<\/noscript> <\/div>\nMost of the world’s lithium deposits are locked up in brine. Lithium brine recovery entails drilling to the underground brine deposit, which is then pumped to the surface and distributed to evaporation ponds like this one in Bolivia<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
‘We will do a process called strip mining in which we dig a small hole to the bottom of the resource, and after about five years, start migrating the pit eastward, said Beson.<\/p>\n
‘As we do that, we will start backfilling the pit (with material that has only touched the water, so it is benign to the environment – in fact, likely better because we will have removed As, Sb, and other heavy metals from the ground that are contained in the clay).\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Once the pit has reached its 40-year mine life, the pit will be completely backfilled and revegetated, leaving it much like how it looks today, if not more vegetated, and at a slightly lower elevation.’<\/p>\n
Benson noted that phase one of the project aims to mine 40,000 tons annually, yielding $1.6 million in yearly revenue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘The US would have its own lithium supply, and industries would be less scared about supply shortages.’\u00a0<\/p>\n
The US is slowly abandoning gas-powered cars for electric vehicles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – but the shift also means it will be more reliant on other countries, like China, to provide the necessary materials.<\/p>\n
Extracting lithium on US soil would help the nation on its path to self-reliance, which the country has strived to – but has yet to obtain.<\/p>\n
The nation is home to only one active lithium mine, Clayton Valley, near Silver Peak, Nevada, but many companies are working to change that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The US\u00a0imports hundreds of millions of lithium-ion batteries each year, with the volume ever increasing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to data from the UN Comtrade Database, China accounted for most UUS battery imports last year, with a total trade value of $9.3 billion. South Korea and Japan are popular sources, with batteries worth $1.3 and $1.0 billion imported to the U.S. in 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The total import value of lithium-ion batteries nearly tripled since 2020, reaching $13.9 billion last year.<\/p>\n
Data has proposed that about one million metric tons of lithium will be needed to meet global demand by 2040 \u2013 an eight-fold increase from the total global production in 2022.<\/p>\n
‘Developing a sustainable and diverse supply chain to meet lower-carbon energy and national security goals requires mining the highest-grade domestic lithium resources with the lowest waste: ore strip ratios to minimize both the volume of material extracted from the Earth,’ the researchers wrote in a study published in Science Advances.<\/p>\n
‘Volcano sedimentary lithium resources have the potential to meet this requirement, as they tend to be shallow, high-tonnage deposits with low waste: ore strip ratios.<\/p>\n
While the discovery could be great news for the US economy, it spells trouble for Native American tribes that claim the land is sacred.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Paiute, Shoshone and Bannock people are pushing back on mining, stating the project would ‘authorize almost 100 acres of disturbance from 267 exploration drill sites.’<\/p>\n
The tribes are part of the People of the Red Mountain organization, which said there are 91 significant cultural sites in the area.<\/p>\n
‘The global search for lithium has become a form of ‘green’ colonialism,’ People of Red Mountain, an Indigenous-led organization created to protect the sacred site, said in an August statement<\/p>\n
‘The Caldera holds many first foods, medicines, and hunting grounds for tribal people both past and present.’\u00a0<\/p>\n
The organization is now trying to stop on the Oregon side of the caldera.<\/p>\n
While lithium is critical in the transition to clean energy, extracting white gold can lead to long-term ecological damage.<\/p>\n
The lithium extraction process uses a lot of water\u2014 more than 500,000 liters per ton of lithium.<\/p>\n
Miners drill a hole in salt flats to extract lithium and pump salty, mineral-rich brine to the surface.<\/p>\n
After several months, the water evaporates, leaving a mixture of manganese, potassium, borax and lithium salts, filtered and placed into another evaporation pool.<\/p>\n
After 12 and 18 months, the mixture is sufficiently filtered to extract lithium carbonate.<\/p>\n
Over a year, producing 60,000 tons of lithium could devastate the surrounding environment – up to 30 million tons of earth needs to be dug.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is more than the annual amount of dirt dug up to produce all coal output of all but seven or eight US states<\/p>\n
In May 2016, dead fish were found floating in China’s Liqi River, where a toxic chemical leaked from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine.<\/p>\n
Cow and yak carcasses were also found floating in the river, likely killed by drinking the contaminated water.<\/p>\n
Lithium extraction also harms the soil and causes air contamination.<\/p>\n
In Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto, residents believe lithium operations contaminated streams used by humans and livestock for crop irrigation.<\/p>\n
In Chile, the landscape is marred by mountains of discarded salt and canals filled with contaminated water with an unnatural blue hue.<\/p>\n
According to Guillermo Gonzalez, a lithium battery expert from the University of Chile, ‘This isn’t a green solution \u2013 it’s not a solution at all.’<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nRead More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Geologists have uncovered what they believe could be the world’s largest lithium deposit inside an ancient supervolcano along the Nevada-Oregon border in the US. Clay containing up to 40 million metric tons of the precious metal was identified throughout the 28-mile-long McDermitt Caldera\u00a0– nearly double what has been found in Bolivia’s salt flats that have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[995,977,1641,11648,3014,150,23,356,1523,11645,11647,3537,6927,5677,3833,1017,11646,1534],"acf":{"source_article":"","image_credit":""},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7686"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}