogen. There's a massive supply of it in the wet stuff.
I have a hard time believing we are out of accessible nickel in the crust - maybe it's not economically competitive at this time, like tar sands weren't 40 years ago, but I think it's still there.
However, as the cost of extracting high quality nickel from the crust increases, at some point it will be cost effective to source it from space rocks. Like solar power in the 1970s, we're not there... yet.
Maybe a better thing to do is to have a diesel or gasoline engine in the vehicle to generate electricity for the motors that provide propulsion, like a train engine or cruise ship.
Good thing we'll have enough Vespene gas because even depleted geysers continue to produce.
US nickels have an (illegal) melt value of $0.041...so store some. if nickel goes up, great. if not, still worth $0.05.
Would you really miss it? Can you point to it on a map?
Just strip mine the whole thing, problem solved!
Cerro Matoso is in Colombia.
Batteries have problems that cannot be solved, the primary are weight and time to recharge. A 200 mile range for a car is not so bad unless it takes a evening to charge. Then you really want a 400 mile range, a compromise for a days drive. Yes, there are technologies for fast change, but even these are measured in hours, not minutes.
I suspect at some point we will have hydrogen fuel cells. The storage of the hydrogen is likely to be the killer app for carbon nanotech, as we don't want to substitute one waste of metals for another. The hydrogen can be generated in situ at home or the filling station with wind or solar power, so no dangerous tanks like with gasoline. One suspects will take longer to absorb the hydrogen in the substrate than simply fueling a car, but it could be get down to much less than an hour. And the substrate hopefully will be much more durable than a battery, so we won't be looking at paying the entire residual value of the car as is the case with batteries in a car.
half the world’s nickel supply is too low in quality to use for car batteries.
1. There is plenty of nickel in the planet's crust.
2. Since nickel is an element, it can be refined into pure nickel with the application of chemistry.
3. All the elements in batteries can be extracted and reused, it's just a matter of chemistry.
Consider aluminum for a moment: despite being extremely abundant, it's rarely found in it's elemental state (which is why it used to be valued more than gold). Then we figured out how to extract it and now it's dirt cheap.
This is just click-bait alarmist bullshit.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
That's assuming we will never invent different kinds of batteries or even wireless electricity which eliminates the need for huge batteries, not even counting the ways we can't even imagine right now.
Think blockchain, but for batteries.
Nickle is going to be in much greater demand, so sign long term contracts now, especially for the high grade stuff???
Mining companies aren't that stupid. The truth is the big mining companies are shutting down nickle mines to put pressure on supply and force the price higher. Only after the prices rise will those mines re-open and be much more profitable than before. Only chumps, or very low quality mines would be signing long term contracts at these prices, knowing there is massive increased demand coming.
They said that too in the 70s. You're just repeating the cycle fool.
Robert Murray-Smith has an interesting Youtube channel where he's doing all sorts of amazing things with graphene and other forms of carbon, including building an all carbon battery.
We might not need any metal (not even for the plates) in a few years time.
We need to generate that power. We don’t build nuke plants any more in the us, coal nat gas and other fossil fuel will still pollute and solar? You’d have to cover how many acres of ground with panels to power one big city parking and charging garage? And what about a rainy day or night time?
I thought we moved from NiMH batteries to Lithium ion in cars. Only the lowly no EV range hybrids use nickel. Correct me if I am wrong.
Now if only battery manufacturers would think of this now and start building rockets and planning longer ranged space missions...
As in District of Columbia? You mean they're going to dig up the nations capital? COOL!
Welp. It's time to make space ships to go mine for resources off asteroids and planets. Dead Space becomes a reality?
While it doesn't make sense to mine landfills for just this stuff, it might make sense to mine landfills for this and other materials. Pity we really kinda suck at recycling.
I'm surprised that the Sudbury region of Ontario isn't mentioned - the town was built on nickel (there's even a giant Canadian nickel coin monument).
Does this mean that the Ontario nickel isn't high enough quality? Couldn't it be refined to meet the needs of the battery manufacturers?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Better build more probes.
We require more minerals.
> all warming is a result of data manipulation by IPCC
Are you suggesting the IPCC controls the climate via spreadsheets?
