Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "The White Gold Rush - How one US startup is changing the lithium extraction game!" video.

  1. The Tesla factory receives spodumene (LiAlSi2O6), i.e. a mineral with a very high lithium content from the port of Corpus Christi and chemically removes the lithium, leaving aluminum silicates as a by-product. Tesla claims to do this without needing a large amount of acid (which probably just means that the acid is recycled in a closed chemical process). What these guys are talking about is about enriching water soluble lithium brines at the mining site. I suspect that to Tesla what matters is the availability of lithium rather than the total cost of production. They can absorb prices above the market price because they are making vehicles with very high margins. What they can not tolerate is to not have enough lithium in the market to keep making as many vehicles as they can sell. Supply risk management is a totally different goal than cost optimization, so the economics is potentially very different for Tesla. There may also be other reasons like quality control... if their process produces either "better" lithium than what they can buy or "good enough" lithium at a lower cost, then that's a winning strategy as well. Tesla did describe their chemistry in a video, by the way. The main advantage seems to be that they don't have to buy expensive sulfuric acid and they don't end up with byproducts that are expensive to dispose. If I understand this correctly, this is like 19th century inorganic chemistry. You could do this at home with a chemistry kit and maybe a somewhat higher temperature burner. It's a different matter doing it at large scale, of course, but in principle this is, as far as chemical factories go, kindergarten level.
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  2. I have some Ye'Olde Nevada Silver and Gold Mining Company stocks. I bought them in 1874 and they must be wort their paper weight in bullshit by now. ;-)
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  3. The world makes something like 100 million cars a year. Tesla makes less than 1% of that. At max they might be making 10% of all the cars in the world. That would make them a second Toyota. That's kind of a realistic limit. And this ain't a Tesla. This is, literally, a pipe dream. So, yeah, invest all of your money in it... what can go wrong? ;-)
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  4. Tesla has its own process that starts with rocky material that has 6% lithium content... not 0.1%.
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  5. It's not the Salton Sea but the geothermal locations in that area. That's where one could pump lithium containing brines, which is all nice and good... but if you are doing it at a cost above world market prices then all you got is a giant money burner.
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  6. Why would the Chinese adopt a process that's too expensive if they can do it dirty on the cheap?
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  7.  @1KentKent  That's where rule #1 kicks in... if nobody else is doing it, then there is usually a reason for that. ;-)
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  8. A cubic meter is 1000 liters. 1000ppm is some rally A+ brine, though, if I understand this correctly. Commercial brines can be 100ppm or something. I might be wrong.
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  9. Rule #1... if everybody knows about it (and this is chemistry that has been known for a very long time and is in use in many applications) and nobody is doing it, then it's not cost efficient.
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