Part 1: The Challenges of White Gold
Giving Thanks to Putin?
Some might say that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to convince the world that Russia is still a dominant player on the international stage. Not discounting the toll on human life, it has had many miscalculated outcomes. Much like the COVID pandemic has accelerated the science and deployment of mRNA technology, Putin’s war has accelerated research into alternative energy sources, including lithium and hydrogen. Both lithium and hydrogen can be green energy alternatives to fossil fuels and nuclear power. In particular, hydrogen is a huge piece to the puzzle of decarbonizing our world.
Lithium
In this 3-part series, we will start by exploring the challenges created by the White Gold Rush: lithium. In part 2, we will dive deeper into UCSC’s green hydrogen breakthrough. Finally, in part 3 we will look at the current and upcoming technologies that bring both green and blue hydrogen energy to a scalable global solution. We welcome your feedback on this article and future articles. Please use the comments function below to share your thoughts.
White Gold
Growth & Supply
Lithium is the driving force behind electric vehicles. More than a dozen countries plan to ban sales of gasoline and diesel cars by 2040 or sooner. California recently announced a plan to phase out gas and diesel cars by 2035. Mass electrification requires more batteries, and the materials that comprise them. Demand for lithium-ion batteries is projected to increase over 500% by 2030.
The “black gold” oil rush in America started in 1859, and continues. There are thousands of oil extraction sites around the world. By some estimates, the world has proven oil reserves equivalent to 46.6 times its annual consumption levels. That is about 47 years left of contributing to global warming.
The White Gold Rush, lithium, is underway. Chile has the world's largest known lithium reserves with 8 million tons. This puts the South American country far ahead of Australia (2.7 million tons), Argentina (2 million tons), and China (1 million tons).
Is there enough lithium? There are an estimated 17 million tonnes of quantified lithium reserves on Earth and another 63 million tonnes not yet assessed for cost of extraction. Lithium-ion batteries consume 100g of lithium per kWh. We’d need 140TWh of short term storage to stabilize the future electricity grid. That would require 14 million tonnes. Transitioning the 1 billion cars on Earth from internal combustion engines to long range electric vehicles would consume another 10 million tonnes (1 billion x 100 kWh x 100g lithium per kWh). That totals roughly 24 million tonnes which is more than the current qualified reserves and about one third of known resources, and that's just to provide enough lithium for both short term grid storage and electric cars.
Mining does have a big footprint. In fact, in 2016, the largest mining companies, as measured by CO2 emissions, were responsible for 211.3 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions in that year alone. Mining for lithium, like most metals, is a dirty business.
There is only one operating mine in the U.S. at present – the Albemarle Silver Peak Mine in Nevada. This mine uses the brine extraction method to pull lithium deposits from under the earth's surface. Extracting lithium from brines requires large evaporation ponds that are environmentally damaging, and result in low lithium recovery, and low product purity. While producing 66,000 tons a year of battery-grade lithium carbonate, the mine may cause groundwater contamination with metals including antimony and arsenic, according to federal documents.
A nascent U.S. mine that has gained global attention is located in the Salton Sea. It applies specially coated beads from Oakland-based Lilac Solutions, promising higher yield. Unlike conventional brine extraction as used in Nevada, the Lilac process does not require evaporation ponds. The entire process is self-contained. Beads are loaded into tanks, brine flows through the tanks, and as the brine percolates through the beads, the beads absorb lithium out of the brine. Once the beads are saturated with lithium, hydrochloric acid is used to flush out the lithium, yielding lithium chloride. Lithium chloride is the “crude oil” of lithium – the standard intermediary in every lithium brine project today. The lithium chloride is then processed on-site with conventional process equipment to yield a finished product. The product – lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide – is sold to battery makers.
To meet the demand for lithium, countries will need to make significant capital investments. In the first three months of 2021, U.S. lithium miners like those in Nevada raised nearly $3.5 billion from Wall Street — seven times the amount raised in the prior 36 months, according to data assembled by Bloomberg.
Additionally, hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent right now on the next generation solid-state lithium ion batteries to address some of the shortcomings of existing liquid-state lithium ion batteries.
Safety
Matthew Paiss
“Lithium Ion batteries are an excellent technology, but must be designed very carefully,” explains Matthew Paiss, Technical Advisor, Battery Materials & Systems Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Santa Cruz resident. “They can burn if they get too hot and the liquid electrolyte is flammable. The liquid is one of the problems. Lithium batteries can produce dangerous heat levels, cause fires and or explosions, and are very difficult to extinguish if in thermal runaway. That's why aviation authorities have banned lithium batteries when traveling. Solid state lithium batteries have far less liquid, but can also be dangerous if they go into thermal runaway.”
Scaling up both types of batteries is a really hard problem. Plus, there is the environmental damage caused by lithium excavation, and energy involved in production, and eventual disposal. In the Lithium Americas Nevada-based lithium mine, the lithium is extracted from a massive open pit mine, dumped onto railroad cars, shipped to the west coast, then to China to create lithium batteries, then returned to the US to be assembled in cars. The mining, manufacturing, shipping, and distribution of lithium is neither environmentally safe nor commercially smart.
But the challenges with lithium don’t stop there.
Recyclability
In the rush to embrace lithium-ion powered vehicles, auto companies are adopting the same pretense that has been embraced by the plastics industry: they are claiming that used batteries will be recycled. However, the truth is being swept under the rug. None of the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles are recyclable in the same sense that paper, glass, and lead car batteries are. Although efforts to improve recycling methods are underway, generally only around half the materials in these batteries are currently extracted and repurposed.
J.B. Straubel
“The sheer magnitude of the waste and scrap problem and the magnitude of batteries that need to get recycled is, I think, shocking to most people,” said J.B. Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials. Straubel spent more than a decade at Tesla, before resigning as chief technical officer in 2019 so he could focus on growing his recycling company. Redwood is creating a closed-loop, domestic supply chain for lithium-ion batteries across collection, refurbishment, recycling, refining, and remanufacturing of sustainable battery materials. Redwood's partnerships span a broad range; from working with battery manufacturers to recycle production scrap to teaming up with automakers to process end of life EVs, and soon, to supplying anode and cathode materials back to the US supply chain. Existing automobile partnerships include Ford, Volkswagen, and Toyota.
Politics
“1% of the cars produced globally are currently using lithium,” states James O’Connor. “How do we get to the point where 80% of cars use lithium? And people don't realize that a lot of the lithium is in countries on the planet that aren't necessarily friendly to the rest of the world. The demand for lithium could start wars.” We will learn more from James in Part 2 of this article series.
And then there is the recent flip by the Biden Administration. The U.S. Department of Energy had chosen Berkshire Hathaway the day Biden was inaugurated in January 2021 for a $14.9 million grant to study how Salton Sea-region lithium could be used to make lithium hydroxide, a specialized type of the metal that produces more efficient and longer-lasting EV batteries. Two weeks later, though, the Energy Department rescinded the grant, according to emails and documents obtained by Reuters, after Berkshire requested what the Energy Department called a "material change" to its lithium project. The politics behind this reversal are not clear, but does not prevent Berkshire from moving forward.
Where do we go from here?
Granted, lithium is a good short term solution. However, it is a finite non-renewable resource. So where do we go from here? Now go to Part 2: The Promise of Hydrogen.
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Part 1: The Challenges of White Gold
Part 2: The Promise of Hydrogen
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