No cobalt might be a good thing. No need to worry about the infamous cobalt bomb.
Duh!
In other news, the author of the article is full of it and really, really clueless of how things actually work. He seems to be completely unaware that technologies get refined over time and that this happens particularly when there is high demand for a good produced by a technology.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Nickel is not required for many Li-Ion formulations. It makes batteries that have the highest power density however it's not the most durable formulation.
Lithium Iron Phosphate ("LFP", LiFePO4) is the formulation used in the Segway. Note the complete absence of Nickel.
Lithium Manganese Oxide ("LMO", LiMn2O4) is another used for electric vehicles that has no Nickel.
I have seen sponsored posts on FB for companies trying to sell investments in Nickel with this same threat that it's needed for electric vehicle market. It's not. Scam.
The elements in used batteries won't evaporate to nothing. Of course, as more and more batteries are needed as the number of electric cars increase, some of the supply of the necessary elements can be obtained from recycled batteries. Recycled batteries may never meet demand, but after a long time the supply may meet much of the demand. Look at the recycling of lead acid batteries to provide the necessary lead to make new batteries.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
But for the electric motors. https://www.greencarreports.co...
I've got a whole jar of nickles. Heck, I sometimes see one on the ground and don't even bother picking it up, and I'm not even Bill Gates.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A little offtopic, but: Columbia? WTF? The name of my fucking country is Colombia! with an O
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
No, he's right. The global temperature is going to continue to increase, we've already passed the point of no return on that.
We'll get past any battery material issue, of course. But we need to cut the CO2 emissions to almost zero at this point to even stop the problem, and as long as political events keep putting scum like Drumpf in seats of power, we're thoroughly fucked.
There is no such thing as clean coal OR clean oil.
That's exactly what Elon Musk is doing.............
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They don't know how to read these articles and understand the words that aren't directly-related to the vehicle itself. They are essentially board-level grease monkeys, not component-level grease monkeys. And this type of reporting demonstrates it very clearly.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Once a company acquires a large enough stake in a mineral or other resource, the first thing for them to do is say how rare it is. This will send prices soaring and profits will too. Basic scam tactics.
"The oil thing was a political stunt"
No. In the early to mid 70's it was the OPEC boycott stunt and subsequent manipulation of output to raise prices. Of course now OPEC has lost the ability to manipulate US actions in the ME. The US currently has the ability to double it's oil production output and knock prices down so low that OPEC, Venezuela, and Russia would go bankrupt. And don't think for a moment that the US government would subsidize it's domestic oil production to make sure the pumps keep pumping. The winners in this scenario would be the US and China. US domestic energy prices would fall which benefits the consumers and businesses. And since China imports the bulk of it's oil they would end up paying lower energy prices which benefit their manufactures. A stronger relationship between China and US could dominate the world economy.
It is so stupid and pointless how many millions of hours of human lives are wasted shuffling back and forth, how many magajoules of energy to take 2 tons of metal with them, how many lives are lost due to this dangerous activity, how much money spent and worn down vehicles, collision repair, and so on. COMPLETE FUCKING WASTE.
http://i.imgur.com/axJmn.gif
I also believe that we will not run out of oil any time soon. One reason to believe this is because we are seeing more efficient uses of it worldwide. One example is not burning it for electricity when there are other sources of energy far more suited for it, saving the oil for transportation. Saudi Arabia has learned this.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sau...
Saudi Arabia plans on building more than 17 GW of nuclear energy capacity by 2032. That's roughly 100 MW of nuclear power capacity built per month for a nation, from a nation with roughly 1/10th the population and economic output of the USA. For the USA to do this means 1 GW of nuclear power capacity built per month. If they can do that then we can do that.
The interesting thing about that 1 GW per month calculation is that this is also about the same electrical capacity we'd need to add to keep up with planned closures of current nuclear and coal power plants. That's not adding capacity, that's just (barely) keeping even.
Natural gas is cheap now, which is the primary source of added electrical capacity now in the USA. What happens when natural gas isn't so cheap any more? Are we going to start building nuclear power plants like Saudi Arabia?
I know someone is ready to come back with a reply that we can go to wind and solar for our electricity, and that we can use batteries to make these unreliable energy sources reliable. Then we just get back to the problem pointed out in the article, a shortage of materials for making batteries. What happens when batteries start to get expensive? Are we going to go to nuclear power then?
