Posted on 04/29/2026 1:25:32 PM PDT by Libloather
They’ve hit the mother lode.
We may no longer need to rely on foreign batteries to power our electronics. Geologists have announced that the Appalachian Mountains could be hiding a sprawling multi-billion-dollar cache of lithium that could last the US hundreds of years.
“This research shows that the Appalachians contain enough lithium to help meet the nation’s growing needs,” declared US Geological Survey Director Ned Mamula in a statement.
According to a map by the institution, this East Coast mountain range houses around 2.5 metric tons of this battery precursor, most of which is concentrated in the Carolinas, Maine and New Hampshire. Total value: around $64.4B dollars.
Per Bloomberg, the US imports nearly half of its consumption of lithium, which powers lithium-ion batteries that are used for everything from iPhones to vehicles and even aerospace alloys.
With this recent mineral motherlode, USGS officials estimate that we could supply 1.6 million grid-scale batteries — enough to power 130 million electric vehicles or supply 180 billion laptops for a collective thousands of years of global use.
It could also fuel 500 billion cellphones, the equivalent of 60 devices for every person on Earth.
All told, this haul is enough to replace 328 years of imports at least year’s level, providing “a major contribution to U.S. mineral security, at a time when global lithium demand is rising rapidly,” said Mamula.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Get it before Trump leaves office
I’ve got 9 acres they can get.
Now all you need to do is to import those Chinese child miners... They are tiny enough to dig down deep and they apparently work for food, which will maximize your profits.
Something is coming in battery technology. I have always had fun setting up and tweaking my off grid solar set up. When I got my first batteries they were nearly 1000 per 100 amp hour battery. And that wasn’t that long ago. Now, batteries are about 10% what I paid. I just got 4 400 amp hour batteries and that’ll keep me nice and cool with an AC and extra panels.
Will they burn the people out, or maybe flood them out. Or could they declare the protected species crap? The little guy has to go.
Liberals always find some speckled frog where ever someone wants to put a shovel in the ground.
Lithium does not “supply power”, it stores power that comes from another source. We constantly hear about battery breakthroughs, but the celebrants rarely mention where the power to charge the batteries is supposed to come from.
Russia and China will be funding even more environmental activists.
Piedmont Lithium was ready to open a mine west of Charlotte two years ago. It hasn’t opened yet, because the price crashed.
Editurs have been replaced by spillchick.
Fixed it
Oddly, that’s where the founding of the country happened. Weird huh?
COULD BE...them's weasel words. Is it or ain't it?
I heard a radio DJ in the Philadelphia area say that that record sold a million copies in two days.
Its not. A bunch of it might actually be under the white mountains national forest. The big current strike is on private land, but cant be mined by maine law as its a metal. Even though it would be legal to mine it for gravel.
Appalachians. “You got a purdy lithium mine.”
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Lithium from Coal: Sources, Extraction, and Applications
Lithium is a critical element for modern energy storage, especially in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, portable electronics, and grid-scale storage. While lithium is often associated with brines and hard-rock ores, coal and coal by-products can also be significant unconventional sources.
I wonder of the part of Appalachia containing the lithium corresponds to the portion that was cleared out by the massive floods in the past few years?
More like pump baby pump.
There is 230 billion tonnes in the oceans just sitting there waiting to be pulled out. Lithium is 200ppb in seawater. The Saudis have a way to get at all of it. Their tech also pulls from any land saline water source like flow back brines from shale wells that can be 200-7000 part per million not per billion. Any tech that works in the ppb range works oh so much better in the ppm range.
https://fii.kaust.edu.sa/en/energy-industrial-leadership/lithium-power-from-seawater/
Between the oceans and flow back and produced waters from shale wells there is a unlimited supply of Li. It comes down to $$$ per kg.
The other side of the resource equation is how cheap it is getting to recover lithium and all the other metals from ground up blackmass of used batteries right now lithium is so expensive it is cheaper to recover it from blackmass vs mining it directly.
