Biden to Invoke Cold-War Powers to Boost Batteries

[applegrove]

Biden to Invoke Cold-War Powers to Boost Batteries

March 30, 2022 at 10:55 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 50 Comments

https://politicalwire.com/2022/03/30/biden-to-invoke-cold-war-powers-to-boost-batteries/

"SNIP......

“President Joe Biden is poised to invoke as soon as this week Cold War powers to encourage domestic production of critical minerals for electric-vehicle and other types of batteries,” Bloomberg reports.

......SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. Billion dollar electric vehicle battery plant being built in Windsor, Ontario

across the river from Detroit.

[MineralMan]

2. Mining. That Would Be a Real Change.

Mining stuff like lithium is not going to be popular with environmentalists. Mining in general isn't. I foresee a serious battle before any new mines are operating. Very serious.

[Budi]

3. I've argued that point for awhile. The pushback I get is from the other environmentals demanding ...

...a move away from petroleum based engines, at whatever cost it takes.

I've pointed out the damage to water resources in mining of lithium, cobalt etc, but to no avail.
That group just blows right past that particular concern.

I've pointed out who the biggest Companies already in the running to do the mass mining, that a couple are foreign & suspect to the profiteering angle.
They never respond to that concern either.
Its just full speed ahead, which is becoming a similar direction taken when oild industry mowed thru our country, environment be damned..

I've warned to be wary that the Big Minerals mining doesn't just become the next Big Oil.

I know there are advances made in innovating the process but the fact of getting it outta the ground to run your car or electronics is still the the same..
This will take extremely careful oversight, since lack of it has gotten us in a deep toxic hole we need to crawl out of, without finding ourselves back in that hole years later.

[MineralMan]

4. Most people tend to take a very narrow view of their primary interests.

So, we need lithium and cobalt and other rare raw materials to make batteries so we use less oil and other fossil fuels. Never mind what is involved with mining such materials, because, well, oil is bad.

I agree that we should be working on eliminating the use of fossil fuels. We should have been doing that for a very long time. But, we cannot ignore the environmental impact of the alternatives. Everything comes at a cost. All one has to do is a Google Image search for "Lithium mine," and it becomes clear.

Below: An evaporative lithium processing facility. The pools contain intermediate stages in the processing. The liquid in them is highly toxic.



Below: An open pit lithium mine at the location of an ancient dry lake.

[ck4829]

5. Mine the landfills

It is a very untapped potential area.

https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/landfill.html

I am confident we would get more lithium and rare earth metals out of landfills per the amount of earth moved out of landfills than via traditional mining methods.

[MineralMan]

6. Actually, we wouldn't. Besides, extracting lithium or cobalt from

landfills is not a simple task, nor is the extraction process environmentally friendly.

Lithium is normally mined from ancient dry lakes and sea beds. It's not rare, but it's also not concentrated except as a salt that accumulates over very long periods of time in places where other salts accumulate. We have such deposits in the United States, in places like Death Valley and other such places where dry lakes exist. Those are also very sensitive areas, environmentally. There are some dry lakes with mineral deposits that include lithium not far from where I lived in California. I have visited them, and have had mineral specimens from them.

One of those places is also a likely site for solar power installations. Environmentalists have fought the building of those installations, as well, in what is an environmentally sensitive area that is home to some endangered species. So far, the solar energy facilities have not been built. Now, imagine tearing up those old dry lakes for open-pit mining and installing the kind of evaporative processing you can see in the photo in my previous post. If you do that, you can see that such a thing will not be easily accepted in those places.

That is why the lithium mines that produce the lithium we are now using for batteries is mined in third world countries and other places with lax environmental standards.

[ck4829]

7. I'm sure there are also literally tons of unused batteries in landfills

The amount of things wasted.

[MineralMan]

8. Not in quantities or concentrations that would make mining economically feasible.

Further, the process of extracting usable lithium from them is not a nice process. Actually, the law requires that such batteries be recycled and not sent to landfills. That law is violated a lot, but there is recycling for those batteries already in place. It produces a tiny, tiny fraction of the lithium needed by the automotive battery industry for EVs.

Learn more below:

Reality bites.