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.