What materials do we need to build a nuclear power plant? Just about the same materials for coal or natural gas, or about 1/10 the materials needed for the same capacity of wind or solar. If we have the material to build enough wind and solar to meet future energy needs then we have enough material to meet our future energy needs 10 times over with nuclear power.
America won't run out of coal, oil, or natural gas because we will have moved a large part of our energy production to nuclear long before we run out of them. If we don't move to nuclear power then we will be buying oil from a nuclear powered Saudi Arabia, which is just saying we'll be using Saudi Arabian nuclear power to power the American economy. Of all the places on Earth to build solar power I'd think Saudi Arabia would be very high on that list. I'm sure they have been and still will use solar power, but they are jumping in big on nuclear power now. That should be a clue for Americans that think we should avoid nuclear power here.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It's no "Mr. Fusion", but a brit by the name of Robert Murray-Smith has a series of processes to turn everyday trash into carbon, graphetize it and turn it into cheap batteries that rival lithium ion.
Here is his latest update https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"However, since 1993 on a rolling decade basis if the same wager had been repeated for subsequent decades, Ehrlich would have won the bet"
There are physical (energetic) and chemical limits to human ingenuity. Between "it runs out" and "it will be there forever" there are multiple shade of grey, e.g. one of them being "the cost of extracting more become unbearable, and thus extracting that resource is a limiting factor to all economies" as an example.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Whooooooooooosh!
A rocket just flew by over your head!
Looks like the Democratic Republic of Congo is going to need to be liberated through aerial bombing and troops on the ground real soon.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Been saying this shit for over a decade, after i thought how cool it would be to run everything off hydrogen. Then I learned how utterly ridiculous the notion of using it for fuel would be, but most telling was that the worlds supply of platinum is pitiful.
Back then I took the estimated mass of the platinum content of earth, broke it down by density, and then gave it the Olympic swimming pool treatment. It wouldn't even touch your ankle.
The next step in our technological evolution is going to have to be novel methods using cheap and abundant materials, because we have and are wasting the good stuff on horseshit products we just throw away. Nb4 moron says recycle. Too late for that; the barn door should have been designed with a spring, but the bean counters needed to save a nickel.
All we know for sure, is that the earth's most intelligent species is ever more clever in a crisis.
Not more clever, just willing to take bigger risks.
A risk, if it works out, will seem incredibly clever in retrospect. If it doesn't in will just seem retarded.
Of course you will not hear the story from someone who is dead so there is a certain amount of survival bias there.
They said that too in the 70s. You're just repeating the cycle fool.
You know what fools also say often?
"Oh, don't worry. That will never happen."
Ironically, this will also be the epitaph of humanity.
Just like Stalin said, it isn't your vote that matters, it's the people who count the votes that matter.
Niobium alloys are almost expensive but better properties.
Try to do more chemistries.
how people could ever lived without cars and build all this (cities, cathedrals, castles ....). In Munich were I live the living areas till the 1970s where all green. This place has been converted into parking space since then and is filled with tin now. Wide Avenues have been converted into 4 lane roads sacrificed on the Altar of individual car traffic.
People are becoming fatter and fatter. Diseases cause of the lack of movement and air polution... this list is endless. tldr;
we paid much more for the false "freedom" of individual traffic than we gained from it. Just my 2 cents
for every time slashdot posted something stupid...
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
as a chemist I really do not know what this article is talking about. Nickel can be purified using the Mond process, so as long as the nickel content in the ore is high enough to make extraction economically viable there is no such thing as resulting "low grade" or "high grade" nickel. The same thing goes for the sulphate. There is no reason why the sulphate shoud actually achieve a higher market price. Actually you need only about 400 kilograms of expensive nickel to produce a ton of it. (sulphuric acid is one of the cheapest industrial chemicals, so its price does not really matter here). I can not help but wonder why they are spreading such misinformation.
I wonder where we'll get minerals for new cars now that the demand for cars is beyond our resources capable of building them with... I guess we'll all just walk until god makes some new minerals for us. Who would have guessed we would run out of minerals for cars with zero years of warning? I'd like to know why the hell geologists and minerologists were left sleeping on the job until today to see if there were enough minerals to make cars for the next year!
