Here's a great idea: Operate our lithium mines only four or five hours a day & only on days the...

[NNadir]

sun is shining brightly.

Right now, the whole world is betting the planetary atmosphere on solar cells, wind turbines, and batteries, the latter being devices that waste energy.

Here in the Western world, we all like to watch ads featuring electric cars with wind turbines and solar cells displayed prominently in the back ground in order to convince ourselves that we - at least people rich enough to afford cars, a planetary minority - can declare ourselves "green."

The most popular batteries for electric cars are "lithium" batteries, which besides lithium contain both nickel and cobalt. The largest source of nickel in the world is the Norlisk mines in Siberia, about which I wrote previously in this space, a region of a prominent Eurasian country called "Russia." Russia is in the news lately.

The cobalt, however, is largely mined in the Congo river region by people who don't need electricity like "we" do. They don't drive electric cars, and the fact that they can't afford electric cars is only a small part of the reason. The major reason is that many of these people belong to the class of people, about 700 million of them, who don't have access to any electricity. (We couldn't care less.)

All this said, "lithium" batteries also contain lithium, and the lithium, like cobalt and nickel, needs to be mined.

I came across this fun paper in the literature today about how lithium mining, could be "green," the conditional word "could" being a popular word to describe being "green" someday that I've been hearing my whole adult life. (I'm certainly not young either.) The paper is this one: CO2 Emission Reduction by Integrating Concentrating Solar Power into Lithium Mining, Pablo Dellicompagni, Judith Franco, and Victoria Flexer, Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (19), 15879-15893.

Oh good, I'm sure we all want lithium mining to be "green."

From the opening text of the paper.

Solar energy can be harnessed through two distinctive technologies: photovoltaics and concentrating solar power (CSP). The latter, with much lesser installed capacity worldwide, uses lenses and mirrors to concentrate the energy from a large irradiated area, into a much smaller surface, that is, a receiver. The concentrated solar energy can be converted into electricity, usually by powering turbines, or directly used to provide heat for industrial processes. (1) These technologies could contribute over 50% of the heat demand of the industrial sector by 2030. (2) Thermal energy for processes can be easily provided by flat collectors (3) or evacuated tubes for low temperatures (less than 100 °C), while for temperatures around 200 °C, flat collectors have been designed with ultrahigh vacuum techniques. (2) For temperatures above 400 °C, solar concentration technologies generate steam at high pressure. Today, most thermal systems for industrial heat generation are at a small or medium scale. Only 33% of worldwide installations have a collection area larger than 500 m2, and the four largest projects (all flat plates) represent 49% of the installed thermal capacity. (4)

It's 2022. I recall driving past solar thermal plants in San Diego, pilot plants, in early 1990's that were markers along the path to a grand solar energy future on which we bet the future of the planetary atmosphere. I used to be very smiley while driving past those "solar thermal" plants, thinking all about the grand renewable future that did not come, and is not here, but I was young then, and now I'm old.

Here's how the bet's going, by the way:

Week beginning on February 20, 2022: 419.62 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 416.30 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 394.30 ppm
Last updated: February 27, 2022

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa (Accessed 02/27/22).

The increase in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide over what it was ten years ago, never mind 30 years ago, is 25.32 ppm. The Mauna Loa observatory has been reporting 10 year increases in its data since the 1980's. In 1993, the year I left San Diego, the place where I admired the "future of energy" solar plants down by the airport, ten year increases averaged 14.02 ppm/10 years.

I have the data.

Four of the 20 highest increases ever recorded over a ten year period have occurred in 2022, and the year is only 7 weeks old for data provided from Mauna Loa this year.

Don't worry, be happy.

We can make lithium mining "green" by hoping to build even more solar thermal facilities than the "small and medium" scale plants described in the paper referenced, which has been published 29 years after I left San Diego.

By the way, the authors state that solar thermal plants are "greener" than PV plants:

CSP systems in general show a much better environmental profile than photovoltaics. The authors calculated that during the whole life cycle of the plants, including fabrication and decommissioning, a PV plant will produce almost twice as much CO2 emissions equivalent compared to those produced by a CSP plant (47.9 vs 29.9 g EQ. CO2 per kWh, respectively). This is mainly due to the manufacturing of PV panels using hazardous chemicals, producing hazardous waste. This is not the case for CSP technologies which use simple mirrors. (1,13) These are fabricated from a reflective layer of thin soda lime float glass mirror (i.e., the most prevalent type of glass) and a support panel in a composite material, obtained by hot pressing a sheet of fiberglass material. (13,14)

I added the bold. How dare they criticize PV solar energy plants! How dare they! Everybody knows that solar PV plants will save the world, someday, somehow, somewhere, although not apparently in 2022.

Don't worry, be happy, we can "green" lithium mining, because it takes place in deserts where the sun shines a lot, at least for several hours a day. From the paper:

About 80% of lithium brine resources worldwide are located in a very small region encompassing southwestern Bolivia, northern Chile, and northwestern Argentina, commonly referred to as the Lithium Triangle. Smaller deposits are found in the Nevada Desert in the United States and in China. (24−27) The Lithium Triangle is also part of the Puna region, an arid plateau in the Central Andes at over 2300 m above sea level (m.a.s.l.), with one of the highest solar radiation levels in the world. (28,29) Interestingly, a large share of both already installed facilities and academic studies on solar energy in the mining industry are for copper mining in Chile. (17,19,30,31) Most of these copper mines are not further than a few hundred kilometers away from lithium brine deposits in the Lithium Triangle and exposed to similar or even lower levels of solar radiation than lithium deposits. Furthermore, brine deposits in Argentina and Bolivia are located in a region with a scarcity of electric grid and/or natural gas pipelines. The large distances from mining exploitations to the electricity grid and natural gas network represent an increment in capital costs. Finally, it is important to note that the thermal requirements of lithium mining from brines are very different from those of more classical pyrometallurgical processes. Indeed, we are referring here to a hydrometallurgical process, where only aqueous streams need to be heated at temperatures below boiling point (∼100 °C), that is, not hard rock ores that need to be processed at temperatures of several hundred degrees centigrade. (23)

There's no word in the paper whence the water for these aqueous streams comes, but don't worry, be happy. I'm sure we'll find a way to make water transport "green" too.

Don't worry, be happy.

It's a good bet, right?

The only time in my life I heard of casinos going bankrupt, they were describing casinos owned by Donald Trump.

One of the things gamblers do, is to throw good money after bad. The same can be said for throwing a good future after a bad future, and let's be clear, we are living in a far worse future than the one I contemplated in San Diego in the early 1990s.

Far worse.

Lithium, nickel and cobalt. Is there really so much available from mines of these elements to make us go "green" with batteries for all our cars and for all of our electricity whenever the wind doesn't blow for weeks and whenever the sun isn't shining brightly?

Well, is there?

One should not answer this question while displaying the common property of being willing to lie to oneself.

I trust you're having doing as well as you can during this tragic week of an aggressive colonial war which has left many of us weeping.