Environmental scam... Not enough lithium in the world to go "green"
(notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (30)
sorted by:
There’s definitely enough lithium-200 billion tons of it, dissolved in seawater. Far less cobalt, though.
Everything I find says about 1000 metric tons.
Really? The source I found had cobalt at 507 million tonnes. Chart on second page, note that totals given are in millions of tonnes: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.est.5b00463?src=getftr
I was referring to lithium.
But extracting it from sea water seems like its own environmental disaster.
Also... Sauce from an environmental org is suss.
Oh yeah, the greens will hate it, just like they hate anything that actually works. But if you're worried about the source, you can just multiply the lithium concentration in seawater by the total volume of seawater. I guarantee you'll get more than 1000 tonnes, lol.
The actual downside of seawater extraction of any mineral is the significant energy cost. Mining land deposits is cheaper, until we mine them out.