I, for one, am not that thrilled with the notion that the Saudi Kingdom is building reactors in the middle east and we are politically hamstrung against advancing the technology here in the U.S. Saudi Arabia may have the outward appearance of stability, but they're not as far removed from constant conflict as it seems.
Great point that the conservation of petroleum resources due to efficiency improvements is a large factor in stretching reserves.
Combining the likelihood of improved techniques for recovery with inevitable leaps in the efficiency of the relatively nascent battery technology seems to suggest that current mineral scarcities will be overcome.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"reply that we can go to wind and solar for our electricity, and that we can use batteries to make these unreliable energy sources reliable. "
And they'd be right. Moreover, the nuclear power stations are unreliable. That is one reason why the USA has a higher than world average uptime (nowhere near as much as claimed, though): they have old and well understood designs that they know when to take down and how to put back up after checking for any new developing failures. When the USA has new designs, the uptime for those drop to the world average, because they haven't learned how they fail yet and when to take them down before they fail.
And guess what? That makes the power from them unreliable too.
And nobody is building batteries for the 3 month backup for a major engineering refit in one of them.
At highway/motorway speeds, every 150 miles you should take AT LEAST a 20 minute break. That means 450mph recharge is more than enough.
Between the 70's and now, though, environmental law has gone from permissive to deliberately anti-industry and anti-progress. Good luck getting any new mines ceritfied.
I, for one, am not that thrilled with the notion that the Saudi Kingdom is building reactors in the middle east and we are politically hamstrung against advancing the technology here in the U.S. Saudi Arabia may have the outward appearance of stability, but they're not as far removed from constant conflict as it seems.
That list of wars on Wikipedia includes many before the modern nation of Saudi Arabia even existed. I'd think that anything that predates WWII is far enough in the past that it has little relevance on today's political climate. I know that the echoes of the era before 1930 or 1950 influence what happens today but the people fighting before then are dead or senile now. The wars after that were mostly of the kingdom defending itself from outside aggressors. Again, not completely true but for the most part the nation itself is quite peaceful and prosperous.
They are peaceful and prosperous enough that they can expend the resources needed to plan for a future where the oil that they've been using to prop up their economy might not be there any more. They are now working on a transition. They had roughly a century of living off of the fruits of their oil resources. They'll likely enjoy another century of transition until the oil income is so low, and income from other sources so great, that there is not going to be fights over oil any more. There will still be wars, no doubt of that, but future wars are much less likely to be over oil.
Combining the likelihood of improved techniques for recovery with inevitable leaps in the efficiency of the relatively nascent battery technology seems to suggest that current mineral scarcities will be overcome.
I doubt that there will be any more "leaps" in battery technology. We'll probably make them safer and cheaper but I have my doubts on making them carry more energy per weight and volume. We might see energy density double, maybe even get to be as high as ten times what we have now. To get beyond that the battery will need resources outside of the battery for the chemistry, an "air breathing" system or something. Having a battery that requires external resources for the chemistry adds complexity, like the air filters we have on current gasoline burning cars to keep out road dust, and is also pushing the definition of "battery". Needing the fuel and oxidizer in a sealed container puts a hard limit on the chemical energy it can store in a given mass and volume. Extending this energy density with external resources means that any convenience for not having to add fuel to the vehicle is now lost, no more driving past filling stations.
We're going to hit a hard limit on battery energy density real soon now, assuming we haven't hit it already.
What is a nascent technology is nuclear energy. We can squeeze a lot out of that yet once people get motivated to do so. I have to wonder if the kingdom of Saudi Arabia have a plan to continue in the energy business, past the days of oil. I believe it would be very wise for them to plan on making nuclear energy research part of the plan for their future.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
ACTUAL measurements show more warming. The Urban Heat Island effect, which you deniers used to claim was the reason for AGW, is overcorrected and reduces the trend too far in the adjusted data. So we can go with "ACTUAL" data, but AGW is worse in that case than the IPCC reports.
"EV's" have a larger environmental footprint, than gas powered vehicles.
Only their measurements of the climate. ACTUAL measurements show no warming.
Citation needed.