Fun fact a 1 gigawatt nuclear reactor pulls for cooling 1.5-2 billon cubic meters per year just got condensing it’s steam it also rejects 2 gigawatts of waste heat making they 1 GW of electricity heat that can desal 130 million gallons per day with low temp desal tech.
China can take 100% of the uranium out of that cooling flows for $83 a kg, there would be 6600kg of U in that volume of cooling flow. In a fast reactor every kg of U has 83.3 Terajoules of energy or 83,300GJ
6600kg is 547,800 TJ thermal
547,800 Terajoules (TJ) is approximately 89,519,693 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) yeah that’s just in the coolant flows.
Oh and One gigawatt-year thermal (1GWyr) is equal to approximately 31,536TJ
You need 3 thermal units for each output electrical unit in a reactor. So you need 94,608 TJ worth of U.
It should be obvious that there is enough U in the reactors coolant flows to fuel itself and then some. This only applies to fast reactors because they can burn U238 not just U235. The once though PWR/BWR fuel cycle should be a crime against humanity for how wasteful it is of precious U235.
There is 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium in the oceans a effective unlimited amount. U is 3.3ppb of every drop of seawater on earth.
“Still paying 5$ gallon from the Aye-Rabs”
You are a special one I see.
First off the USA is producing more oil today right now than we ever have on a barrel per day basis.
We are also exporting record amounts.
Oil is a fungible global commodity you have to know this if not then we’ll can’t help but think there was a mental issue involved.
Gasoline and especially diesel is up because we are exporting record amounts to Japan and Europe the tanker depots are back logged.
I will put it this way it costs under 50 cents a gallon to tanker transport a gallon of diesel across the Atlantic. The market sale prices there are double what they are here wholesale. So you are Exxon Mobil and have a choice sell a gallon of diesel to the wholesale market here or put it on a tanker and charge the receiving party FOB for the shipping costs then sell it to them at a nearly double wholesale price.
Yeah they are exporting the max that can be put on tankers and shipped. This is the main reason prices are up the domestic market is competing for gallons that Europe is willing to pay much more for.
The other reason is speculators in the commodities market are making a killing.
It’s not a supply issue domestically at all we are a net exporter of crude oil and more so refined products.
“We constantly hear about battery breakthroughs”
BYD and CATL are no longer in press release mode they are in production mode in a big way.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/china-byd-dc-battery-block
20 foot shipping container, 14.5 megawatt hours worth of energy storage.
“The Haohan system is built around its own 2,710 Ah Blade Battery cell, which the company calls the world’s largest for energy storage. This cell delivers triple the capacity of typical storage batteries, offers more than 10,000 charge–discharge cycles, and cuts lifetime energy costs to under $0.014 per kilowatt-hour “
Read that again unit you understand how profound that is.
That’s a LCOS of $1.4 per megawatt hour round trip.
ERCOT routinely has mid day Sun at near zero under $5 megawatt hour and middle of the night wind goes negative regularly. As in ERCOT will PAY YOU to charge those power banks -$10 to -$20 happens frequently over night for 4-6 hours at a time.
Even at $5 MWh wholesale with a LCOS of $1.4 your round trip cost is $6.4/MWh this is less than 1/5th what the minimum sale price for gas turbine power can be. Natural gas at $4 MMBTU has a breakeven fuel costs alone of $44 per megawatt hour. It takes 11,000,000BTU of gas per MWh from a turbine.
The simple truth is solar and wind set the minimum wholesale prices every day and gas set the peak and baseload when those sources are lower than demand. Solar can sell $10 all day every day and turn healthy profits. Same for wind $10-15 is plenty for wind to operate in the black gas turbines simply cannot due to fuel costs alone.
Having a power cube with a levelized cost of storage LCOS of $1.4 changes the calculus fundamentally.
Texas is getting 35,000 megawatts worth of BES by 2030 that’s just what is already funded and approved. To be approved they must be at least 4 hour systems so minimum 35,000 MW for 4 hours worth of discharge times, some are going to be 8 hour banks it’s just 4hr min to get a cert.
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