Update on the Tesla lithium extraction method

[Old Rocks]

Lithium is a very important metal in building a sustainable economy. While very abundant, it does not occur in high grade deposits. The US, especially the West, has huge deposits of low grade lithium clay. Just part of one of these deposits, located on the Oregon-Nevada border, could supply 25% of the world's needs of lithium for the next 40+ years. The problem is how to mine it as an economical cost and return the land to original shape after the mining is done. Tesla may well have solved the problem;

 

[toobfreak]

Lithium is a very important metal in building a sustainable economy. While very abundant, it does not occur in high grade deposits. The US, especially the West, has huge deposits of low grade lithium clay. Just part of one of these deposits, located on the Oregon-Nevada border, could supply 25% of the world's needs of lithium for the next 40+ years. The problem is how to mine it as an economical cost and return the land to original shape after the mining is done. Tesla may well have solved the problem

40 YEARS?! Gee, it sounds like we will be out of the ability to make high tech batteries before the century is out, meantime we wallow in massive oil energy reserves!

Seems to me we should be focusing on cleaner oil and gasoline cars as a viable back up to electric transportation.

 

[excalibur]

Environmentalists will not allow such mining.

And where is all the electricity going to come from to charge all those EVs? Uh, unpossible.

 

[flacaltenn]

Lithium is a very important metal in building a sustainable economy. While very abundant, it does not occur in high grade deposits. The US, especially the West, has huge deposits of low grade lithium clay. Just part of one of these deposits, located on the Oregon-Nevada border, could supply 25% of the world's needs of lithium for the next 40+ years. The problem is how to mine it as an economical cost and return the land to original shape after the mining is done. Tesla may well have solved the problem;

The world's "needs for lithium" are increasing geometrically EVERY YEAR.. One site in the US is irrelevant.. Largely thanks to the braindead "BATTERY CENTRIC" energy system you and Bernie and AOC are designing for us..

HUGE battery storage grid facility at Moss Landing Calif goes on-line soon.. It can BARELY charge all the Tesla's in the silicon valley area if the wind aint blowing or the sun doesn't shine.. No shit Sherlock -- I did the calculations for a political position paper I wrote last spring on the mirage of alternative energy.

So besides the "MANDATES" for EVehicles and these HUGE enviro nightmares of battery storage facilities on the grid trying to "fix" the insane UNRELIABILITY of wind and solar, your "geniuses" in the Green Raw Deal are gonna BURY US in battery waste IN LESS than 40 years...

 

[WelfareQueen]

The world's "needs for lithium" are increasing geometrically EVERY YEAR.. One site in the US is irrelevant.. Largely thanks to the braindead "BATTERY CENTRIC" energy system you and Bernie and AOC are designing for us..

HUGE battery storage grid facility at Moss Landing Calif goes on-line soon.. It can BARELY charge all the Tesla's in the silicon valley area if the wind aint blowing or the sun doesn't shine.. No shit Sherlock -- I did the calculations for a political position paper I wrote last spring on the mirage of alternative energy.

So besides the "MANDATES" for EVehicles and these HUGE enviro nightmares of battery storage facilities on the grid trying to "fix" the insane UNRELIABILITY of wind and solar, your "geniuses" in the Green Raw Deal are gonna BURY US in battery waste IN LESS than 40 years...

Denmark went all in on wind energy about a decade ago. Huge wind farms planted in the North Sea west of the Country. The net result? Carbon emissions went up because the wind farms had to be backed up with conventional carbon based power plants when the wind was not blowing. The only way to make the winds farms economically viable was to build.....you guessed it....coal power plants.

This gets into physics, but it is very difficult to store electrical energy economically. It must either be stored as Kinetic energy or Thermal energy, but always at a significant loss in efficiency. I could talk for hours about this, physics is a passion, but the net result is much of alternative energy crap spewed out by Dims is garbage. It can only be an adjunct to traditional power sources unless some major breakthroughs in the physical sciences takes place.

 

[flacaltenn]

Denmark went all in on wind energy about a decade ago. Huge wind farms planted in the North Sea west of the Country. The net result? Carbon emissions went up because the wind farms had to be backed up with conventional carbon based power plants when the wind was not blowing. The only way to make the winds farms economically viable was to build.....you guessed it....coal power plants.

