The Supply Chain for Lithium (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The Supply Chain for Lithium (2020)

clearpath.org

81 pointslai-yin54 comments

> just transporting completed battery cells from South Korea to Michigan adds a 4.1 kg CO2e/kWh footprint

Some Googling says my phone has a storage capacity of 2800mAh, at 3.8V, or 10.64 Wh. Scaling the footprint, that's 43 grams CO₂e, for a device I replace every several years? A quick Google says a car is 411 grams CO₂ … per mile. The phone seems insignificant?

The EV usage is probably worse, though it'd be nice if the article didn't suddenly switch to pounds. Presuming the 10k phones number is accurate, we're up to 430kg. But that's 1046 miles of travel for a normal car. If it can make that up in terms of cleaner energy usage over the life of the battery, that seems better than the current state?

They are made in SK because Koreans work for less.

It's directly related to the CO2 question because lower wages translate to (almost 2-fold) lower emissions per person, despite their more industrial economy.

Is the process of making batteries easy to move to low cost countries? I’d wager it’s in Korea because of their amazingly developed electronics industry, but it’s also true that the average American makes more. If it’s easy to move to low wage countries, there are countries in Europe with lower wages, and surely American states as well.

Battery manufacturing is somewhat different from other electronics, but that's beside the point. They built new plants for batteries in SK and are building more because it's cheaper overall. "Cheaper" is not an abstract economic coincidence, it directly translates to "less emissions".

> 411 grams CO₂ … per mile

At first glance I thought that that can't possibly be right.

Some quick calculations for my Toyota Camry (non-hybrid): It gets about 7.8L/100 km, which is 62 miles, which is 126 mL per mile. A litre of petrol produces 2.3 kg of CO2, so that's 290 grams per mile.

Shit. Cars are worse than I thought!

The mass per volume of gasoline is another way to reason about how much petroleum is consumed (~0.75 kg/L or ~6.3 pounds/gallon)

I was going to call BS on your claim that a litre of petrol produces 2.3kg of CO2, but the Internets confirm it. It's a surprising amount, even knowing that the O2 comes from the atmosphere and weighs a lot more.

Makes a lot of sense tbh. C and O have roughly the same atomic weight, and CO2 is about a third C (from the fuel). The fuel of course has a bunch of H but by mass that's only a small fraction. So a given mass of fuel turns into roughly three times as much CO2. With petrol being a bit lighter than water (which is 1 kg/l) the 2.3 kg CO2 per liter is right around the "factor 3" estimate.

Wouldn't electrifying the manufacturing process (perhaps with solar and / or nuclear) and shipping process eventually reduce total emissions?

300 kg CO2e per kWh, for a lithium battery pack.

Shit. EVs are worse than I thought!

Now account for recycling that battery after the few thousands charge cycles have been exhausted.

EVs are not a panacea. Instead, we should look more into collective transport, better urban planning, more bike lanes, etc. Cars are a cultural issue, and more cars won't solve the problem, whether electric or not.

I can't do that, as an effective and large-scale method of recycling lithium batteries (and more specifically, one that can extract the lithium, as well as other elements) does not yet exist, so we have no idea how much energy it would take to do so.

It is true that the small-scale methods currently being investigated cannot compete with the existing supply of raw material.

You are right though, EVs are not the solution.

That's cherry-picking the number from the upper range of estimates, and is glossing over the fact that hydrocarbon fuels also have production costs that can be measured in CO2e before they're burned and become tailpipe emissions.

Source: https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...

Additionally, Tesla's relatively cost-effective (and hence energy-efficient) manufacturing of battery packs will bring this down, probably to well under 100 kg.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/22/21450916/tesla-battery-pa...

Another way to look at this kind of thing is to directly convert dollars into CO2. This is assuming that all "economic activity" directly or indirectly uses energy, and that most energy is fossil-fuel based. This is actually a good way to estimate the maximum energy usage, because energy is fungible but businesses aren't a charity. They'll sell you something for the energy cost plus profit, but not less than the base energy cost.

