My understanding (bowing to ChatGPT) is that you can get 1 pound of iron from <2 pounds of iron ore. But to get 1 pound of lithium, you need around 500 pounds of lithium ore.

So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.

▲ epistasis 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Interesting, but tailings never seem to enter much into environmental analyses that I have seen, unless you count coal ash as "tailings" which would be a pretty broad interpretation of the idea.

Lithium is also extracted via brine, as opposed to hard rock. Most of the environmental reporting has been on the brine approaches, which currently are in high elevations of South American mountains, and the problem appears to be mostly the use of land and taking that land out of the ecosystem for economic use as drying pools. But the same problem occurs with mining, too!

▲ trhway 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.

means recycling of lithium batteries will be a thriving business. (i.e. big difference from recycling of say tires or plastic bottles, more like, pretty successful, recycling of aluminum, and even better than it)

▲

numpad0 5 days ago | parent [-]

Li-ion batteries are older than you think. First volume production of NMC cells happened 1991. LFP in 1997. Google was founded 1998.

No one made fortune in Li-ion recycling in all those years. Li-ion cells remained disposable.

	▲	adrianN 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Lithium cells are still disposable (eg vapes). The difference is that a single EV contains hundreds of kilograms are we are not used to just chucking old cars in the gutter.
	▲	HeadsUpHigh 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The volume of batteries wasn't there, neither did we really have the network to sell scrap batteries like we do with used cars.

▲ kragen 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You shouldn't post AI slop here. Until a few years ago, no lithium was mined from ore. Now roughly half of it is, mostly spodumene, LiAl(SiO3)2, which you can easily calculate (with units(1)) is 3.7% lithium, 18 times higher than the 0.2% you're claiming. 50 pounds of lithium thus comes, on average, from 25 pounds of brine-derived lithium and 670 pounds of spodumene.

▲ adrian_b 5 days ago | parent [-]

While the rest of what you say is right, you will not find anywhere on Earth a mine with compact spodumene.

Spodumene is dispersed among other minerals into rocks and it only forms a few percent at most of those rocks, if not only fractions of a percent.

The rocks must be crushed and spodumene must be separated from the other much more abundant minerals, by flotation or similar mineral concentration techniques, before going further to chemical processing.

So your 670 pounds must be multiplied by a factor like 100, varying from mine to mine.

Some multiplication factor must also be used for the iron ore, which is also mixed with undesirable silicates, but iron oxide may reach up to a few tens of percent of the rock, so the multiplication factor is much smaller.

▲ kragen 5 days ago | parent [-]

Hmm, I thought the Australian deposits were mostly spodumene. I appreciate the correction, although it's embarrassing; I'd rather be embarrassed than wrong.

▲ nandomrumber 4 days ago | parent [-]

At the mine's current size, it can fulfil a third of the worldwide demand for lithium spodumene concentrate,[1] which is used to produce lithium hydroxide, a component of lithium-ion batteries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbushes_mine

	▲	kragen 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Further down on the page, it says: > The mine sets a chemical-grade specifications benchmark of 6.0% Li2O minimum and 0.8% Fe2O3 maximum. Spodumene is 0% iron. How much lithium does it contain on a Li2O basis? 8%, I think: `You have: lithium + aluminum + 2(silicon + 3 oxygen) You want: Definition: 186.089 You have: (2 lithium + oxygen) / 2 _ You want: % * 8.0282762 / 0.12455974` That suggests that the rock (pegmatite?) being mined there is about 75% spodumene. Is it possible that this is a misinterpretation, perhaps describing a standard for the output of the froth flotation process or similar, and the rock being dug up really is just a few percent spodumene? No, as it turns out. The paper linked just before that says that none of the rock is quite that lithium-rich https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/segweb/economicgeology/arti...: > The lithium ore zones comprise mainly spodumene, apatite, and quartz, with some ore zones returning upward of 5 percent Li2O. OTOH, that paper is from 01995, so maybe there are new findings since 30 years ago. It says the reserves there were 4% Li2O. Later in the paper, it explains: > The hanging-wall lithium zone in the main pegmatite is generally richer (up to 5% Li2O, equivalent to 60–80% spodumene) than the footwall lithium zone That seems to contradict adrian_b's strong statement: > Spodumene is dispersed among other minerals into rocks and it only forms a few percent at most of those rocks, if not only fractions of a percent. It could still be true at other mines.