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By the time any of these mines or refineries come online, lithium ion batteries will be being replaced by sodium ion for the larger EV and storage batteries. Besides that, America hardly manufactures phones or laptops.
It’s also why the Department of Energy department EERE (Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy) was just renamed to CMEI (Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation)
At the same time the DoE lab NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) was renamed to NLR (National Lab of the Rockies)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Energy_Efficiency_and_Renewable_Energy
Surely it’s more economical to just recycle batteries
Yes, but how will that completely fuck up the countryside? Destruction for quick profit is the key part!!!
Require the ability that anything with a battery has the ability to have it removed for recycling. And force ban on single use batteries from vapes and like products that are frequently difficult in design to not be recycled.
Just make a vape deposit system. And resell the batteries back to the vape manufacturers. They are good for hundreds of charges.
MFW I take a split-second to imagine anyone in this administration can competent their way out of a wet paper bag.
To action this, they’ll kick poor people out of a town, clearcut something’s only habitat, pollute the area, make a tentative agreement for billions that equal zero because of the tax breaks and other oversubsidized giveaways, and then close it all down after all that with a suspicious bankruptcy and government buyout.
The Appalachians are older than sharks.
So yeah let’s dig it up and burn it, since that’s apparently the only thing we know to do with nature.
If they really need to ruin nature somewhere, please let the US do this to their own nature so they can live with these consequences instead of outsourcing them
Yep, for once they do it to themselves.
And sharks are older than trees.
Well, they could always rely on their good friend and partner China to never gate keep the minerals they possess 🤔…oh wait.
They can pry the lithium from my cold, dead, Mainer hands. But I will be taking at least a few of them with me to Hell.
The rest will perish from the curse of the Paul Bunyan statue, which will awaken like a vengeful Lorax golem.
Ayuh!
We have quite a few Paul Bunyans of notable size in Minnesota. If one awakens I hope they all do and become a weird US folklore version of the army of the ents.
What bullshit. The usa already has extensive lithium deposits. It’s not a question of supply, it has always been a question of how much it costs to mine it. Lengthy permitting processes, environmental concerns, high costs, and technological challenges.
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/white-gold-mapping-u-s-lithium-mines/
Lengthy permitting processes, environmental concerns
Those two don’t matter to the current administration.
Substitute those by corrupt assigning of contracts and public funds and pipedream “AI will extract Lithium for us” snake oil salespeople.
Tell that to the states where the mines are located. Because they will laugh themself silly.
No one has ever cared about the mountain folks :(
Stay the fuck off Plumbago thanks, Maine doesn’t want it’s mountain tops chopped off like fucking West Virginia. I love that since we have a state ban on metal extraction, and even though the lithium is bound as a silicate mineral (spudomeme, sp) it’s technically a metal and that’s prevented it’s extraction so far.
Also they are the largest lithium crystals found, I believe, anywhere. We’re talking 30ft long tree trunk sized crystals embedded in matrix, some of which have been exposed and are insanely cool to look at. The site is on private land but it’s not terribly difficult to get in contact with folks who have permission up there. Maine has a very long history of mineral extraction, and some of the richest gem deposits in North America, but the size of this locality and the type of mining proposed would be a massive problem for a relatively pristine area of Northern Mixed Hardwood and Conifer forest, not to mention the very small towns in the area that would be entirely transformed in the process.
I have a feeling they’ll have a much harder time pushing through mining operations in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire than they did in West VA. This will be received like proposals of mining the great lakes would in MI or WI, and many of the residents (Boston area professors) have the resources and energy to resist it.
Pennsylvania which has a lot of lithium that can be extracted without mining. Brine from fracking can be a major source. Lithium extraction from fracking brine can be relatively sustainable considering fracking is already being done.
Didn’t they just remove the mining protection from the BWCA?
Yep and they’re working on removing protections for other federal land which I have little doubt they’ll* accomplish given it was the fed previously protecting it. I’m just saying I think it will be difficult to actually implement projects in some places due to local opposition combined with the energy and resources to sustain that opposition.
Not a good thing overall btw, by my figuring it just means under-resourced regions will continue to shoulder the bulk of industrial waste and pollution because they’ll be the least equipped to resist. Tale as old as time.
For now.
Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all have different groups that individually disagree with mining once protected wilderness. The only selection of people pushing for this would be the rich who want the money.
I would not fuck with rights of New Hampshire. They will come after you. Never met one who wasn’t a bit off.
It’s like the push to deforest the western states. You’ll be surprised by the weird alliances that pop up when billionaires show up in the backyard. Wish we could find common ground broadly, but I guess I’ll take what I can get.
The hilarious part of this is that they think they can do this to get to something approaching parity/self-sufficiency with China’s level of Rare Earth Metals production, in like… no time at all.
That’s not even close to how any of this works, but okey dokey?
They’re literally the most incompetent economic planners / policy makers… at least since the Smoot Hawley tariffs.
Even if this all like, actually worked, without legal challenges, to … open up mining operations…
You… still have have to do all the rest of the industrial planning/policy to… make… any of this… make any actual sense, and that’s just… national heritage/environmental damage treated as moot.
Oh cool so more lithium than they k ow what do do with. What’s next laws stating everyone has to own at least 100 phones and 50 laptops?
And lithium batteries are already obsolete sodium ion battery can last thousands of charge cyclesBut they still suffer from thermal runaways and aren’t as energy dense
Not really there’s a reason lithium is still used. Other battery chemistries have other drawbacks beyond longevity.
As far as I’m aware, lithium still isn’t beat on energy density.
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Yeah and sodium ion batteries aren’t solid state yet either I don’t think.
Um, so can lithium. And lithium has a much higher energy density.
What’s next? Hopefully domestic-component grid storage batteries and EV batteries for greatly reduced cost and less reliance on China.
Any serious effort towards a “green” future is going to require better home and vehicular energy generation and storage. We need gridscale batteries and EV batteries, cheaply, now.
Cheaply
Ha ha, its made in the US, selling cheaply means less profits.
Greatly reduced cost
We’re lucky if energy costs stay the same
Where will it get refined?
Well uh, China.
Untill they figure out that you can’t just cram raw ore into a battery or computer.
ETA on them figuring that out … 2-3 years?
Oh right, and then you actually have to build the refineries.
I’m goin with ‘within the next 2 years’, being said for approximately 8 years.
In America rich people must profit and everyone else must suffer. Everything is for sale.
And when the new batteries become standard, then what? Ruined mountains for nothing.