A Tesla replacement pack costs roughly $15K and a matching solar panel to charge it would cost about $10K. That's the equivalent to burning $25K of a fuel such as petrol. Even before the pandemic, my fuel costs were quite low at about $1.5K/year, so it would have taken nearly 17 years to break even! An Uber driver might be able to achieve a net benefit for the environment in under a year.

I already pointed out it's on the slightly higher end of esimtates, but it is reasonably accurate. Regardless of Musk's promises, EV battery pack manufacture takes a lot of energy. Given that you say hydrocarbon fuels (which are typically what power all of the manufacturing processes in question) have their own energy cost, they also need to be added to the EV side of the equation.

I also prefer, in general, to stick to measurements of energy usage, and not CO2e or dollars, because energy usage is what matters. The rest can be manipulated by legislation, and leave too much to interpretation. If I burn some coal to power my manufacturing plant, that's a lot of CO2. If I burn a load of timber from a virgin rainforest to do the same, that's zero CO2, because that is defined as "sustainable".

This 4.1 number seems kind of iffy in origin. They cite a document that cites the number from another document that cites the number from a fourth paywall-hidden document[1] that seems to be a case study of one car based on information provided by the maufacturer, where the transport is covered only in a side sentence. Also there's a graph that shows the transport being a tiny slice of the overall lifetime GHG footprint.

A much better way would be to just take the weight and use widely available ghg per km-ton numbers.

[1] https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.6b00830

According to this paper[1] (and using an online calculator to roughly convert GJ to CO2e), manufacturing and assembly of a Li-ion pack adds around 300Kg CO2e/kWh. That's already a problem for your phone, before you even start counting the embedded energy of all of its other compnents (semiconductor manufacturing is very energy-intensive).

But, multiply that by 100 to get a Tesla battery pack, and you're in real trouble. 300Kg * 100 / 0.4Kg/mile = 75,000 miles before you've broken even, compared to a petrol car. This number is actaully a little high, compared to other ways I've calculated it, but is definitely in the right ballpark.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00078...

Ah, thank you for finding that & pointing it out. One of the things I didn't get & wanted from the original post was the full CO₂ cost of the manufacture, and I figured it was probably going to be much higher. (I didn't include it since the article was focused on moving manufacturing, so the manufacturing CO₂ cost would remain the same either way.)

(But, presumably the ICE car also has its own manufacturing cost, which should offset that of the Tesla? Though, I'm not sure what the equivalent here is; the manufacturing CO₂ of the gas? The CO₂ of the ICE's battery?)

I know not everyone does keep their vehicles as long as I do, but I better get at least 75k mi out of it! (My current — and first — car is at ~130k mi, and still going fairly strong, though it is definitely showing some wear. Alas, it burns gas.)

Read this with a huge grain of salt. Clearpath is a conservative lobbying organization. In the end they use the article to sell several bills (most of them sponsored by republicans) even if some of the bills it touts (the ones by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) have nothing to do with lithium but are about rare earth metals instead.

I look forward to your addressing some of the information actually presented in the article.

Oh come on don't be naive. Have you ever seen something put out about renewable energy by a "conservative thinktank" that wasn't full of shoddy reasoning or outright misinformation?

Examples please. Specifically examples in this article would be nice. If there are so many problems here, what are they?

In todays real world, where it takes 10 times the time and effort to refute bullshit than to transmit it, your request is nothing but support for the disinformation campaign.

Academic ideals of debate are not what happens now. Please adapt.

Am I to understand that the new standard is simply to judge the quality of information from its publication source alone? Would you mind giving me a list of approved sites?

I think you are to understand that you're permitted to believe whatever you desire. Other people may sometimes warn you, but if you go out there saying "Prove it! Prove I'll die if I jump off this bridge", they might just let you find out for yourself.

So you criticize an article not for its content, but for what you imagine its writers are thinking because of its source.

When asked for a list of publications so credible that the publication’s reputation promises the unvarnished truth no matter what, you still provide none of the publications.

