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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.
Tell that to the states where the mines are located. Because they will laugh themself silly.
Substitute those by corrupt assigning of contracts and public funds and pipedream "AI will extract Lithium for us" snake oil salespeople.
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.
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’re 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.
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.
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
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.
Surely it's more economical to just recycle batteries
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.
Vapes shouldn't be disposable in the first place.
Would probably also be expensive to validate that the used batteries are still safe.
We do an amazing job with lead acid batteries. You don't even have to throw them in the ocean anymore because you get money back.
I think the batteries in everyone's car are basically ore for the next generation.
I think this is where we'll start to see some innovation, large pita batteries supplimenting the crumbling infrastructure that people trade out every few years.
With the deregulation of wireless Internet, wired Internet is basically a liability now. I know that where I'm located the electric grid hasn't been updated in years, the pipes are rotting out around us as well.
Ridiculous, we need to dig up Appalachia to make 500 billion cellphones
Yes, but how will that completely fuck up the countryside? Destruction for quick profit is the key part!!!
Also you need a jobs program for people who insist on living in mountains, refuse to leave or consolidate, and get mad at the idea of government handouts.
I'm sympathetic to Appalachians, most of the women I've dated have been Appalachian actually. There's a lot to love about their culture and history. But as a political block they can be really frustrating as the region is just really inefficient for anything but mining, tourism, and subsistence farming, and the mining is killing them and everyone else.
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.
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)
Im a Canadian geologist so I obviously dont have any personal stake in this but I do want to share my thoughts.
I think anti-mining sentiment is understandable in most places but not always justifiable. Lithium mining is absolutely required to transition from fossil fuels. Unless the number of cars on the road is greatly reduced, replacing them with BEVs will require significant amounts of lithium or improvements to Na ion batteries. There is not enough lithium available to get by just on recycling.
The question then becomes: where should this lithium come from? If it is not mined in western countries like USA or Canada, it will be mined by China or developing countries. In this comparison, who has better environmental regulations? Which countries have more human rights abuse?
If we decide that we can mine these deposits in the west, there is still a question about where they are mined. Do we extract lithium from basinal brines? My understanding is that these are generally more environmentally risky than extraction from pegmatites (the deposit type in New England).
The final question becomes, which communities will have to accept this mining? In Canada, most of the time it is indigenous communities that suffer most of the negative impacts of mining. There are many benefits to the communities too (usually), but the indigenous communities do not have nearly as much political sway as say rich cottage owners might, so their preferences and desires often get steamrolled by government in the name of "progress".
The unfortunate reality is that if we want to get rid of fossil fuels, we need to do a lot more mining and extraction or come up with some serious technological and societal innovation. In a globalized economy, saying that you dont want mining near your home means that you want some other people to deal with the potentially negative consequences of it. I am not saying that we need to allow all mining everywhere, but these are important ethical considerations that we have to make when talking about how we want society to progress.
Sorry for the rant.
This is a beautiful description of why the obvious move here is "fewer cars, way better public transit."
Mining has always been allowed on national forest land, but it was heavily regulated and overseen. They recently changed the rules so that no permission is needed for mining operations on less than 5 acres. This will be an ecological disaster
Yep, they are going to strip mine the Appalachians. And the sad thing is that the people in the Appalachians are going to welcome this. Because it means jobs in their minds.
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.
Just like always USA fighting yesterday war. Lithium is already on the way out.
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?
I have a running joke I tell my friends that one day, the rich will flatten mountains, so the only way to see their natural wonder will be in VR. That’s when they will become mainstream. Not because they offer some new technological advancement, but because they’ve managed to capture the spaces we use to get away.
They already take the tops off mountains in Appalachia because it's more efficient to just straight up delete a mountain to get coal than to dig into it for it
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.
In America rich people must profit and everyone else must suffer. Everything is for sale.
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?
What exactly is 328 years of anything? Are they saying we consume X tons, and we have found 328×X tons? Or is there some sort of future consumption estimations or trend lines accounted for? Is this all functionally available, or can we only access 20 years worth of it economically and banking on future extraction improvements? With thay large of a supply I would expect economic viability of further extraction would diminish over time.
My interpretation of the image is, "we consume x per year, we estimate there is 328x in the Appalachian area."
Original information source, not the tweet: https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/lithium-eastern-states-could-replace-imports-a-century-or-more
And the Study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11053-026-10652-9
~~There is a very important sentence all the way at the end:~~
~~The USGS did not assess what amount would be economically recoverable.~~
Edit: On a second reading, I think this sentence applies only to the southwest Arkansas brine deposits. Sorry.
Visit your national parks while you can.
And China is moving from lithium to sodium
More options for batteries is always good. Doesn't negate the demand for more storage in general.
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.
And when the new batteries become standard, then what? Ruined mountains for nothing.