Lithium And Copper
In The Brave New Green Electric World, It's Lithium For Storage And Copper To Transmit
This is a little extension of that Tesla story a while back.
They want to open a lithium mine up on Rhyolite Ridge about halfway between Reno and Las Vegas in Nevada. A very rare buckwheat called Tiehm's buckwheat grows on that ridge. Some say it will go extinct with the proposed lithium mine and are fighting its development. Many others say unless we mine more lithium to make batteries to store electricity, we will keep burning oil which will make the rare buckwheat go extinct anyway.
Hmmm? Hypocrisy? Or what? I love watching these intra activist group wars. Wait for the whale lovers to take on the wind industry for killing whales.
It is astounding the amount of rock that has to be dug up and refined to give humanity a little bit of lithium or copper. It is not as much waste rock as a gold mine (300,000 to 1) but it is still a hell of a lot. The digging, crushing, and refining is done with diesel fuel (oil). Actually our food, our clothes, our medications, our everything in the room you are sitting in, is oil but don’t get me started.
There’s a copper mine at Chuquicamata, Chile. It is a hole of 15 square kilometers (about four Stanley Parks) and one kilometer deep. This has been created over the last hundred years of mining copper there. The Talabre tailings dam of this mine (all the arsenic ladened muck from refining) is about the 60 square kilometers (size of Manhattan).
Rich people don’t like holes and dams like this in their backyard. So these things tend to be where poor (or no) people live. I have often wondered what would happen if we found some extraordinarily rich deposit of dysprosium or neodymium (the rare minerals that make your cell phone vibrate) under the Canadian Parliament buildings. Would we dig it up? Well…no…we wouldn’t.
But as the old saying goes, never short human ingenuity. We will get more lithium and copper. Human ingenuity will take us deeper in the earth’s crust or/and take us to the ocean floor for the stuff we need/desire. Now this is gonna be REAL Greenpeace stuff.
Deeper
So the earth’s crust (the stuff above the mantle) is about 40 km deep or about 1% of the the earth’s mass. The deepest mine dug is maybe 4 km deep (yes, it’s a gold mine in South Africa). It gets pretty hot pretty quickly at about 30 degrees centigrade for each kilometer you dig down. Let’s just say humans have mined billions of tons of rock. Well the crust of the earth is billions of TRILLIONS of tons of rock, so yeah, many orders of magnitude more stuff. So we will mine it. Eventually. No question.
Deep Sea
The average depth of ocean is 10 km. The untouched ocean floor undoubtedly has mineral deposits that are much more concentrated as they have been untouched. Sorta like those ancient tales of picking up nuggets of gold. In fact the mining industry wants to “harvest” something called polymetallic nodules on the ocean floor with robots. There is a big brouhaha now developing over whether to allow mining on the ocean floor. Island nations like Palau (300 islands and maybe a couple hundred square miles of total land) have banned it. Norway has allowed it. So we will mine it. Eventually. No question.
Let the show begin.