Unpopular opinion for some but I'm a maximalist. I'd like an electric car to charge at home, run around town and do errands blah, blah, blah to go along with my 28 gallon tank Tahoe. Gimme all the toys haha!

"Biden blocks mineral mining on 225,000 miles of land, harming EV production needs"

https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/biden-admin-blocks-mineral-mining-225000-miles-land

nortex97 said:

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What a laughable attempt at a talking point by ABC "news." Might as well have asked Dan Rather what he things.

Well north of a trillion dollars is needed to invest in the precious metals required for this 'green energy transition' that some hold as an article of religious faith. Redefine terms all you want, but it ain't possible to do this stuff cheaply, or in some sort of wonderful tree hugging way. Most of the 'carbon' impact isn't even the mining itself, but refining them into usable grades. It's dirty, requires a LOT of energy, and exponential growth.

It's not just lithium, but cobalt, manganese, platinum, silver, copper, palladium, gold, nickel, you name it.



Sure, humanity should be able to do this, the question is why, to me, and is it worth what we will do to our fellow man in places like Africa/Asia to get this produced?

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Thanks for posting this. I had heard a good analysis on lithium mining output and projected demand for EV batteries in the next 3 years, and the current output will not even cover the EV demand for only the US and China. Not to mention existing demand for laptop, cell phone, and other batteries. I was about to go hunt it down, but your graphic and links do it more justice than what I saw.

Brains and Common Sense are become rare earth elements!!

Yup another drive by post without follow up.

ChemEAg08 said:

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"Climate Change" is a religion rooted in emotion, not facts..

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Oh, it's rooted in facts, alright. Facts such as destroying civilization for the sake of a few global elites who will profit greatly by it. Don't ever think that climate change is irrational; it's completely rational to the genocidal sociopaths who want most of us to die for the sake of the new world order.

richardag said:

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Trajan88 said:

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"Maine Ruling Could Complicate Lithium Mining Project"

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/maine/articles/2022-07-25/maine-ruling-could-complicate-lithium-mining-project

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I don't believe lithium is a rare earth element.

Just after the Big Bang it is theorized that lithium was the 3rd most abundant element.

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Refined lithium, in a usable state for batteries, is not the same as total available lithium on/in the planet. Look it up.

Do you recall being told to conserve water due to a drought? Water is both essential to refining lithium and also very abundant on earth. Clean water is still precious though, as global nutrition/hunger/starvation statistics prove.

The hypocrisy (worthy of mockery) is that 'green' advocates see no issue with driving vehicles that required absolutely ginormous use/consumption of clean water (and energy/metals) to produce relative to alternatives, while lambasting people who disagree with their personal consumption habits as silly/absurd/selfish.

texsn95 said:

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More drive-by garbage from this poster.

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That article is so laughable, I just assumed OP was sarcasm.

We all know what happened to the dwarves when they kept mining mithril. It wasn't pretty. I am in no shape to fight a Baelrog.

nortex97 said:

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richardag said:

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Trajan88 said:

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"Maine Ruling Could Complicate Lithium Mining Project"

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/maine/articles/2022-07-25/maine-ruling-could-complicate-lithium-mining-project

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I don't believe lithium is a rare earth element.

Just after the Big Bang it is theorized that lithium was the 3rd most abundant element.

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Refined lithium, in a usable state for batteries, is not the same as total available lithium on/in the planet. Look it up.

Do you recall being told to conserve water due to a drought? Water is both essential to refining lithium and also very abundant on earth. Clean water is still precious though, as global nutrition/hunger/starvation statistics prove.

The hypocrisy (worthy of mockery) is that 'green' advocates see no issue with driving vehicles that required absolutely ginormous use/consumption of clean water (and energy/metals) to produce relative to alternatives, while lambasting people who disagree with their personal consumption habits as silly/absurd/selfish.

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Very good point here and it's been touched on before when we have gone down this rabbit hole that the resident idiots don't like to address. The are differing ore bodies with percentages of the metals and that plays into the return of the actual metal output. Just because there is a cobalt or lithium present, it has to be recoverable in some form and that relies heavily on surface area and extraction technique. Sure, they can recover it when they pay slave labor a dollar a day and they couldn't do the same if they used heavy equipment and operational processes.

