{"id":157639,"date":"2024-06-13T07:00:10","date_gmt":"2024-06-13T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=157639"},"modified":"2024-06-09T23:16:37","modified_gmt":"2024-06-10T03:16:37","slug":"the-irony-of-lithium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=157639","title":{"rendered":"The irony of lithium"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Well, we know that one of the great needs of the grand and glorious EV revolution is lithium. Can’t have an electric car without either a bloody long extension cord or a pretty sizable battery, right? Old-style lead-acid batteries don’t hold enough of a charge for their weight – so the current front running technology is lithium ion batteries. Grand things they are…but they need, whatddya call it ? Oh, yeah…lithium.<\/p>\n

Turns out we import over 50% of our lithium,\u00a0 USGS<\/a><\/p>\n

And yet, there is but one large-scale lithium mine in the US, meaning for the moment the country has to import what it needs.<\/p>\n

Believe we heard a while back\u00a0 most of the imports would come from China, which is also trying to get their EV industry off the ground – so you know they will sooner or later decide they need all they have with none for us. (We won’t necessarily talk bout how their auto industry is going to be killing ours when they flood us with small INEXPENSIVE EVs. Have you seen the prices and sizes of American made ones?)<\/p>\n

But one of the gating factors, like above – is availability of lithium. Turns out it may be coming from a very ironic source.<\/p>\n

Now public researchers on the other side of the country have uncovered another untapped reservoir \u2013 one that could cover nearly half the nation’s lithium demands.<\/p>\n

It’s hiding in wastewater from Pennsylvania’s gas fracking industry.<\/p>\n

Expanding America’s lithium industry, however, is highly controversial, as mining can destroy natural environments, leach toxic chemicals, and intrude on sacred Indigenous land.<\/p>\n

Over vast stretches of time, deep groundwater has dissolved the lithium in these rocks, essentially “mining the subsurface”, according to Justin Mackey, a researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pennsylvania.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mackey and his colleagues have now found that when wastewater is dredged up from the deep by fracking activities, it contains an astonishing amount of lithium.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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So a byproduct of fracking can be – lithium.<\/div>\n
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Fracking works by drilling an L-shape into the earth so that water can be pumped downward. This forces deeper substances, including gas, out into the open.<\/div>\n
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Such practices could squander precious lithium. As this new study shows, in properly measuring lithium reserves in fracking wastewater, there could be another way to put the waste to good use.<\/div>\n
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Their results suggest that the Marcellus Shale “has the capacity to provide significant lithium yields for the foreseeable future” \u2013 as long as fracking continues, that is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Sciencealert.com<\/a><\/div>\n
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So the key to coming up with a good portion of our battery needs – is drilling for hydrocarbons. Gonna make Greta Thunberg’s pasty carrot head explode…<\/div>\n
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“Ohh, drilling bad. Batteries good. Ohh, decisions, decisions….”\u00a0 Definitely King Lear-level irony.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Well, we know that one of the great needs of the grand and glorious EV … The irony of lithium<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":668,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442,702,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-evs","category-global-warming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=157639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=157639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=157639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=157639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}