
A request to drill for lithium near Death Valley - jseliger
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-death-valley-lithium-mine-california-environment-20190507-story.html
======
saiya-jin
I wholeheartedly recommend visiting Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni (and rest of the
country like Yungas death road, Titicaca or Potosi mines) - it is estimated
that it contains 50% to 70% of the world's known lithium reserves in brine
underneath the solid crust.

It is a nature's marvel, sitting 3600m high, becoming a 70km wide mirror
during rains, having less than 1m altitude variations so satellites are
calibrated on its surface.

I sure hope for greener future but would shed a tear if this wonder would be
destroyed in the process...

------
mrpopo
We will not run out of Lithium (or any of the other rare metals powering the
"green" revolution, the electric batteries, the electro-magnets, catalysts,
cameras, IOT), we might simply destroy more of the environment mining it. When
do we stop?

For those who speak French, I recommend talks and books by Philippe Bihouix,
in which he explains the environmental and societal challenges associated with
our new thirst for rare earths and metals.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx9S8gvNKkA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx9S8gvNKkA)

~~~
ElKrist
What do you mean by we will not run out of any rare metals powering the
"green" revolution? Bihouix agrees that we may not run out of it in a
geological sense. However he also argues that the extraction will become
harder (lower concentrations to deal with) and is one of the fallacies of the
"green" revolution

~~~
thiago_fm
Just go watch a video about pre-salt oil in Brazil and how hard it is to
extract it, almost an engineering miracle... and people still do it, as a good
field might take some initial investment, but in the end might cost like $15 a
barrel to extract with current technology, making it
economically/environmentally viable. Even better than fracking. But as with
any extracting work, there are downsides. People having been mining/drilling
etc for centuries, I doubt people in hacker news can discuss all there is into
those topics and the environmental impact.

I think now we should look for better alternatives to the current way wreck
with the environment, eletric cars are better than the ones moved by oil -- by
a wide margin, even taking in account that you need to mine lithium. Just
check the environmental implications of fracking, yet -- people still do it.

There is always a way. What governments and police makers should care is to
understand the environment implications and create a good legal framework and
there is law enforcement, so companies do it correctly.

We can either let this fear aside and believe humanity will need this step to
perhaps takes other and find more efficient ways of creating energy. Or we can
die in fear by keeping this dependency in oil, which btw, we will run out
soon.

Earth itself is a timebomb with 7bi people, with the current way we do things.
We should be definitely pushing for changes and figure out what we could do in
order to get rid of this problem. Also invest more into fusion energy. Develop
new shit, basically. We have had much progress in history because people were
bold and tried new things. If nowadays humanity is ruined by fear of doing
things and press, earth is going to become nothing and humanity will collapse.
Don't get triggered by this fear.

------
inflatableDodo
Was reading that the brine off the back of a seawater desalination plant can
have a ppm of lithium high enough to chemically precipitate off the lithium.

------
newnewpdro
There's nore lithium in the ocean than anywhere else, it just isn't
concentrated.

I wonder if there's an opportunity for a combined seawater desalinisation and
lithium extraction plant, if they could have complementary processes.

~~~
austincheney
Similarly aluminum is the most abundant mineral on Earth's surface, but
aluminum is only harvested from bauxite rock formations. The highest
concentration of gold on the planet is thought to reside just off the
continental shelf next to California, but this is never harvested because
scraping the ocean floor for trace metals is too expensive. Density and costs
of extraction matter.

The primary problem is hypocrisy. Environmentalists don't want a metal
harvested from their backyard, but require it be harvested elsewhere at equal
environmental impact. The options are clear: be content with atmospheric
carbon, trade atmospheric carbon for water polluting metal extraction, or stop
using electricity.

~~~
SiempreViernes
The primary problem is quite obviously the carbon lobby/climate change
deniers, without which serious effort to rein in unchecked carbon emission
would have started 30 years ago.

Trying to blame some private individuals for the system failure we have lived
through is pretty weird.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Well no, that isn't the primary problem. The carbon lobby wants to keep coal
plants, but the alternative currently involves what the linked article is
about - battery production, which produces a lot of waste as well. Other
alternatives are windmills (visuals, kill a lot of birds), solar panels (hard
to compensate their energy production with the energy required to make them),
nuclear power (the US has a huge nuclear waste problem), etc.

It's a compromise. It's replacing one evil with another. It's more a matter of
where you draw the line; I for example am in favor of nuclear energy because
the waste product, while extremely dangerous for tens of thousands of years,
is in a neat and relatively compact package, instead of blown out into the
atmosphere.

