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Comment by peytoncasper | Hacker News Reader

How is this different from oil?

The vast majority of new deposits are leveraging different technology to enrich yields or extract it from challenging environments. Seems like a common problem for resource extraction that gets solved with time and investment.

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One of the biggest differences is that oil is all _primarily_ the same stuff and the difficulty is pulling out impurities. This means it can be quite cost effective to ship it where it needs to go to be processed. Crude oil is considered sour for example if it contains 1-2% sulfur. Ores on the other hand are usually mostly not the actual mineral you're looking for, and you're lucky if you're hitting double digit percentage concentrations, Lithium being "high concentration" if you're reaching 6%. This means that you ideally need to be doing most of (and usually all) of the processing at or very near the mine. One of the only minerals we regularly ship raw ore of is iron, since it tends to be in relatively high concentrations. Some Lithium mines might ship some ore but this is usually only done as an initial source of revenue while the processing is being built.

The end result of this is that it's harder to take advantage of economies of scale where you can have a handful of processing facilities working on a very specific type of ore.

So all of that Australian lithium being shipped off to China, is it being mostly processed in Australia first, or is most of the processing done in China, or something half half?

The main reason America develops great oil tech and not lithium tech vs China is that the USA has lots of oil, while China doesn’t.

A lot of it is sent as partially processed ore, but two major reasons for that are: 1) a lot of these mines are very new and 2) Australia in particular is _very bad_ at secondary industries. We have a long history of just sending our minerals and raw food ingredients overseas to be processed and are lacking in expertise.

Here is a recent article about this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/business/australia-lithiu...

Its not that different from oil. Oil has the same different from different sources requiring different refining. But oil is an industry is about 100-1000x bigger. Lithium until just a few years ago was a absolutely tiny industry.

So in oil its very worth it to build the right refining capacity for large resources and there are tons and tons of experienced people to do those things.

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