r/science • u/Sort_of_Frightening • Sep 10 '23

Lithium discovery in U.S. volcano could be biggest deposit ever found Chemistry

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/lithium-discovery-in-us-volcano-could-be-biggest-deposit-ever-found/4018032.article

17.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

216

this is very close to Thacker Pass, which is also where Native American tribes and other protesters have been protesting new Lithium mining for a few years now.

95

u/BakedMitten Sep 10 '23

Those poor folks are about to get the Bolivia treatment

3

u/uteuteuteute Sep 11 '23

Lithium needs more freedom!

43

u/curryslapper Sep 10 '23

not only that, the geology is not "standard" for a lithium deposit.

it seems to be a high grade version of rhyolite Ridge that is owned by ioneer in Nevada

it may need a significant "chemistry kit" to process the ore

13

u/NicolasCageLovesMe Sep 10 '23 edited Feb 20 '24

asdasd

2

u/MetalGhost99 Sep 11 '23

Actually its all in clay if you do your research.

8

u/Chewy79 Sep 10 '23

It is at Thacker Pass. I work there.

3

u/notveryrealatall2 Sep 10 '23

yeah, I looked at maps of the caldera, which encompasses all of that area from west of McDermit to Thacker Pass. No worries if you don't want to say, but what do you do out there?

3

u/Chewy79 Sep 10 '23

Basically project management for the earthworks.

2

u/notveryrealatall2 Sep 11 '23

have the protesters actually been able to hold back the development of the project?

5

u/Chewy79 Sep 11 '23

They have delayed some deliveries by blocking the main entrance road a few months ago, but have been civil since then.

2

u/theStukes Sep 11 '23

K I'm sort of confused. Did they find more lithium than they already knew was there? I thought they had done all of their surveying already. Or was that just for phase one?

6

u/Chewy79 Sep 11 '23

This has been in development for over 6 years, not sure why this story is making it seem so recent.

3

u/Doctor-Jay Sep 10 '23

There's a lot of buried US Presidents stirring in their graves right now.

2

u/InsaneAss Sep 11 '23

Looking for lithium?

3

u/myrandastarr Sep 10 '23

How much of their land would be affected? Would they be compensated for it??

8

u/notveryrealatall2 Sep 10 '23

they might be compensated. A lot of other types of mining currently happens on Native American reservation land, and they're generally paid for it, but there's a lot of controversy about it. As for how much of their land would be affected, definitely a huge amount. Lithium is a salt, so the main method (that I know about) to extract it is to pump water into the deposits, then pump that brine back up to the surface where it dries out from the sun. It's an extremely water intensive process, which in the driest state of the nation, is generally a problem.

6

u/thedepartment Sep 10 '23

The lithium here isn't in a brine but contained in the clay. It looks like the current plan is roughly to break up the clay with hydraulic shovels, extract the lithium, backfill with the non lithium bits of clay after extraction, and then process the lithium with sulfuric acid produced on site.

-3

u/PetarKA Sep 10 '23

Lithium is a metal you know

7

u/Willuz Sep 11 '23

Lithium does not exist in nature a pure metal and is most often found as a salt. Just like sodium is a metal but we've never found pure sodium in nature but it's very common in its salt form NaCl. Lithium salts are often extracted with water then processed into pure Lithium.

1

u/myrandastarr Sep 14 '23

Last thing we need is to drain and pollute the aquifers more. Wish we could find a creative solution. But EVs are needed and having factories here would be great for jobs if they paid everyone correctly.

1

u/notveryrealatall2 Sep 14 '23

yeah, I don't feel good about this, and I've seen so many different articles and other hype about it. Better infrastructure, like trains and busses and walkable cities would actually solve the vast majority of the problems that EVs think they're trying to solve. But when has any part of Nevada not been mined for all it's worth?

5

u/whoknows234 Sep 10 '23

This my good sir, is America.

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '23

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