Lithium – White Gold
by Not Sure
6 October 2024
In the
summer of 2023, Elon Musk and Tesla broke ground on a lithium refinery near
Corpus Christi, Texas. Elon Musk called
the refinery a “money-printing machine”.
Expected to open in mid-2024, the refinery is not completed. The plant is needed to supply battery
materials to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas.
Musk has
referred to lithium batteries as “the new oil”.
Lithium is called “white gold”.
At sciencealert.com
on 22 September 2024, Carly Cassella wrote, “Almost two centuries after
California's gold rush, the United States is on the brink of a lithium rush. As
demand for the material skyrockets, government geologists are rushing to figure
out where the precious element is hiding.”
The U.S.
Department of Energy and the Federal Consortium for Advanced Batteries (FCAB)
released an Executive Summary entitled “National Blueprint for Lithium
Batteries 2021-2030”. This reads more
like a press release than a substantive document highlighting resource
locations and extraction and processing plans, and we imagine this was printed
in color and distributed widely across government departments, so petty
bureaucrats would understand where to invest their retirement savings.
Alan Watt
spoke often about two important premises which are 1) there are at least three
levels of science, and 2) scientific advances, “re-search” and technology are
many decades ahead of what is given to the public to know. If we keep these in mind when reading
articles, scholarly papers, and press releases, we will find it easier to
reason things out for ourselves.
It should be
a “given” that at the highest level of science it is acknowledged that
anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, a tool used to create fear, shape lower
levels of research, and exert control.
Therefore, when a government document talks about the urgent need for
clean energy, we immediately catch the whiff of Bothersome
Stuff.
Theoretically,
lithium can be extracted from clay, but that has yet to be realized. The current sources of lithium are brine
deposits (salt lakes) and hard rock. The
South American countries of Argentina, Chile and to a lesser extent, Bolivia,
is where most of the brine originates.
This brine region is referred to as the “Lithium Triangle”. Nevada, in the U.S. is a lesser source of
lithium brine.
Lithium is
found in “hard rock” as part of the Pegmatite rock units that form when magma
intrudes into the crust. As this magma
cools, water and minerals are concentrated.
Within the Pegmatite is a lithium-bearing mineral known as Spodumene.
The benefits
of hard rock lithium are its flexibility because it can be processed into both
lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate, whereas brine can only be processed
into carbonate. Brine takes longer to
process because of evaporation time, and Spodumene generally produces a higher
lithium content in comparison to brine.
The largest
producer of Spodumene by weight is Western Australia and the largest hard-rock
mine is Greenbushes mine, co-operated by a Chinese company.
Piedmont
Lithium is developing Carolina Lithium as a “multi-phased, fully integrated
lithium project in Gaston County, North Carolina, with mining, spodumene
concentrate production, and lithium hydroxide conversion being designed as
Phase 1 and a second lithium hydroxide train being designed as Phase 2. We
expect Carolina Lithium to be one of the world’s only fully integrated lithium
sites and among the most sustainable lithium hydroxide operations of its kind.
The project, currently in the development stage, is located within the renowned
Carolina Tin-Spodumene Belt”.
Gaston
County suffered hurricane and flood damage and was without power for days, but
they escaped the extreme devastation that the western part of the state
incurred. Kings Mountain in the
Appalachians received much damage too, and this is where Albemarle Kings
Mountain is located, “one of the world’s most advanced lithium material sites”. On 24 September, just a few days before the
hurricane and flooding, Albemarle submitted state and federal permits for the
redevelopment of Kings Mountain Mine.
According to the World Economic
Forum, these are the top-ranked producers of lithium, starting at number 1:
Australia, Chile, China, Argentina, Brazil, Zimbabwe, Portugal, and the United
States. In addition to their domestic
mines, Chinese companies have acquired close to $6 billion in lithium assets in
countries like Chile, Canada, and Australia over the past decade and they control
about 60% of the world’s refining capacity for lithium batteries.
Just a quick investigation on lithium
mining, whether brine extraction or hard rock mining, shows the huge negative environmental
impact of this global operation. Refining
lithium as another layer of environmental damage. The “greenhouse gas” released by mining and
refining is a clue that battery manufacturing is not about clean energy and EVs. What then?
In this Redux from 26 October 2007, “California
Dreamin' on Such a Smoky Day - Fires and Spraying,
The People Praying”, Alan Watt talked about propaganda, childhood
indoctrination, and how we are educated to see any given reality as
normal. People are entering into their
elderly years who have never looked up, who cannot remember what skies looked
like in their youth, so they have nothing to compare today’s skies to, if they
bothered to see. It has proven to be too
easy for the highest level of the scientific priesthood to move us into our new
“smart” pasture.
If not clean energy and electric
vehicles, what then? Consider the rise
of “grid-scale battery energy storage”, the energy needed to power a smart city. There are now hundreds of smart cities around
the world, and numerous conferences and “connect” initiatives. Depending on the source, the U.S. alone
spends between $200-300 billions annually on smart
city technology. A smart city is a
prison.
We must also consider the military
applications of batteries. It’s
impossible to ascertain how much the U.S.’s Department of Defense spends on
battery acquisition and energy storage programs. A lot, I think.
What we know is that we’re never told
the truth, the indoctrination starts early and is lifelong. It’s essential to learn to reason things
out. As Alan said in this talk, “One of
the main things they had to do a long time ago was to get a standardized
educational system so that everyone could be taught the same indoctrinations
because you take your reasoning from what you've been taught. You reason things
out according to the data and you come to conclusions, but they knew back then
that we worked just like computers. A computer has a language, and a computer
has a certain logic, a process it must go through, and we work the same way;
so, by giving you little bits and bytes of information, you use your reason,
and you will come to predetermined conclusions as you must. Therefore, when you
give the same data to everyone under a standardized educational system, they'll
all come to the same faulty conclusions, but they’ll all think they're right
because everyone else agrees with them and that's how simple it is. They
understood this long, long, long ago.”
© Not Sure
Additional reading:
National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries 2021-2030
Department of Defense Operational Energy Strategy
https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/Downloads/OE/2023%20Operational%20Energy%20Strategy.pdf