I would be thrilled if you pointed me to just one such source. In my case no source, whether I generally like it or not, provides the kind of infallibility suggested by your undisclosed site.

I'm not the guy you were talking to. I'm a third party explaining your interaction to you.

D’oh! Thanks

I gave you an example in this article. The article talked up a couple of proposed pieces of legislation that had nothing to do with lithium, because they were proposed by republicans.

So, this is how you build your wealth of knowledge.

There was also an active mine in CA (I forget the name), but it closed down a few years ago... not sure why. I'm guessing it's the fact that lithium requires many harsh chemicals to extract and is a very 'dirty' process. Probably why China does most of the processing -- they're far more willing to pollute their own environment than most countries currently. For independence to occur, we either need to accept the environmental wreckage, or find a better way to contain it and make it 'cleaner'.

You're probably thinking of the Mountain Pass, CA rare earths mine. Molycorp finally got the process clean enough that even the Sierra Club approved. Then China cut the price on rare earths and Molycorp went bankrupt. Then China raised the price on rare earths.

The Mountain Pass mine is operating again, but it's not clear who owns it now. Names involved are JHL Capital Group, QVT Financial, Shenghe Resources Holding Co. Ltd., and Fortress Value Acquisition Corp.

The output has to go to China for processing because the plan to build US extraction facilities at Mountain Pass has slipped from 2020 to 2022.

> Molycorp finally got the process clean enough that even the Sierra Club approved.

Being praised by a big NGO is in no way a marker of being "clean enough". Sierra Club (like Greenpeace) is well-known in ecologist circles to be eco-hostile and business-friendly.

I want to (and do) spend money to lessen our impact on the environment, and I want to do more, but I've met environmentalists who unironically wish that humanity would cease to exist. I am not interested in appeasing them.

I am doubly uninterested in environmental policy that encourages bad options over much-better-but-still-imperfect options.

Anti-nuclear environmentalists are directly responsible for our continued over-reliance on fossil fuels. Add anti-damming and anti-windfarm environmentalists into the mix, and the environmental movement is anything but.

Fossil fuel are terrible, but nuclear energy is arguably just as terrible. Also, nuclear energy (like most pretend-green energies) does not work without considerable amounts of fossil fuels, from extraction to actual energy production. If only that, building a nuclear facility is going to take a lot of fossil fuel to power the machines, and use a lot of concrete, which requires even more fossil fuel to produce and bring over.

Water and wind turbines are a little different. Their ecological impact depends on their size. The problem here is most countries insist on urbanization which concentrates energy production and therefore tends to centralize energy production away from usage, in big power stations.

Producing a little electricity with turbines has a quasi-null environmental impact, and is good for local usage for a small village. You'll find that people on the countryside are opposing industry's project not because they're new and ugly, but because they have actual concerns about the damage produced by such installations. How much resources does it take to build a wind turbine? How many tons of concrete does it take to anchor so many tons of steel? How does this considerable of concrete affect the local ecosystem?

People are not entirely stupid. They protest the nuclear industry and windfarms because they've seen the damage, and they understand these proposals do not bring required change. We need momentum to reduce energy/resources usage, not to produce ever more energy.

If you want to understand why many people from here (France) strongly oppose nuclear power, i recommend you do some reading on Areva's many failures (engineering-wise) and on Françafrique, the french neocolonial system which ensures uranium supplies.

You've demonstrated my point. You're pointing out some valid concerns. They're insignificant in comparison to the fossil fuel alternative. Environmentalists make perfect the enemy of good every time.

> They're insignificant in comparison to the fossil fuel alternative.

Weighing options is a good stance, but i'm pretty sure "insignificant" is not the word to describe problems caused by the nuclear industry. I don't want to sound judgy, but feel free to do some reading on the topic.

Also, you seem to dismiss my central point that nuclear doesn't work without considerable amounts of fossil fuel. Even if that were the case, what is it powering? Almost all these electric devices use lithium which also takes a lot of fossil fuel to extract and refine.