As pointed out in the Rogan video, virtually all the companies like to say they are "clean" but this crap is all mixed in to streams of ore/recovered materials and there is no way to say what they are getting, but it helps them sleep at night and makes the bleeding hearts feel good. But hey, virtue signaling is relative now, isn't it?

Correct. If you read their 'conflict' mineral policies, you'll find they are laughable. Nope, no Tesla supplier has ever used metals/materials from a conflict zone. All good here, we check every year, trust us!

It's all boilerplate trash.

richardag said:

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Trajan88 said:

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"Maine Ruling Could Complicate Lithium Mining Project"

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/maine/articles/2022-07-25/maine-ruling-could-complicate-lithium-mining-project

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I don't believe lithium is a rare earth element.

Just after the Big Bang it is theorized that lithium was the 3rd most abundant element.

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You are correct, lithium is not a rare-earth element. The REE's are the lanthanides and I think 2 or 3 (?) other elements.

Iron and anything with a lower atomic number are fairly common elements, this is the point during that supernova when it now consumes energy to fuse to make larger elements. Elements up to and including iron release energy from fusion and are made prior to the supernova, and thus are more abundant.

Rare-earth metals are targeted for mining because this is where you can find alkali metals such as lithium, bonded to the rare-earth metals.

Ran across this article discussing the amount of rare earths required for a wind turbine, hooray for green energy!
https://www.windsystemsmag.com/24015-2/

Quote:

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A single industrial-size wind turbine can require as much as three metric tons of copper and permanent magnets composed of rare earths, according to Dan McGroarty, Advisory Board Member with USA Rare Earth LLC, a U.S.-based company developing the Round Top rare earth and critical minerals project in Texas. Of the 17 rare earths, a wind turbine uses about a ton of four of them: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. And even more copper is required for grid transmission.

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And the environmental impact acquiring 1 ton of rare earth?
https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complicated-legacy-of-rare-earth-mining/amp/

For every ton of rare earth produced, the mining process yields 13kg of dust, 9,600-12,000 cubic meters of waste gas, 75 cubic meters of wastewater, and one ton of radioactive residue. This stems from the fact that rare earth element ores have metals that, when mixed with leaching pond chemicals, contaminate air, water, and soil. Most worrying is that rare earth ores are often laced with radioactive thorium and uranium, which result in especially detrimental health effects. Overall, for every ton of rare earth, 2,000 tons of toxic waste are produced.

Monkeypoxfighter said:

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And China dominates the market. Wonderful………

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/chinas-scramble-for-africas-rare-earth-elements/

https://www.nbr.org/publication/chinas-control-of-rare-earth-metals/

While we block mining ours.
https://insidesources.com/will-maines-anti-mining-laws-keep-green-tech-minerals-underground/



*Pop* go the bubblez………

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The pox guy sure called this right. Ol' bubblez popped and disappeared from this obvious troll.

The new bull**** buzzword is "robust" anyone that says "robust" is immediately disregarded.

Bubblez said:

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All of the doom and gloom is really not warranted. There is plenty of rare earth elements necessary for our transition to green energy.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/study-rare-earth-minerals-fuel-green-energy-shift-96719251

Quote:

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The world has enough rare earth minerals and other critical raw materials to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy to produce electricity and limit global warming, according to a new study that counters concerns about the supply of such minerals.

With a push to get more electricity from solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric and nuclear power plants, some people have worried that there won't be enough key minerals to make the decarbonization switch.
Rare earth minerals, also called rare earth elements, actually aren't that rare. The U.S. Geological Survey describes them as a "relatively abundant." They're essential for the strong magnets necessary for wind turbines; they also show up in smartphones, computer displays and LED light bulbs. This new study looks at not only those elements but 17 different raw materials required to make electricity that include some downright common resources such as steel, cement and glass.

A team of scientists looked at the materials many not often mined heavily in the past and 20 different power sources. They calculated supplies and pollution from mining if green power surged to meet global goals to cut heat-trapping carbon emissions from fossil fuel.

Much more mining is needed, but there are enough minerals to go around and drilling for them will not significantly worsen warming, the study in Friday's scientific journal Joule concluded.

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[Cutting and pasting entire copyrighted articles is a violation of the user agreement. Link and a short excerpt only, please -- Staff]

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Drilling for these minerals will not significantly worsen warming.

Neither will combusting more carbon sources

So does that mean the value of Lithium is going to skyrocket?