Posted on 04/08/2025 5:20:03 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
The democrats will try to block the mining.
♪ Save the trees! ♪ 🌲
♪ Save the bees! ♪ 🐝
♪ Save the whales! ♪ 🐳
♪ SAVE THOSE SNAILS
George Carlin
Oregon is just as bad as California. They will sue to declare the whole crator is off-limits. Then, Ore is gone.
Where one finds lithium are rare earths also present?
That is a great question. I don’t know.
Haha! - H&I just ran “Amok Time” yesterday evening!
OK, It’s there, and it’s useful. But how do we get at it, safely and cost-effectively? Until that is answered, it is useless.
The oceans have 230+ million tonnes in them and no less than three groups have competing tech to harvest lithium from them. This one from Saudi Arabia basically makes the lithium for free as the process is added to the existing chloro alkaline process already used to make H2 , HCL acid ,CL2 gas and or NaOH chemicals. The cost of the electrons to get the lithium across the membrane is less than what the CL2 and H2 sell for by nearly 3X. <<<<<this is the way.
More lithium is washed into the oceans every year faster than humans could ever mine it at any conceivable usage rates so it’s effectively unlimited in supply.
This same tech has also been tuned for uranium and it works at low double digit kWh per gram of UO2 recovered from 3ppb seawater here again that single gram of uranium is equal to 23,000 megawatt hours of energy in a fast spectrum reactor...The implications should be immediately obvious. Uranium harvested from seawater plus fast spectrum reactors is billions of years worth of ebergy. We have the tech today what is lacking is political will as there is much to much profit in the existing system for corporations and congresscritters, I don’t complain the oil industry made me a wealth man and still sends thousands per month in mail box money. As a scientist nuclear is the future period.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1039/D1EE00354B
’ the total Faradaic efficiencies of all stages were close to 100% (Figure 2d). In the first stage, ~47.06% of electrical energy was used to transport lithium, while in the remainder of the stages, ~100% of electrical energy was used for lithium migration. Based on these data, we estimated the total electricity required to enrich 1 kg lithium from seawater to 9000 ppm in five stages to be 76.34 kWh. Simultaneously, 0.87 kg H2 and 31.12 kg Cl2were collected from the cathode and the anode, respectively. Taking the US electricity price of US$ 0.065/kWh into consideration, the total electricity cost for this process is approximately US$ 5.0. In addition, based on the 2020 prices of hydrogen and Cl2 (i.e., US$ 2.5–8.0/kg and US$ 0.15/kg, respectively),34 the side-product value is approximately US$ 6.9–11.7, which can well compensate for the total energy cost. It should also be noted that the current Cl2 utilisation capacity in the chlor-alkali industry is ~80 Mtons/yr. Even in the case where all the world lithium capacity is produced from our extraction process, the amount of Cl2 produced will be <3 Mtons, and so will have very little effect on the total market. It is also noted that the total concentration of other salts after the first stage is less than 500 ppm, which implies that after lithium harvest, the remaining water can be treated as freshwater. Hence, the process also has a potential to integrate with seawater desalination to further enhance its economic viability.’
(pg10-11 of report)
Just mine the oceans using the Saudi process it would be cheaper they already proved they could get too 9000ppm which is the threshold you need to directly precipitate lithium carbonate for direct use in lithium ion anodes. When added to existing industrial scale chloro alkaline process you only need to add the membrane chambers and run the electrons to them the other part of the process stays the same. The byproducts of the process are worth more than the electrons cost by a factor of 3 so you are effectively getting lithium form seawater for free. Open the scientific paper they lay out the economics in detail. Oh and it leaves behind 500ppm or less otherwise known as freshwater which itself is worth $2-5 per cubic meter in the desert.
It doesn’t have to be seawater the higher the lithium and salt concentrations used the lower the electron transport balance needed.This means brines are a even better, flow back from oil wells is loaded with lithium one of my alma mater’s has commercialised its process just for flow back brines in the Permian Basin. I worked on the betascale for it as a Hydro Geo consultant.
One well makes 300 cars per week of lithium and there are 100,000 wells in the Permian Basin let those numbers sink in. We will never be without lithium its what will people pay for it.
EEK EEK
Some yet to be discovered rare amoeba will be threatened.
Make the area a Hands Off protected wilderness-plus.
