An almost inexhaustible reserve of lithium discovered in Canada
https://www.earth.com/news/an-almost-inexhaustible-reserve-of-lithium-discovered-in-canada/Open linkView original on lemmy.ca410
Comments113https://www.earth.com/news/an-almost-inexhaustible-reserve-of-lithium-discovered-in-canada/Open linkView original on lemmy.ca
uh oh
"It'll be our beautiful 51st state!"
🎃
More like the US will be bought by Canada.
I too like to help people out but I don't know if we'll survive absorbing Florida and Texas while remaining a federal democracy. We already have Alberta and it's difficult. 😅
(AB canucks, this is a joke. Please don't get mad at me. If you still do, I apologize.)
Just take the northeast (NY, VT, CT, MA, NH, RI, ME), and the west coast. The rest won't complain.
Please do, I would rather be Canadian these days.
A few more states would be happy to join I'd say.
The PNW would complain.
Washington and Oregon at least are part of the West Coast, and I don't know how much Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas would complain. Outside of urban areas the country seems to be pretty red regardless of where you go, and those states are definitely not known for being very urban.
If Canada got rid of FPTP, proportional representation and ranked voting across all its provinces (Texas and Florida would become provinces) and federation (get rid of the monarchy), Florida and Texas would be much less of an issue.
For sure. That said PR isn't a panacea. It solves a legitimate issue but it doesn't solve the orthogonal and serious problem of democracy's tendency to represent large capital.
Ugh. Try living here!
As a Texan, I find your joke insulting. Primarily because it's typed instead of being a video and I have no clue what it says.
Savage..
One can only hope. Just think of it as a renovation project.
Is Canada that big on charities? I know they’re well known as being pleasant and kind, but are they so pleasant and kind that they’d accept a catastrophically bankrupt welfare country as their own?
There no expected ROI on America for decades!
They can just own it like a colony. All the control, none of the financial responsibility.
Isn't that already allocated to Greenland? So 52nd it is!
I bet their president can't name 9 states. This isn't even a jke
For sure. If the US goes the length of annexing Canada or part thereof without the consent of most Canadians, then there's little point conceding electoral power to the undoubtedly indignant population.
We need a government with the balls to nationalize this shit, and charge for every single gram that's being extracted. And do the same with every other natural resource, including oil.
Oooooh, best we can do is let corporations rape and pillage the land, and make citizens pay for the whole operation through taxes, sorry.
Don't forget about the cleanup after they're gone.
Right right right, thank god the peons will pay for that too! Can't hold anyone accountable now, can we?
They won't leave. It's inexhaustible. Best learn to live with the pollution!
It’s trickle out economics.
Trickle down economics, because they're pissing on you.
Best we can do is sell it all for 2% of its worth
"Inexhaustible"
Humans: hold my beer
Great! Let’s sell this off to multinationals ASAP so we can accelerate pillaging the land without consultation, outsource the jobs and ensure the fewest Canadians benefit from the windfall.
Ah! Someone who's familiar with Alberta oil & gas extraction.
…AND BC lumber, AND Ontario steel, AND maritime fish, AND everybodies’ water and minerals, etcetc
I call it “outsourcing profits”.
Nooo imma pretend I didn’t read this so Canada can stay as awesome as I thought it was a minute ago
BC lumber? That means BC's old growth forests, doesn't it?
So extract all the value and give it to rich ppl while leaving everyone else to clean up the mess left behind?
This isn’t gold. The value comes from the extraction part. That’s the really expensive and dirty part. It’s like salt in the ocean: insanely abundant but prohibitively expensive to extract.
The value comes from the material extracted being sold for profit in some way.
That’s a perfect description of Carney’s MO.
You're showing your bias. That was Canada's position well before Carney was on the scene.
True about that being Canada’s MO.
Weird I don't remember Carney being PM for the last 50 plus years. Its Canadas MO doesn't matter who is in charge.
Why not criticize them all??
USA:
It's funny cause it's true. Trump wants to invade Greenland and Canada; it's not just because he's a piece of shit dictator. He's after resources for his cronies.
Wouldn't wonder if the US discovers tomorrow that Canada is run by a drug cartel
“Almost inexhaustible”
Humanity: Hold my beer.