It would be interesting to read a full study on the requirements on fossil fuel to produce an electric car and feed it over its lifetime (accounting for the short life of electric batteries), depending on how energy is produced. I'm not entirely sure, but it may be just as bad as a combustion car. For hybrids, it's not even a debate as they get the environmental downsides of both worlds.

The nuclear industry often complains that their critics are incapable of division, and you sure seem to be proving them correct. In the USA, nuclear has 10x the install base of wind. If it were equally problematic, you should expect 10x the problems. The ratio is probably higher in France.

> nuclear doesn't work without considerable amounts of fossil fuel.

Ditto wind, ditto solar. They are considerably worse once you divide by the power they actually produce, as you should. With wind, you build a gigantic edifice of concrete and steel, and it powers a neighborhood, some of the time. With nuclear, you build a gigantic edifice of concrete and steel, and it powers multiple cities, all of the time.

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/03/wind-energys-carbon-footpr...

> It would be interesting to read a full study on the requirements on fossil fuel to produce an electric car

Dude, this is electric car 101 stuff. If you haven't found these studies, it's because you weren't looking.

Dams are pretty awful for the landscape.

> environmentalists who unironically wish that humanity would cease to exist

Sure these people exist, but they are a tiny minority. This is just a sick form of neo-malthusianism which fails to understand climate change as a symptom of industrial capitalism. Aiming to destroy humanity is the logical conclusion of analyzing our era as "anthropocene", not "capitalocene".

> I want to (and do) spend money to lessen our impact on the environment

Unfortunately, environmental damage cannot be fixed with money. We need to address the root problems causing the damage. Use less resources, build more durable items and reuse them as long as possible, and only employ somewhat-recyclable materials. Planned obsolescence is a crime against nature and humanity.

Beyond every day items, urbanization a great factor of environmental damage. Concrete is a huge problem and so-called "developed" countries keep on using more every year, but for what benefit to humanity? There's already millions of empty housing units, we don't need more buildings: we need social change.

> I am doubly uninterested in environmental policy that encourages bad options over much-better-but-still-imperfect options.

Agreed, it's interesting to explore these imperfect options. But government policies around the globe concerning climate are not "imperfect options", they're actively contributing to the problem by refusing to stop infinite growth, and trying to reconcile greed and common good through green capitalism, the green new deal and what not. Looking at the whole lifecycle of a solar panel (with the current technology), how could someone call them green. Same goes for electric cars.

If the industry used less materials, less-harmful materials, and recyclable materials, the situation would be less terrible than it is today. We are currently paying for them to poison us and destroy the land. In most countries rivers are now considered undrinkable according to safety standards. The system is broken.

> Then China cut the price on rare earths and Molycorp went bankrupt. Then China raised the price on rare earths.

Speaking of which, China loves projection.

They recently accused Australia of dumping products such as wine in order to bankrupt the local Chinese vineyards.

As you can imagine, the many independent Australia wine exporters were rather perplexed by this, because they are not centrally state-controlled. In fact, such price-fixing collusion would be illegal here.

Any time China accuses another country of some sort of misdeed, just assume they're thinking that everyone acts the same way they themselves do.

Any time China accuses another country of some sort of misdeed, just assume they're thinking that everyone acts the same way they themselves do.

You can fill in "pretty much any country" for "China" when it comes to trade disputes like this. The vast majority of between-nation dumping accusations seem to be unfounded or extremely thinly founded -- e.g. US accusing China of solar "dumping" when solar equipment manufacturers get state support by tax credits or low interest loans. US states pay to attract manufacturing too [1].

China can make t-shirts and tea cups cheaper than western producers. This has been known since before China joined the WTO. Objections to China also producing sophisticated goods cheaper seem to be mostly post-hoc regret. They weren't supposed to climb the value chain like that. Our countries were supposed to keep the sophisticated production while they just make trinkets!

I actually think that it is a problem that the western world has lost so much domestic productive capacity, but countering that with hollow accusations of dumping is dishonest. Countries should formally alter trade obligations to reinvigorate domestic production instead of fabricating rationalizations to match the text of old treaties.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/796344782/wisconsin-foxconn-a...