Sierra Club Oregon Statement on McDermitt Caldera Lithium Mining
https://www.sierraclub.org/oregon/blog/2025/04/sierra-club-oregon-statement-mcdermitt-caldera-lithium-mining
Well, alrightie then. Mine the sea. Lithium is a plentiful element.
The 'saltonsea' keyword, sorted:
The oceans have every element in the periodic table its the ppm-ppb levels that matter. There is gold in the oceans but it’s so dilute no one has come up with a way to concentrate it at economic levels. Uranium is 3 part per billion the current price to get it via acrylic resins is $600 per kg that’s much more than mined uranium but even at that price in a PWR is would only be 3/4 cent per kWh in raw uranium costs. In a fast spectrum reactor its 100 times more energy so 1/100 th the cost of a PWR.
The Chinese have a process to grab it from seawater via electrons that’s better than acrylic resins the uranium is already in oxide form and so much of it you can see it caking on the carbon fiber this breakthrough cannot be stressed enough. They used raw seawater at 3 ppb it only took 24 days to saturate the material that is one third the time of resins. To get the uranium you reverse the polarity and it drops off in bulk form too. This process can use any ppb level even ppt levels you can solution mine the earth’s crust with hot water and either mild acid or alkaline water into granite rocks which are all 1-35 ppm avg is 4ppm there is 40 plus trillion tonnes of uranium in the top few kilometers of granitic crustal rocks. The Chinese just gave humans a way to get at it via engineered geo thermal you get hot water for energy and you suck the uranium dissolved in it out which yields 100s of times more energy than the hot water carried by volume. One gram of uranium is 23,000 megawatt hours worth of energy in a fast spectrum reactor.
The Lithium craze ends when the EV fad is over.
There are many brines that are located directly above granitic rocks at shallow depths. The Texas Panhandle and southwestern Oklahoma as examples. I wonder if they have higher levels of uranium in them. The question would be how much fluid would have to be moved to get an economic amount at the surface. The ocean is a bit more expansive but lower concentrations. As an aside, there is also helium in those brines but since they are such a small molecule, they need a top seal of salt or anhydrite to keep them trapped in the subsurface.
I’ve been through that area a few times and the name struck a bell, but I still had to look it up. Drive to Winnemucca and take US 95 north to the end of the earth. It’s on the right-hand side.
The presence of helium means there must be concentrations of uranium in those sub surface granites. Helium is the decay product of uranium decay chain you only get it concentrations above a uranium rich basement plus a suitable trap and seal formation. The panhandle of Texas has Permian red salt beds that make for a near perfect trap for helium it’s why the world’s largest reserves were found under them in that same area.
I would expect the deep basement under the helium fields to be loaded with uranium probably 35-100ppm...directional drill dual boreholes, frac, EGS fluids to binary cycle turbine for closed loop fluid cycle, on the way back down pass it over the carbon fiber membrane and add in CO2 gas to form carbonic acid to leach more uranium on the way back up. The sale of the EGS geothermal electricity covers the pumping and drilling costs the uranium is a by product of the EGS system itself.
Flow back water from shale wells also contains NORM materials uranium ,radon, in significant quantities so much so its disposal is regulated as low level rad waste in some areas. Shale naturally accumulates and concentrates uranium it is little wonder that flow back and produced waters from shale wells has sometimes part per thousand levels of uranium. Here again having a electric membrane that selectively and in visibly high density concentrates uranium from even part per billion levels is nothing short of ground breaking. Every shale well is also a uranium well, every coal ash pile is also a uranium mine when leeched with slightly acidic waters, every phosphate tailing pile same same, tech like this opens the whole planet to uranium capture on a grand scale. That achievement cannot be understated it fundamentally changes humans energy balance.
The amount of electrons needed to capture and hold a kilogram of U are a tiny fraction of the energy of the atomic energy held by a single kilogram of U millions of times more energy vs the electrons to electrocapture.
They detail it out in the full paper its EROI is hundreds to thousands of millions to one. Even just using the U235 as fissile given the ratio of 0.7% U235 to U238 is still in the millions to one. 23,000 megawatt hours of energy per kilogram of U235 with 7 grams per kilogram of captured U is still 161 megawatt hours per Kg of uranium captured. This also shows why fast spectrum reactors are essential to our species.
It should be clear why nuclear energy is humanities greatest achievement. It’s a test on the species level to understand the binding curve energy of matter. Using any other form of energy once your species has split the atom is just stupid on a evolutionary level.
Not to change the subject but what is your background? I am obviously a geologist but you seem to have a diverse repertoire.
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