r/business • u/PrudentDamage600 • Sep 10 '23

Largest Lithium Deposit Ever Found

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/lithium-discovery-in-us-volcano-could-be-biggest-deposit-ever-found/4018032.article
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u/blbd Sep 10 '23

The problem in the US is that processing the lithium deposits requires huge amounts of water and most of the deposits including this one are in rural parts of Nevada that have effectively no water. Trucking the raw materials to places with water to extract the small amount of lithium is not especially cost effective. I suspect any destination with a meaningful amount of water is 3-4 hours away from this deposit.

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u/vertigo3pc Sep 10 '23

As opposed to all the oil extraction sites that are within 3-4 hours of a refinery? Oh, wait, many are literally thousands of feet beneath the surface of the ocean, and then refined elsewhere.

Meanwhile, lithium extraction using other methods are growing day by day, and this lithium deposit won't be mined until 2026, giving them plenty of time to figure out water needs, extraction methods based on the site, and expansion. More sites like this will rely on sulfur leeching or DLE rather than using the current pond evaporation methods.

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u/blbd Sep 10 '23

Sure. But a higher percentage of the raw stuff gets refined to sellable products with crude at about 80%. In a Lithium mine, the best possible percentage is 8% and it's heavy huge volumes of soil. Plus you can't easily send it through pipelines.

Hopefully they will figure out solutions for it. I'm just saying it's been a big obstacle for using our lithium reserves in Nevada.