I'm not aware of a lithium mine in California. North Carolina was where most of the world's lithium was mined and refined.

Pretty much all mines for lithium closed in the US because it was simply cheaper to get from either South America brine and then Australian spodumene mining.

While the US stopped mining lithium however there is still a lot of lithium refinement in North Carolina. And more refinement capacity is already planned both there and other places in the US.

The main reason it is in China is because China made EV and the supply chain a priority.

However, most of the downstream refinement of the downstream for actual battery materials actually happens in Korea. So a lot of lithium is mined in West Australia, transported to China and then the Korea/Japan until it is shipped to Nevada where it turns into a battery.

In the next few years you should see the whole supply-chain from mining to battery in the US.

>However, most of the downstream refinement of the downstream for actual battery materials actually happens in Korea. So a lot of lithium is mined in West Australia, transported to China and then the Korea/Japan until it is shipped to Nevada where it turns into a battery.

Why does it need to stop off in China on its way to refineries in Korea/Japan/Nevada?

It leaves Australia as ore, and leaves China as enriched oxide/carbonate, but by no means of the purity needed for batteries.

This leaves Korea as highly purified final product, suitable for building cells.

Years ago I visited family in Chile, we mostly stayed in Santiago, but we took a side trip flying north to the Atacama Desert, which happens to be where the lithium mines are located. (Chile has the largest lithium reserves in the world, by far.) We were told most of the flights (737 sized aircraft) are usually full of miners on the flights. Most of the miners live in Santiago, fly up to Atacama to work for the week, then fly home at the end of the week. Even though we never saw the mines (we were sightseeing in other areas), after the trip, I got the impression that lithium mining in Chile is very big business, and if America wants a reliable source of lithium in the future, it should foster strong relations with Chile.

Im extremely Suspicious of this site.

The 'advisors' appear to consist largely of nuclear and traditional energy leadership. Given the carbon maths put forward by other hn members this seems like a hit piece on renewables...

Looking further into the site its designed to promote nuclear, gas and "clean" coal so I'm not surprised its got an axe to grind on batteries...

The carbon maths referenced by other hn users were very interesting, but they didn't debunk anything in the article. What specifically about the article did you find misleading? I thought it was an interesting and comprehensive introduction to the challenges and opportunities in the lithium supply chain.

I would also enjoy alternative resources that aren't produced by think tanks. But it seems unfair to denigrate think tanks out of hand.

I wonder what parallels we can draw with oil. The US resumed being a major oil producer in the last decade thanks to the fracking boom. I feel like we got a lot of propaganda about energy independence and not supporting brutal Middle East dictators (that our CIA set up). We got into a price war with the Saudis and Russia [1] and lost. With Covid killing demand this year, the US shale oil industry is on the verge of imploding.

I can't see the US competing long-term with cheaper rivals in any natural resource production. We're hamstrung because the main tools for sustaining such industries (state ownership, tariffs, massive subsidies) are politically unpalatable/anticapitalist. "Energy independence" was just a cover for private industry to make a quick buck. Shale firms have not produced a profit [2], workers are being laid off left and right, but owners and investors benefitted massively from the grift [3].

1. https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6... 2. https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-and-f... 3. https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom...

Thrilled to see Desmog cited on HN - they are doing yeoman’s work

> U.S. national security is weakened if the ability to build in the United States depends on materials and exchanges far outside U.S. control.

While true, this is odd. We’ve outsourced so much manufacturing that there’s a ton of different items we can’t build. We’re in the middle of a pandemic where we found we couldn’t make enough Ppe and there was literally a single American factory left for n95s.

Having the materials available is important but useless if we can’t do anything ourselves with them.

As someone part of the mining side of the supply chain ( hard rock) happy to answer any questions

Do you think it would be helpful if there were a platform for anyone involved in this industry to communicate with one another? With the ability to register as a mining organization, recycler, auto manufacturer, consumer, etc?

Asteroid mining.

We could be doing that, but Murica would rather spend it's time at the maul.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com