Federal and state researchers said there might be five million to 19 million tons of lithium, more than enough to meet the world’s demand for the battery ingredient.
Federal and state researchers said there might be five million to 19 million tons of lithium, more than enough to meet the world’s demand for the battery ingredient.
I’d prefer to mine where there is less life. Southwest AR has a decent amount of wildlife. The area around the Salton Sea would probably be better.
I like it. Let’s mine the parts of the planet we’ve already severely fucked up.
It’s a better idea than continuing to fuck up more of it for the sake of mining.
Yeah. The lake only currently exists because the canal built to divert part of the Colorado River around there had a massive breach and flooded the dry lake bed. Farmers didn’t care because they still had the canal and were not really affected. Now it is all super salty farm runoff. Lithium brine pools certainly aren’t going to make things much worse considering the lake is pretty much a giant brine pool.
There’s a good documentary I saw about it on PBS years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TjGAWxL23c
I don’t expect commercial extraction to be limited to one area.