Incoming reclassification of maple syrup as a WMD.
“This ‘syrup’ comprises a clear and present danger to the United States of America. Operation ‘Freedom Fries’ has been authorised!”
I know there's been lots of headlines in the past like OMG there's not enough lithium! It's never been true.
It's one of the most abundant elements out there, it's everywhere. It was always more about what reserves we knew about, but when what we knew about wasn't going to be enough, people go looking, and it's abundant.
Also the more uses there are for it, the more profitable it is to extract from these methods and the better we get at it, the cheaper it is to extract, which further opens up even more options.
I don't actually remember any articles that claimed there were lithium shortages in that there isn't enough on the planet, but rather that China is the only country with a working supply chain.
I mean, it's not. Either in the crust or the universe - stellar nucleosynthesis skips straight to carbon.
Your point still stands, though, since abundance is only one of the factors that goes into how easy something is to recover.
It's 31st in the crust, there's more than Lead.
Then it's all over the world in other areas in higher concentrations like in brines (the easiest way for us to get it) or clays, and there's over 200 billion tons of it in the ocean. Granted the ocean stuff would take some figuring out how to get, but it's a ridiculous amount.
Whenever we go looking for it, we keep finding vast reserves of it.
Such as this just this month: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-5-trillion-lithium-deposit-114805186.html?guccounter=1
Edit: for the sea water stuff, capturing it as a side product of desalination or a next step in desalination might be a starting way to begin extracting it without massively increasing costs as some of the costs will already be part of desalination, which could help bring desalination costs down via another revenue stream.
Wow, that's a better abundance than I thought - I guess it really concentrates here - although still not that impressive. The major natural source of it and it's friends beryllium and boron is literally the nature particle accelerators out there in the cosmos, and the collisions they create, for example in our upper atmosphere.
The rest goes under "things other than abundance", which I did mention. Bismuth is a cheap element because it concentrates itself in veins and has limited applications, despite being comparably rare to silver. At the other end titanium is more common than all forms of carbon put together but is an absolute PITA to concentrate into metal and then manufacture into products.
I suppose it's a bit like diamonds, which are actually really abundant, just not always very accessible.
Lithium is quite rare. Essentially all the lithium that exists was created at the big bang, and since then the total supply has been diminishing with each generation of stars - they fuse lithium into heavier elements.
There's less lithium all the time
But still lots
America: “That’s ours! We called it!”
Well take it by any force needed, brother. Citation: iraq 1 and Iraq 2
And we'll just keep shipping it out of the country for pennies for other countries to make value added products.
You want some of the impacts of making those value added products in your back yard?
A key reason why Canada ships its oil, lumber, and minerals elsewhere for processing is because there is a human cost to processing these things that moat people don't want to pay.
Also, where clean processing is possible it makes processed materials cost-prohibitive when you can just buy the stuff from jurisdictions where health and environmental laws are lax or non-existent and you can process however you like.
Well, tax the dirty processors and eliminate them from the supply chain, you might suggest! That's not easier either, see eliminating forced labour from the supply chain as an example.
I'm not saying nothing should or could be done about Canada's extraction-only economy, just that it isn't as easy it may appear at first glance.
Well, we've figured it on things like canola (crush for oil), peas (fractionation plants), lumber (sawmills) and cattle (packing plants). Those have pretty much been in spite of ourselves, not because, as they've flourished when we've had trade wars with the US/China (or BSE as the case may be).
We just need a nice crippling tariff on raw lithium and we'll invest in making batteries. Maybe an export tariff for anything that heads to the US, and funnel that to startup some competition to CATL. The amount of human labor a LFP plant uses is pretty minimal. It would give us all those high-tech retraining positions I keep hearing about we're going to get any day now.
The problem is greed, ad infinitum.
Are you folks interested in some freedom!?
Asking for your neighbors to the south.
/s, just in case it wasn't obvious.
Finally, good news for people with bipolar!
Maybe Alzheimer's as well. There is new research on lithium that shows promise for that.
Hooray!... Fuck!
Don't tell trump
He's already sniffin'. He can smell it with his greed.
This is just an ad for a satellite exploration company. It is not even that big a deal.
