Comment by smithkl42
5 months ago
My understanding (bowing to ChatGPT) is that you can get 1 pound of iron from <2 pounds of iron ore. But to get 1 pound of lithium, you need around 500 pounds of lithium ore.
So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
Interesting, but tailings never seem to enter much into environmental analyses that I have seen, unless you count coal ash as "tailings" which would be a pretty broad interpretation of the idea.
Lithium is also extracted via brine, as opposed to hard rock. Most of the environmental reporting has been on the brine approaches, which currently are in high elevations of South American mountains, and the problem appears to be mostly the use of land and taking that land out of the ecosystem for economic use as drying pools. But the same problem occurs with mining, too!
>So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
means recycling of lithium batteries will be a thriving business. (i.e. big difference from recycling of say tires or plastic bottles, more like, pretty successful, recycling of aluminum, and even better than it)
Li-ion batteries are older than you think. First volume production of NMC cells happened 1991. LFP in 1997. Google was founded 1998.
No one made fortune in Li-ion recycling in all those years. Li-ion cells remained disposable.
Lithium cells are still disposable (eg vapes). The difference is that a single EV contains hundreds of kilograms are we are not used to just chucking old cars in the gutter.
The volume of batteries wasn't there, neither did we really have the network to sell scrap batteries like we do with used cars.
You shouldn't post AI slop here. Until a few years ago, no lithium was mined from ore. Now roughly half of it is, mostly spodumene, LiAl(SiO3)2, which you can easily calculate (with units(1)) is 3.7% lithium, 18 times higher than the 0.2% you're claiming. 50 pounds of lithium thus comes, on average, from 25 pounds of brine-derived lithium and 670 pounds of spodumene.
While the rest of what you say is right, you will not find anywhere on Earth a mine with compact spodumene.
Spodumene is dispersed among other minerals into rocks and it only forms a few percent at most of those rocks, if not only fractions of a percent.
The rocks must be crushed and spodumene must be separated from the other much more abundant minerals, by flotation or similar mineral concentration techniques, before going further to chemical processing.
So your 670 pounds must be multiplied by a factor like 100, varying from mine to mine.
Some multiplication factor must also be used for the iron ore, which is also mixed with undesirable silicates, but iron oxide may reach up to a few tens of percent of the rock, so the multiplication factor is much smaller.
Hmm, I thought the Australian deposits were mostly spodumene. I appreciate the correction, although it's embarrassing; I'd rather be embarrassed than wrong.
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