This gets into physics, but it is very difficult to store electrical energy economically. It must either be stored as Kinetic energy or Thermal energy, but always at a significant loss in efficiency. I could talk for hours about this, physics is a passion, but the net result is much of alternative energy crap spewed out by Dims is garbage. It can only be an adjunct to traditional power sources unless some major breakthroughs in the physical sciences takes place.

I love how they talk about the cost of a solar or wind farm and DONT INCLUDE the cost of the "back-up" generation that's BIG ENOUGH to handle the output of their green energy farm BY ITSELF 24/7/365.. We need new accountants for the Green Raw Deal.. Even the CongressionalBudgetOffice aint gonna get this right.. LOL....

 

[flacaltenn]

Or the cost of the MASSIVE Grid Scale Battery back-up that not only KILLS their economic advantage but still is a DRAIN on the grid to charge it..

 

[WelfareQueen]

I love how they talk about the cost of a solar or wind farm and DONT INCLUDE the cost of the "back-up" generation that's BIG ENOUGH to handle the output of their green energy farm BY ITSELF 24/7/365.. We need new accountants for the Green Raw Deal.. Even the CongressionalBudgetOffice aint gonna get this right.. LOL....

Correct. Solar and wind must have conventional hydrocarbon or nuclear power plant backup. This obviously raises the cost of alternative energy sources above the norm. This has been true for decades. As an adjunct to a conventional power grid green energy is fine. As a primary power source, a disaster.

 

[Devils_Advocate]

Over a period of time you will mine out the resource and be stuck back at square one…

Truthfully all these solar and wind farms will end up being failed experiments and the future is truly Nuclear if we stay on this planet…

 

[flacaltenn]

Correct. Solar and wind must have conventional hydrocarbon or nuclear power plant backup. This obviously raises the cost of alternative energy sources above the norm. This has been true for decades. As an adjunct to a conventional power grid green energy is fine. As a primary power source, a disaster.

Once you realize this reality that wind and solar are NOT ALTERNATIVES -- because they require a "secondary" generator for when they dont produce, AT LEAST we can stop WASTING lithium and trainloads of money building insane shit like the Moss Landing CA battery back-up facility..

And that secondary generator is actually the PRIMARY generator because IT CAN provide all that energy without wind or solar.

Likely to be a nat gas plant, right now and for the next 20 years unless we truly test and confirm the safety of 3rd and 4th generation nuclear plants and deploy them. Want to force fossil fuel companies into bankruptcies, tear down the damns and free the salmon? Nuclear is the ONLY answer right now..

 

[flacaltenn]

One thing I learned writing that paper is that the State of California holds all the FINANCIALS and economic considerations and contract details of ANY "renewable" to be secret and confidential for up to 5 years AFTER the site is deployed..

WhatTF are they protecting? Wont allow the public to review costs or even find out if the suppliers are getting kick-backs or "royalties" on their contracts.

So I wasn't able to find out the COST or whether Musk or others were being given a slice of the "revenue" for that battery storage monstrousity. But I suspect they do..

Which is weird because batteries CONSUME energy, NOT PRODUCE energy. So what is the INCOME revenue based on? TWICE SOLD GOODS???

 

[Old Rocks]

The cost estimates for technologies in Australia are (all figures in US dollars).

Tracking PV $26-67 per MWh
Fixed-axis PV $29-80 per MWh
Onshore wind $32-83 per MWh
Combined cycle gas turbine power plant $66-96 per MWh
Onshore wind plus storage $50-124 per MWh
Fixed-axis PV plus storage $58-178 per MWh
Utility-scale battery (four-hour storage duration) $145-167 per MWh
Open cycle gas turbine power plant $146-309 per MWh

Solar, wind and battery storage now cheapest energy options just about everywhere

More big falls in cost of wind, solar and storage mean they are cheapest form of new energy generation nearly everywhere in the world, and particularly in Australia.

reneweconomy.com.au

 

[Old Rocks]

Correct. Solar and wind must have conventional hydrocarbon or nuclear power plant backup. This obviously raises the cost of alternative energy sources above the norm. This has been true for decades. As an adjunct to a conventional power grid green energy is fine. As a primary power source, a disaster.

Standard generation has to have a backup. That is why there are peaker plants. But that backup does not have to be fossil fuels. In fact, the combination of batteries and pumped hydro is not only cheaper than gas peaker plants, their use results in a more stable grid.

 

[Old Rocks]

40 YEARS?! Gee, it sounds like we will be out of the ability to make high tech batteries before the century is out, meantime we wallow in massive oil energy reserves!

Seems to me we should be focusing on cleaner oil and gasoline cars as a viable back up to electric transportation.

