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Comment by johnm1019 | Hacker News Reader

The article raises a few interesting points I didn't know:

- In SoCal there are several areas which have geothermal activity and correspondingly several electric plants based on that

- This geothermal activity raises both hot water and a fair concentration of a brine solution containing many metals

- The lithium isn't mined, they were getting it by processing this brine solution

Based on that, and reading many comments that modern batteries also needs lots of Co, Mn, etc... I wonder if the brine water coming up from this area is basically 'battery soup'? Seems like a lot of potential value that is already being pumped out of the ground by someone else - who considers it a waste product!

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You can get 'geothermal' waters pretty much anywhere in the world, it only depends on how deep you dig (in some cases this is completely unviable from an economic point of view) You can then use the water for heating, extracting minerals, spas, swimming pools etc.

Most places are wildly uneconomic for geothermal.

The Great Basin is composed of Horst and Graben [1] (i.e. Mountain ridges separating basins) geology. H&G happens when the Earth's crust is stretched. The stretching also makes the crust much thinner than normal -- that's why there are tons of cider cones and old lava flows in the Great Basin region.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_and_graben

The Great Basin is usually described in English as basin and range. It's a part of the is a part of the Basin and Range Province.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basin_and_Range_Province

Yes, but it is pretty thin soup!

Boil it for a while?

I know (expect?) you are being funny - but one of the things that the eco-people always miss in their end-to-end cost calculation (that they do not do) is the cost of "boiling it for a while". It's like free energy! :-)

Usually these liquids are pooled into evaporation ponds to be boiled away by the sun, for free.

Take a close look at aerial images pretty much anywhere in the US SW desert.

I do geothermal projects using depleted oil wells in that part of the country -- so I know exactly what you are talking about. The question ends up being economics for recovery, isolation transport and sale.

EDIT: Just because you can see crunky white stuff from the sky doesn't mean you have a lithium mine on your hands! :-)

And a thing non-eco-people (wtf?) seem to miss is that eco-people aren't all the same person.

I am rather low on the eco scale. Pollution including CO2 IMO should be heavily taxed as a negative externality. But, things like land preservation is really just about land use with leaving it alone as one option. Extinction is another meh issue. Make an effort to preserve DNA, but trying to save animals that compete with humans is rarely going to work well.

So, recycling for example needs to be a net gain when adjusting for externality's not just a pointless feel good measure. Eco homes are another pointless waste. Want to save the environment live in a condo.

Basically, you can do what you want with your land, but don't hurt other peoples air, water, etc.

PS: Needless to say, rarely do I find people with similar viewpoints.

Please, realise there is no "your land" island on which people live apart from the ecosytem. Personally, I feel that living on "your" land is fine, it's that market mechanism forcing the extraction of value from it that scares the shit out of me.

I am all for curbing polution and even city's have ecosystems, but they look nothing like untamed land. Saying, you can't turn your property into a parking lot because reasons is rarely well thought out.

Yes, but, like their co-religionists, they seem to hive out and make this same objection! :-)

Compared to overall lifecycle energy costs of something like a car, the one-time cost to boil one of the manufacturing components up front isn't very much. Better to boil a lithium soup once than to burn gasoline to power your car for fifteen years. Plus renewable energy is easier to use in manufacturing processes than it is in mobile applications (like vehicles). Check out the history of aluminum manufacturing, for example -- it's been heavily dependent on renewable energy in the form of hydroelectric power for almost a century.

You might think that but you need information to back up your intuitions (which are wrong)

A significant amount of the total lifetime energy usage of a car is made up by it's manufacture. It is not trivial to say you should always buy something new and more efficient.

You're making arguments against something that I didn't say.

All cars have significant manufacturing costs. So saying that making batteries has energy expensive processes isn't an argument that disqualifies EVs. An EV will have much less impact on the environment over its lifetime than a gas-powered car manufactured in the same year.

Better to boil a lithium soup once than to burn gasoline to power your car for fifteen years

Put bluntly: if I'm the battery manufacturer, my main goal is a profitable operation, not the end-user's ecological footprint.

If having to "just boil it" means I lose money on the product, then I don't have a business.

I R a web designer?

Ahem. Nuclear

This is the right next ~100 year answer. I'm not sure what happened with this. It looks like the protest-vietnam machine didn't want to shut down when vietnam shut down and decided that nuclear was a cool thing to protest next. I haven't had time to verify that this is true.

If the area is already geothermal...

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