How’s Biden and the liberals going to get all the lithium needed to keep making these vehicles (batteries)?
This is Li from only a small region of Germany. There's bound to be large deposits in a country as huge as the US. Also, it's not set in stone that all future battery tech is going to depend solely on Lithium.
Geologists have estimated that an area in the Upper Rhine Valley, in the Black Forest area of southwestern Germany, holds enough lithium for more than 400 million electric cars, making it one of the world’s biggest deposits.
The trove could reduce the reliance of the German car industry on imported lithium. The European Commission estimates that Europe will need to increase its supply of lithium by a factor of 18 by 2030, and by a factor of 60 by 2050. To date, Europe has been importing the bulk of its lithium from the “lithium triangle” in South America, and from Australia. Both sources have substantial local environmental impacts, in addition to the carbon cost of shipping the lithium around the world.
German-Australian startup Vulcan Energy Resources says it can deliver carbon-neutral lithium, extracted at geothermal power stations. “The lithium deposit we’re talking about here is gigantic, and its properties are ideal for our goal of producing high-quality lithium on a large industrial scale in Germany,” Vulcan Energy Resources co-founder Horst Kreuter told Reuters.
The company plans to invest 1.7 billion euros ($2 billion) to build up to five geothermal power stations and facilities to extract the lithium. It says it could be producing 15,000 tons of lithium hydroxide per year at two sites by 2024, and an additional 40,000 tons per year in a second phase beginning in 2025.
There's tons of lithium. We just stopped mining it here because the Chinese were doing it so cheaply that it wasn't economical.
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