Posted on 09/01/2012 4:19:40 PM PDT by djf
The Peak Energy blog has just reported on the purchase of an Australian lithium mine by a U.S. group as evidence of the skyrocketing demand for the silver-white metal used in a variety of batteries.
The story of the Australian-based Talison Lithium company is interesting, but the eye-opener is at the bottom of the story. A graph illustrates that demand for lithium has been growing 20% per year since 2000 – and that the real growth will kick in starting in 2015.
Here at SGN, we've been carefully monitoring the progress of electric vehicles and grid-scale storage and related topics ranging from China's drastic reductions in lithium exports to DOE's attempts to find a workaround for the rare earths shortage, as well as the ups and downs of the EV battery industry. But the future of energy storage may depend on whether or not we're already nearing the peak of available lithium, or whether we can find new supplies.
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Jesse Berst is the founder and chief analyst of Smart Grid News.com, the industry's oldest and largest smart grid site. A frequent keynoter at industry events in the U.S. and abroad, he also serves on advisory committees for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Institute for Electric Efficiency. He often provides strategic consulting to large corporations and venture-backed startups. He is a member of the advisory boards of GridGlo and Calico Energy Services.
I recently attended a presentation from a man who was promoting some investors for his company which is developing lithium batteries for the racing industry and the subject about lithium mining came up. He said that China now controls most of the world supply.
The notion of “peak lithium” will eventually have been shown to be as wrong-headed as every other claim of depleted resources. The reason — technological change, substitution, and other adaptive measures. The only way we will suffer from “peak lithium, will be if government decides to “do something about it”. Government interference would ensure a crisis, just as every other central-planning “solution” throughout history has done.
Substitution, and alternative technologies are particularly likely in the case of stationary applications — such as storage for a smart grid. Just let the marketplace, and the price system work their wonders.
I’m more worried about Peak Valium.
Imagine if there were a shortage!
Never mind that, worry about Peak Chocolate.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/june/ultrafast-edison-battery-062612.html ~ NICKEL IRON BATTERY ~ NEW FASTS CHEAPER BETTER WAY TO GO
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/june/ultrafast-edison-battery-062612.html ~ NICKEL IRON BATTERY ~ NEW FASTS CHEAPER BETTER WAY TO GO
Well, it was left to the marketplace... and the market discovered and created lithium batteries, which are a highly effective form of energy storage.
And your pleas about “leave it to the market” are ignoring that fact.
The market worked. The market spoke. And we need lithium to do what the market found out.
Yes, there might be a better solution. But it might take years to discover and bring online some new technology.
Oh, there is plenty of lithium. But most all of the lithium manganese dioxide is in China. Its been the flaw of this battery nonsense since day one.
Thanks. Interesting. Not sure how practical, but interesting nonetheless.
With the Peak Oil folks around, we definitely don’t wanna run out of lithium.
Thanks djf.
The basic change in these new nickel-iron batteries is the way they are manufactured ~ on the micro-scale. The manufacturing technique is probably the way we are going to go in all sorts of things ~ and ideas that didn’t seem so productive earlier are going to look fantastic.
Chile is sitting on the largest deposit of lithium in the world, by far. And Bolivia has the second largest. If Push came to shove we can extract it from sea water.
Check out post # 7.
That battery might work in my basement for stationary power instead of lead acid batteries. But no way is it a substitute for lithium, it weighs too much and has less energy density according to the article.
I don’t beleive that.
There is reportedly a huge volume which is beginning to be mined in the Atacoma, just north east of Antofagasta, Chile. The capitalistic Chileans would hardly hand it over to the Chinese.
Extract the lithium you need from sea water.
And how, you ask?
The simple way is to just let big, shallow ponds fill with sea water, and let the water evaporate off. The salts remaining are a vast combination of chlorides, sulfates, carbonates, and silicates, which include, among other things, quite a bit of sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, and yes, lithium. All you must do is separate it out.
This may be done by fractional crystallization. Different ions both dissolve and crystallize at different rates, and this phenomenon may be observed by using a piece of filter paper. The filter paper is satuated by letting a minute amount of the brine per time period drip on one point, which then diffuses through the paper medium. The most easily dissolved remains on the leading edge of the diffusion, while the more slowly dissolved remains close to the point of infusion. These leave distinct striations on the filter paper medium, and may be cut apart with a pair of scissors.
Now obviously, this is a rather slow and tedious method, not really scalable for industrial purposes. But the principle could be applied to using large mats with discrete separations, and controlled rate of infusion. When the desired point is reached, the separate but adjacent mats are taken up, and the one with the desired metallic ion is then further treated to extract the now purified compound.
Essentially, this was how the once huge potassium chloride deposits at the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah were formed over the eons, as the original Lake Bonneville dried down from the trapped waters of what was once an arm of the Pacific Ocean. But those beds have been mined for the better part of a century, now, and the potassium has long been shipped away to become fertilizer, gunpowder, and other important industrial chemicals. We may be running low on this very necessary element, and it may be time to start mining the ocean for it.
The fast way is to speed up evaporation, not merely depending on the solar radiation falling on shallow ponds. I propose utilizing nuclear energy to generate the heat necessary to evaporate down huge quantities of water, and either collecting the water vapor as condensate to supply huge new amounts of fresh and potable water, essentially free of contaminants, or to let it simply provide a local boost in the relative humidity of the locality. If the local humidity is high enough, snowfall or rainfall is encouraged, and we can truly change the climate, but only on a micro scale.
Of course, with the water evaporated off, the dissolved solids that were in the sea water become a very concentrated brine, which may then be treated in any of several ways. Dried down until it is desiccated, the crystals will be in distinct striations, and may be physically separated by practical means. Or the concentrated brine may be subjected to electrolysis, freeing the anions at the anode, and attracting the metallic ions to the cathode, where they are reduced to metallic elements.
As anybody who has ever done the experiment in high school chemistry knows, the very active metallic elements (lithium, sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium), react with varying degrees of speed upon exposure to water, generating free hydrogen and considerable heat. So once the elemental metal is formed at the cathode, it must be immediately whisked away before it proceeds with the back-reaction (which generates free hydrogen), but this is an engineering problem, not an impossibility.
Another approach is to heat up the salt mixture until it is molten, THEN proceed with electrolysis. The complication with water is then eliminated, but the necessarily very high temperatures bring its own set of engineering problems, probably involving some high-temperature ceramic containment vessels.
We have not yet begun to do more than scratch the surface for the potential wealth this planet may still yield. Trying to make fusion energy practical is just a little too far in the future for that approach to be of much significance yet, but but we do have the means to harness and apply the processes we already know about right now.
Lithium is abundant on the planet. Most often it is extracted from salt flats and dried up lake beds. There are plenty of these in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and the American West for starters.
This sounds like a pump and dump promotional for a penny stock.
The demand for lithium may be growing at 20 percent a year but what is the price doing? I noticed that that is not mentioned.
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