Oh my, your fetish for nuclear power is growing so much you're relying on the Saudis as an example?
C'mon, they're not going to do it anymore than the US will, you might as well be praising them for their ice-berg plans, and we know how those worked out.
> and as long as political events keep putting scum like Drumpf in seats of power
You mean nonsense like the other party trying to crown an old first lady Queen? Yeah, it would have been nice to have a real Democratic candidate in the last election.
Don't assume an unhinged media narrative will get people to vote your way. If anything, that kind of thing should make people deeply suspicious.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, it's the 800lb gorilla of OPEC that's keeping prices down right now. Our ability to engage in fracking has nothing to do with that. It's actually that 800lb gorilla in the ME that's tanked our own domestic fracking industry because of the afforementioned manipulation of global oil prices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> I'd think that anything that predates WWII is far enough in the past that it has little relevance on today's political climate.
"Ancient history" is relevant to both our region and theirs. The state of politics in both reflect political traditions with very deep roots. That entire region suffers from the fact that it's the remnant of the Ottoman Empire. It suffers from wars, ethnic strife, and a tendency towards tyranny due to the democratic traditions it DID NOT develop since the time of Mohammed.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, where about half of all cobalt comes from -- is increasingly unstable, making car manufacturers nervous and cobalt all the more valuable.
Sounds like someone needs a dose of "Freedom"
We live in a scarcity-controlled society. The truth of the matter is that we have much better sources of energy than petroleum and much better ways of harvesting petroleum and virtually limitless petroleum at our current rate of consumption, but that the imposed scarcity ensures only people with lots of wealth can get at and control it. That scarcity cascades in turn into every industry/product and allows for control of the population because suddenly money is a useful concept and with that comes the means to control labor. Now you have every idiot under the sun chasing fiat currencies for the sake of increasing the labor they themselves can control because it prevents them from looking for alternative ways to control labor, which would itself detract from the labor which is already controlled by others. It's all about control, in truth there are resources for everyone but then you'd just have several billion people all doing their own thing, which is no good for sociopaths who gauge their standing on how many people they control.
My own belief is all electric vehicles will die because of lack of capacity and range before they get popular. We will eventually realize a severe growing pain with all electric and discover that we cannot possibly deal with even 20% of all vehicles having to use infrastructure to charge their vehicles. The ease at which we buy fossil fuels is going to prevent many from embracing all electric. We may even see those that want to use it, finally admit its just not practical.
Nobody I have talked to see's any breakthrough in capacity, charging time, or massive interest in car owners abandoning gasoline. Mostly because people love big vehicles, they love to drive long distances, and they want the convenience of spending 5 minutes filling a tank and driving 400 to 500 miles.
Well, if you're correct, then it seems the fear associated with losing our jobs to robots is quite overblown.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Science marches on. It doesn't stop with nickel or anything else. Do you actually think that we are going to stop at Lithium?? Expand your minds, please!
We May Not Have Enough Minerals To Even Meet Electric Car Demand
Putting extraction costs aside, this is physically impossible. I mean, sweet Jesus, we are sitting on a planet with a fuckton of elements and ores. We already recycle a number of materials, countries are already exploring mineral extraction from sea beds, etc.
Invest in the next mining boom while there is still time. Stake that claim early pardner!!!!
Columbia? Is that a state in the US? I know of the South American country called Colombia but never heard of this other one. Any help would be appreciated.
And here's how they could do it. This electric mining truck generates MORE electricity driving down the mountain with a load of ore, than the truck uses going back up the mountain empty "free" electricity "free" refining...
https://electrek.co/2017/09/17...
"Recoverable quantities of petroleum products in the mantle"
This gets modded up to 5? Really?
Actually, though the US producers have the capacity to knock prices down with oversupply, it is the US production that can't compete on price with most of the OPEC countries. Drawing oil out of the Saudi reserves is much cheaper than fracking. Over-production would put the US fields out of business, not the OPEC producers. As it is, the OPEC countries have been trying to limit output, but still the 'low' current prices make US oil production borderline profitable, and many fields have been idled. Although I have no doubt that Venezuela will probably go bankrupt anyway, even with high oil prices, and Russia isn't doing too well economically, either..