From the article, “That potential would place Cisco among the largest hard-rock lithium deposits now being tracked in the James Bay region.”
So, not even the biggest in the area.
Also, Sodium Ion is about to make Lithium much less of a big deal.
Still great economically but hardly as world changing as the headline makes out.
This is the part that I find interesting:
The federal and Ontario governments have said repeatedly that they want to build a lithium battery industry. I worry we are arriving too late now that Sodium Ion is upon us but I am probably being too pessimistic.
None of that depends on this deposit specifically though. Canada already has lots of Lithium reserves. Much of it is in the same district as this. Of course this could end up being the biggest and truly be “the anchor” I suppose.
2nd best time is now. Always.
Even if sodium takes off, lithium still has a higher energy density. Lots of uses will want that, even if it's more expensive and dangerous.
Sodium Ion is great diversity source for batteries, but they are inferior in many respects.
Other than "energy density" they're better in every way imo. Safer, cheaper, more sustainable, wider operating temp range, big fan
Energy density is an important one, but there is also high voltage sag, and overstated capacity if you need a high draw at lower remaining voltage.
inb4 US bombs Canada for some lame excuse of a reason
And it belongs to the people of Canada. Right?
This shit really bothers me.
Wow that's great for the people.
Well yes, 3 of them
Depends where it is. Where it is in this case, it seems more likely than not it's on Crown land, so yes, until a producer buys it from us.
You mean...the 51st state of 'Merica?
Who tf is downvoting? Is sarcasm that hard to figure out? Use your context clues, this Lemmy, without a single MAGAt in sight to be saying this in earnest. 🙄
what a godawful website
thanks for the blocklist addition
Why not just do uBlock instead of individual blocklists?
I also don't want to even go to sites that disrespect their users like this
I don't want to give them any traffic at all
yeah it looks fine once I turned ad blocking back on
Not backing up the site, but are you running an Adblock? I had no ads when I opened it.
I still had ad block off when I opened it initially
Weird. I have uBlock and it was fine.
People of canada should get dividents from profit
That's way less impressive than the headline makes it seem.
Congrats on being the only person that apparently read the article before commenting.
Thanks. Honestly I was just excited to nerd out about geology, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised this website I've never seen before does clickbait.
Sounds like a dictatorship that needs McLiberated™
Time to invade. After all what yours is ours. I wish I was joking.
We know and that’s why we’re getting a citizen army of 300,000 and we’ll party like it’s 1812 part two electric boogaloo.
And throw
teacoffee barrels into the sea. That'll show them!Wasn't the last time a Canadian company discovered an "inexhaustable supply" of some mineral it was a gold scam that was one of the biggest mining industry scams in history that scammed people out of their pensions?
Please, I would like to see chain-of-custody third party samples before jumping to conclusions.
I am sure you are thinking of BreX.
Other than Canadian investors and mining as a general theme, I cannot think of a single reason to link the two stories.
Also, BreX never claimed “inexhaustible” anything and was certainly not “the last time” for anything either.
Canada has more mining companies and mining investment than any country in the world. These kinds of discoveries are common-place. There have been many, many discoveries and success stories in the decades since BreX.
And this is just another Lithium deposit. Not the biggest in the world and probably not even the biggest in the James Bay district.
BreX deposit was in Indonesia.
The article itself has many caveats. I wouldn't pay too much attention to an attention-grabbing headline.
This isn’t the fascist states of america.
That's right, we got that sweet cheap desperate-educated-foreigner-being-paid-peanuts labour instead
Yet. :(
We have significant lithium mines in Australia, we produce the most lithium in the world presently. Zero child or slave labour.
We only do that with agricultural workers and Tim Horton's restaurants.
Canada is a first world country, so no.
Now do silver
I wonder if Elon will call for couping Canada to gain access to it.
Tragically, he is a citizen. He can just walk in and do whatever the hell he wants.
Tosh will be happy
I hope this doesn't ruin peoples lifes. And if it affects anyone in Canada, I hope their revisit those laws on environmental pollution. There's a reason why all the mining companies are in that country. Ecocide in third world countries is driven by that "blind spot" in their laws and I'm certain the majority of canadians don't have the least idea of their complicity.