Comment by kragen
5 months ago
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.
At the mine's current size, it can fulfil a third of the worldwide demand for lithium spodumene concentrate,[1] which is used to produce lithium hydroxide, a component of lithium-ion batteries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbushes_mine
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