Really a stupid comment. There are many places in Oregon, Nevada, and California with the same kind of geology. Many are already known to have lithium clay deposits. We will not run out of lithium for a long time, and, since we are already recycling lithium batteries, there is no reason ever to run out of lithium.

 

[flacaltenn]

The cost estimates for technologies in Australia are (all figures in US dollars).

Tracking PV $26-67 per MWh
Fixed-axis PV $29-80 per MWh
Onshore wind $32-83 per MWh
Combined cycle gas turbine power plant $66-96 per MWh
Onshore wind plus storage $50-124 per MWh
Fixed-axis PV plus storage $58-178 per MWh
Utility-scale battery (four-hour storage duration) $145-167 per MWh
Open cycle gas turbine power plant $146-309 per MWh

Solar, wind and battery storage now cheapest energy options just about everywhere

More big falls in cost of wind, solar and storage mean they are cheapest form of new energy generation nearly everywhere in the world, and particularly in Australia.

reneweconomy.com.au

Those do not include the cost of having a 2nd completely redundant generator to assure the lights dont go out.. You just made my case about how rotten the "accounting" is on all this..

 

[flacaltenn]

Utility-scale battery (four-hour storage duration) $145-167 per MWh

Even THIS is dishonest. Which is it? (four hour storage) or $150/MWh? You are about 3 orders of magnitude wrong on this anyways. EVEN IF -- that's just the price of the batteries..

 

[flacaltenn]

Whoever you copied those costs from doesn't even know the diff between KWh and MWh...

From DOE... https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy20osti/75385.pdf

Figure ES-2 shows the overall capital cost for a 4-hour battery system based on those projections, with storage costs of $144/kWh, $208/kWh, and $293/kWh in 2030 and $88/kWh, $156/kWh, and $219/kWh in 2050. Battery variable operations and maintenance costs, lifetimes, and efficiencies are also discussed, with recommended values selected based on the publications surveyed.

-------------------------

That's BATTERIES ONLY.. Not the complex AC/DC/AC convertors or facility, safety, monitoring or cooling needs. AND it does NOT AMORTIZE the approx 14 year LIFETIME of these batteries..

You and AOC gonna bury us in battery waste dude... AND wasted debt from this folly.

That's $150,000 per MWh.. So Moss Landing at 1200MWh for the BATTERIES ALONE is somewhere around $180MILL. And that's barely enough storage to charge 17,000 Tesla Model S with nothing left over for homes, hospitals or businesses.. MORE Teslas in Silicon Valley than that..

It's ALSO about 93Metric tons of Lithium... How much did you say that puny deposit in the US was?

 

[eagle1462010]

Green Money Making Machine advocates ignore the enviro nightmare caused by producing the solar panels and the batteries. They EXPORT the POLLUTION and STRIP MINING to China. Asia and Africa then yell how clean they are............................and then one major hail storm wipes out massive solar farms in about 2 hours.

So reliable. lol

 

[WelfareQueen]

Standard generation has to have a backup. That is why there are peaker plants. But that backup does not have to be fossil fuels. In fact, the combination of batteries and pumped hydro is not only cheaper than gas peaker plants, their use results in a more stable grid.

Pumped hydro is grossly inefficient. It takes far more energy to pump water up a hill than the energy derived releasing the water down a hill. Battery power is also far less efficient than hydrocarbons because all batteries must carry their reactant. This is all basic physics.

 

[WelfareQueen]

The cost estimates for technologies in Australia are (all figures in US dollars).

Tracking PV $26-67 per MWh
Fixed-axis PV $29-80 per MWh
Onshore wind $32-83 per MWh
Combined cycle gas turbine power plant $66-96 per MWh
Onshore wind plus storage $50-124 per MWh
Fixed-axis PV plus storage $58-178 per MWh
Utility-scale battery (four-hour storage duration) $145-167 per MWh
Open cycle gas turbine power plant $146-309 per MWh

Solar, wind and battery storage now cheapest energy options just about everywhere

More big falls in cost of wind, solar and storage mean they are cheapest form of new energy generation nearly everywhere in the world, and particularly in Australia.

reneweconomy.com.au

These numbers are garbage. Capital costs to build the power plant plus operational costs to run the plant, plus back up costs for power plants when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. Nuclear has the highest start up costs but the cheapest operational costs. Standard gas and coal plants overall costs are much cheaper than renewables.

Cost of electricity by source - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org