But I digress; the only real solution is population and economic decrease.
That's unlikely to happen unless something catastrophic happens, but that is
the only way without replacing one bad thing with another.

~~~
Aromasin
> solar panels (hard to compensate their energy production with the energy
> required to make them)

That hasn't been a major issue for a number of years. It only takes a few
years on average to 'break even' on energy in vs energy out [1].

[1]
[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3038824](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3038824)

~~~
rcxdude
Which is actually substantially better than a producing oil rig.

~~~
Aromasin
Agreed, which comes back to the question as to why we don't cover vast swathes
of uninhabitable desert in said solar panels - and we come back to the root of
the issue; carbon lobbying.

~~~
PorterDuff
I have a feeling that if power companies could make money by building solar
arrays, they'd be all-in in a New York minute. It's kind of like blaming GM
for not building electric cars because of the evil oil companies. If they
could build a car that ran on water, they'd happily sell them.

Of course, this all implies that vast swathes of uninhabital desert aren't
ecosystems worth saving, which I suppose is the point of the article.

Personally, I think that the root of the issue is overpopulation. None of this
would matter so much with fewer people and moving millions of them from the
Third to the First World ain't gonna help any.

~~~
newnewpdro
> moving millions of them from the Third to the First World ain't gonna help
> any

It's on the order of a billion.

------
Simulacra
Something more interesting is lithium recycling. There’s only a few firms that
do this work. A lot of it is sent overseas to be recycled. If the US
government where to declare lithium a strategic mineral, it would force that
lithium to be recycled here in America there by hopefully increasing a
recycling market.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/x9RBv](http://archive.is/x9RBv)

------
martin_a
A war? Are the Russians at the border of Death Valley? How many tanks do they
have? Have shots already been fired? What do the presidents say?

It's headlines like these which are the reason you can't or should not really
give a fuck about news anymore. There's only exaggerations, hype and bloated
stories left in news. I don't even want to read the article when it's using a
headline like this.

~~~
geomark
Russians? I think you have already been influenced by news more than you wish
:p

~~~
solveit
Yeah, it's not like they were the predominant threat to the US for ~50 years.

Not everyone on HN is in their twenties.

~~~
geomark
I was around for a lot of that. It was utter BS. Right up until when the
Soviet Union fell apart the US gov and all its spook agencies were constantly
screaming warnings of a Soviet breakout that would surely wipe us out. I was
working at a defense contractor during that time so was pretty close to it.

~~~
paganel
It's true that no Western "sovietologist" had predicted the sudden fall of the
Eastern Block, but that doesn't mean that the West and the countries that were
under Soviet influence weren't enemies. Source: me, a guy that grew up in an
Eastern European country and who was imbued with my country's propaganda
during my childhood.

And to make it even more OT: the "war" between West and East was won by the
West the moment when people in the East started almost revering physical
objects coming from the West, such as blue jeans. I remember that growing up
in the '80s my mother's only jeans dress had an almost mythical status, it was
THE one piece of clothing from our family's wardrobe that had that extra
thing. I remembered of that feeling this past weekend while watching a Russian
movie describing the '80s as lived on the Eastern side of the Wall (the movie
is called "Leto" [1], I highly recommend it), during which movie one of the
female characters highly wishes to purchase a pair of jeans for herself, if
only she would have had the money.

It is my intuition that the Western sovietologists from back in the day didn't
have access to this type of information on the real feelings of the people
living in Eastern Europe and in the former USSR, they were looking mostly at
translated articles from Pravda and at satellite photos of rocket-launch sites
in order to predict the health of the system. Turns out they were looking at
the wrong stuff.

[1]
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7342838/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7342838/)

~~~
pauljurczak
> the "war" between West and East was won by the West

Not so fast. The most populous country and the largest world economy by
purchasing power parity is communist China. The physical objects people revere
are likely made there or in neighboring communist Vietnam.

~~~
paganel
China is basically a Western country now, I mean it runs on the same
capitalistic principles as the nominally Western countries, with some extra
dystopian elements thrown in the mix. The pre-1989 clash between East and West
was a real clash of the worlds, of different visions on how the future should
look like.

------
gcc_programmer
If we can't even use electric vehicles, what's left? Horses?

~~~
tzs
The first result when I Googled "cost per year to keep a horse" [1] claims
that the average monthly cost is from $200 to $325, and notes that is on par
with a car payment.

It's amusing to contemplate whether it would actually be feasible to have a
decent sized modern town in which horses, rather than cars, are the main form
of transport.

If that article is right, they would be about as affordable to the owner as a
car. And note that they all come with better self-driving software than any
car currently for sale to the general public, and probably better than any
that will be for sale within the next decade at least.

