Environmental scam... Not enough lithium in the world to go "green"
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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.
The lithium in sea water is irrelevant since they really can't access much of it.
Sure we can. The ocean brings it to you on the currents. And as you lower the concentration, more lithium dissolves into the water to maintain equilibrium, from the 70% of the earth covered by ocean. Like I said, the downside is expense, not abundance. I just don't like people deceptively saying that the Earth doesn't have enough of something, because it definitely does. It just gets more expensive to extract.
Nothing about seawater extraction makes net-zero any less suicidal, of course.