Sorry guys who believe that resources are so limited, but there are huge deposits of nickel, cobalt, and virtually every other industrial metal. The only big hurdle is the low commodity prices. If the value were to double or triple, all of a sudden so many new sources could be economically mined. Nickel laterites are mostly untapped because nobody wants to put up a multi-billion dollar operation at today's ROI. We have been hearing about the Malthus' inaccurate views for over two hundred years despite overwhelming proof that he doesn't understand technology. The world's population will start to collapse from small family size long before we run out of natural resources.
Instead of whining and complaining, plz make more babies.
We already have the material to make combustion engines. Changing the fuel to hydrogen may be the way to do.
You're confusing fracking with oil tars/sands. BTW We've been fracking for 100 years, the greenies just recently started to demonize it.
It's production that's keeping prices down. Most large exporters, including russia, are largely one trick ponies economically. Saying 'OPEC' is sort of true, saying 'American production' is sort of true.
It's all of it, including Europe reducing its demand because 'fuck Putin'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You don't truck ore down the mountains. You pump it down a slurry pipe. If you don't have water you use a train.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Elon doesnâ(TM)t have enough sales to demonstrate an electric car demand.
No, he's right. The global temperature is going to continue to increase, we've already passed the point of no return on that.
Does that mean you and your ilk will shut up about it and take the L?
http://i.imgur.com/axJmn.gif
That was an epic woosh. I had to quote it and post just so I can be sure to find it again someday, in my own post history.
Saudi is (their claim anyhow, books are not open) the world's 'low cost producer'.
But only if you IGNORE the obligatory government spending that is funded out of oil revenue. Once you include the price of welfare, princes and haj, they become a high cost producer.
The real shit end for Saudi. They can't cut those costs by shutting down production. They, more or less, have to pump or die.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How does someone fudge uptime for gigawatt power plants in AC land? Exercise bike and alternator?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Fudge the figures, look the other way, same as anywhere.
Do you really know what 'low cost producer' means?
Hint, it's not the cost of the entire economy, just the cost of producing the oil.
There's also not enough Lithium either. A calculation was done 10 years ago: if you switched ALL US ICE sales to lithium battery EVs, there isn't enough lithium on the entire planet between known reserves and suspected reserves to even supply 1 years worth of sales volume.
Your realize there are actual engineers involved in running a power plant and grid? You might be stupid, but they aren't.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When your entire economy is dependant on funds extracted from oil revenue, that definition is very convenient.
The fact remains that the Saudis _have_ to pump or die. It's worse than if the costs were actual pump costs.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This bogus article doesn't mention the biggest source of nickel of them all: the huge asteroid buried under Sudbury, Canada, that crashed to Earth long ago. We've been mining it for decades. As for cobalt, we buy oil ffrom Saudi Arabia. They don't come much worse than that. We are well used to paying thugs fior things we want. We've been doing it for a century.
Only boring people are ever bored.
True enough if no other innovations come along, for example:
Aluminum Storage Breakthrough Hydrogen Economy now possible
The accidental discovery of a novel aluminum alloy that reacts with water in a highly unusual way may be the first step to reviving the struggling hydrogen economy. It could offer a convenient and portable source of hydrogen for fuel cells and other applications, potentially transforming the energy market and providing an alternative to batteries and liquid fuels.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2142693-nano-aluminium-offers-fuel-cells-on-demand-just-add-water/#.WYU4xugiRsM.facebook
And don't forget China's advances in materials! Expect much larger, higher voltage high current super capacitors.
Lithium is king perhaps only for a short spell.
What? We've already reached peak mineral? Excellent--let's get back to petrol.
Like how the US petro dollar is the dominant global currency. So all the constant wars the US keeps starting forcing countries to use dollars, we count that as what manufacturing? Having a big navy we count as exports, wouldn't have any without it. Where do we put being global policeman?
If you want to start adding in all sorts of other things, why not reversing global warming and all those pollution externalities. Everyone gets to be a high cost producer then. Na much better to just use common sense and just use the cost of producing as the production costs.
Thats your 'argument' engineers cant lie?
LOL
Seek help. You're unhinged.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When your entire 'argument' is based on making up your own alternate definitions for common words, of course you have nothing to say when called out on it.