They are generally slower than cars, though. A walking horse goes around 7
km/hr (4 mph). They trot at about 13 km/hr (8 mph), and can easily keep that
up for hours.

They canter at 2 to 3 times trot speed, but can only keep that up for about an
hour over reasonable terrain, which I'd hope a town would have. They can
gallop a bit faster, but not for very long.

[1] [https://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-
alternatives...](https://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-alternatives-
buying/)

~~~
fulafel
I wonder if it is possible to harness a stronger-than-human animal to power a
wheeled vehicle. A couch potato human can bicycle faster than 13 km/h for
hours after all. This could mean that a domesticated animal could get a big
speed boost by using wheels instead of legs.

The normal bicycle posture might be hard for many animals but maybe something
more like a recumbent, adapted for 4 limbs since animals don't have such a big
hand/leg strength imbalance...

~~~
PorterDuff
That's a good idea. As an alternative, we could rig a draft animal up to a
device that charges up a flywheel-powered car.

------
chr1
I would understand if this was about mining in a forest or near a city, but
what is the value of a desert where nothing grows and no one lives? Would
people be also opposed to building canals and converting the desert to
agricultural land?

~~~
nradov
Have you ever been to the Death Valley area? Despite the name there's actually
a lot of life in that area including several threatened and endangered
species. We probably do need to mine there for the greater good but with due
care to minimize the environmental impact.

Yes I absolutely would oppose converting the desert to agricultural land. We
have more than enough existing agricultural land. No need to wreck the desert.

~~~
mc32
Only few areas of DVNP have any flora or fauna. Most areas are devoid of life.
I have no idea what section of the park this mine would be in, so your concern
might be deserved, but also could be overblown.

~~~
kgwgk
And the park is _huge_ , larger than Connecticut in the US or Kosovo in
Europe. About one third of the size of Switzerland or one half of the size of
Massachusetts.

~~~
francisofascii
Only 3% the size of California. And 5% the size of Nevada.

~~~
kgwgk
“Only”

------
jseliger
This article isn't too far from _The Onion_ , but it does point to some of the
constraints and general drag faced by anyone doing anything in this country,
or at least California.

~~~
tracker1
Sorry, but environmental impact is really important to consider. Party of why
I've been a bit bullish on Tesla and the Prius is the destruction for rare
Earth metals and shipping everything all over the world is not insignificant.

The problem is, as soon as you bring a bigger picture or talk about the
economic offset to Green anything, you're labeled anti science.

Politically I'm libertarian and conservative leaning centrist, I refer to
myself as a pragmatic libertarian.

I absolutely am in favor of some policy to protect the environment. Not to the
point that some would extend things though. All the same, it's very concerning
to me the amount of ewaste produced, badly disposed of and restrictions on end
user maintenance and right and ability to repair.

I'm also surprised how far the left has gone away from classic liberal values.

~~~
SECProto
Massive carbon taxes would create a nice environmentally accurate way to
account for externalities. If you need some taxes on lithium, cobalt, etc to
account for same, I assure you $20/gallon gasoline would still ensure the
electric car to come out on top. The difference is relatively minor
externalities during manufacture of electric vehicles, and massive (difficult
to conceive) externalities of use of fossil fuelled cars

~~~
tracker1
Is building all the parts for a Tesla, including mining and shipping less
environmental impact over 10 years than a gas car getting 35mpg at 10k miles
per year considering the additional impact of battery replacements and proper
disposal?

How about against natural gas, even considering fracking vs lithium mining?

Also, I never suggested using taxes for either.

~~~
King-Aaron
I've seen the electric car lifecycle vs ICE car lifecycle trope get rolled out
quite often, but neither parties (those for or against) can ever provide
sufficient modelling on either side of the argument. I'd be interested to see
a study done into it however, if ones been done.

Mostly it seems to be based on perceptions rather than facts.

It can be noted however that the components in an electric vehicle can be more
readily recycled than parts in a traditional ICE vehicle.

~~~
mehrdadn
> I've seen the electric car lifecycle vs ICE car lifecycle trope get rolled
> out quite often, but neither parties (those for or against) can ever provide
> sufficient modelling on either side of the argument. I'd be interested to
> see a study done into it however, if ones been done. Mostly it seems to be
> based on perceptions rather than facts.

This is just a reason to continue research, not a reason to avoid what the
vast majority agree is likely to be the better approach.

~~~
tracker1
I think in the end there's room for some diversity in approach. I just tend to
resist the tropes that state X is absolutely better when it absolutely isn't
backed by sufficient evidence.

A lot of things that feel good aren't.

