> just transporting completed battery cells from South Korea to Michigan adds a 4.1 kg CO2e/kWh footprint<p>Some Googling says my phone has a storage capacity of 2800mAh, at 3.8V, or 10.64 Wh. Scaling the footprint, that's 43 grams CO₂e, for a device I replace every several years? A quick Google says a car is 411 grams CO₂ … <i>per mile</i>. The phone seems insignificant?<p>The EV usage is probably worse, though it'd be nice if the article didn't suddenly switch to pounds. Presuming the 10k phones number is accurate, we're up to 430kg. But that's 1046 miles of travel for a normal car. If it can make that up in terms of cleaner energy usage over the life of the battery, that seems better than the current state?
Read this with a huge grain of salt. Clearpath is a conservative lobbying organization. In the end they use the article to sell several bills (most of them sponsored by republicans) even if some of the bills it touts (the ones by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) have nothing to do with lithium but are about rare earth metals instead.
There was also an active mine in CA (I forget the name), but it closed down a few years ago... not sure why. I'm guessing it's the fact that lithium requires many harsh chemicals to extract and is a very 'dirty' process. Probably why China does most of the processing -- they're far more willing to pollute their own environment than most countries currently. For independence to occur, we either need to accept the environmental wreckage, or find a better way to contain it and make it 'cleaner'.
Years ago I visited family in Chile, we mostly stayed in Santiago, but we took a side trip flying north to the Atacama Desert, which happens to be where the lithium mines are located. (Chile has the largest lithium reserves in the world, by far.) We were told most of the flights (737 sized aircraft) are usually full of miners on the flights. Most of the miners live in Santiago, fly up to Atacama to work for the week, then fly home at the end of the week. Even though we never saw the mines (we were sightseeing in other areas), after the trip, I got the impression that lithium mining in Chile is very big business, and if America wants a reliable source of lithium in the future, it should foster strong relations with Chile.
Im extremely Suspicious of this site.<p>The 'advisors' appear to consist largely of nuclear and traditional energy leadership. Given the carbon maths put forward by other hn members this seems like a hit piece on renewables...<p>Looking further into the site its designed to promote nuclear, gas and "clean" coal so I'm not surprised its got an axe to grind on batteries...
I wonder what parallels we can draw with oil. The US resumed being a major oil producer in the last decade thanks to the fracking boom. I feel like we got a lot of propaganda about energy independence and not supporting brutal Middle East dictators (that our CIA set up). We got into a price war with the Saudis and Russia [1] and lost. With Covid killing demand this year, the US shale oil industry is on the verge of imploding.<p>I can't see the US competing long-term with cheaper rivals in any natural resource production. We're hamstrung because the main tools for sustaining such industries (state ownership, tariffs, massive subsidies) are politically unpalatable/anticapitalist. "Energy independence" was just a cover for private industry to make a quick buck. Shale firms have not produced a profit [2], workers are being laid off left and right, but owners and investors benefitted massively from the grift [3].<p>1. <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6...</a>
2. <a href="https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-and-fall-of-shale-oil/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-and-f...</a>
3. <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom-fraud-alta-mesa-enron" rel="nofollow">https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom...</a>
> U.S. national security is weakened if the ability to build in the United States depends on materials and exchanges far outside U.S. control.<p>While true, this is odd. We’ve outsourced so much manufacturing that there’s a ton of different items we can’t build. We’re in the middle of a pandemic where we found we couldn’t make enough Ppe and there was literally a single American factory left for n95s.<p>Having the materials available is important but useless if we can’t do anything ourselves with them.