Guest post by Alec Rawls
Most lithium (the lightest metal) is now mined in the Andes (image above), but it looks like the U.S. has more than a little of it too:
[T]he Rock Springs Uplift’s 18 million tons of potential lithium reserves is equivalent to roughly 720 years of current global lithium production.
Nice.
University of Wyoming researchers found the lithium while studying the idea of storing carbon dioxide underground in the Rock Springs Uplift, a geologic formation in southwest Wyoming.
The lithium is dissolved in a brine solution. Pump the brine out, goes the UW thinking, and you’ve got a nice space to bury some CO2.
The sequestration part is a non-starter, given that the external value of atmospheric CO2 is unambiguously positive. If anything we should be subsidizing its release, not trying to contain it, but since taxpayers are stuck financing this politicized research it’s nice to see something positive come from it. We’ll take the lithium and the greens can have the hole.
Has there already been a breakthrough in lithium battery technology, combining super-capacitor charge and discharge rates with high density energy storage? That’s what some researchers at the University of Illinois are claiming on a micro scale, and they seem to be suggesting that their battery architecture could be scalable.
That would be revolutionary, even making intermittent energy sources and battery powered vehicles practical, so by all means let’s encourage the carbon-sequestration fantasists to look for more lithium formations that could theoretically be useful for storing CO2. Hey, its not impossible that we could want to one-day store some carbon dioxide. After all, it is valuable stuff, and those lithium mines sound like an excellent place to put it. Just got to get the lithium out first.
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Lithium is an anti-depressant (e.g. Nirvana, Evanescence) so this find will be good news for CAGW supporters despondant at the lack of global warming.
There is a natural depository for CO2, fossil fuels and limestone.
Most Greens are not only aethist but also concerned about using valuable land (for biomass?) as burial sites. One use would be to off free cremation services and ash sequesteration. Since there’s little need for haste, all those near useless windmills/solar panels could be used to run the crematorium. A perfect solution. Not only is no CO2 used but their own carbon and scrubbed emissions would be forever buried until they turnedd into coal, or oil or natural gas. Just imagine if they all did this? Oh, and we, unlike many Greens, would wait until they died from natual causes.
This could moderate an awful lot of bi-polar disorder!
E.M. Smith’s Maxim comes to life. Take that Bolivia.
Pete Olson says:
May 2, 2013 at 6:40 pm
“Hey, we’ll pump out the oil, and replace it with carbon dioxide…!”
=========
the oil industry has been doing this for years. the only difference is now they want to get paid for it. same with carbon taxes. they push up the price of coal much more than oil, again helping the oil industry.
make no mistake, the oil industry stands to gain most from the push to “green”. by eliminating competition for coal in the US via EPA regulations, they know well all that is left is gas or oil.
The reason “climate scientists” are so quick to claim skeptics are in the pay of “big oil” is to deflect attention from the truth of the matter. Maurice Strong was a Canadian Oil Man that got the ball rolling, Enron dreamed up the plan, and the oil companies and bankers are providing the money to push the press, politicians and scientists in the right direction. The aim is quite simple, to take money from poor people and give rich people, in the name of saving the planet.
willybamboo says:
May 2, 2013 at 7:33 pm
“Eric Worrall is right. You don’t want to build a battery so big it has the energy equivalent of 10 kilotons of TNT. Lets make lots of smaller batteries with the lithium. The wind blows all the time in Rock Springs, so here is my suggestion: First mine the lithium; dig a big hole. Then set up wind mills to compress air inside the giant, empty, lithium mine. Use the compressed air to generate electricity on a schedule rather than just when the wind happens to blow – peaking power. The Jim Bridger generating station is right there at Rock Springs. It’s a ten megawatt behemoth and it has a tremendous transmission grid interconnected with six western states. Use the lithium to make many small batteries, use the mine to store compressed air, use the compressed air to generate scheduled electricity on demand, use the pre-existing network of transmission lines to transmit the power.”
You are off by two orders of magnitude, Jim Bridger is (4) ~500 MW units, a total of 2.1 GW.
H.R. says:
May 2, 2013 at 5:54 pm
“Idle musings:
…
It would be ironic if it were a ferrous ore deposit but since it’s lithium ore, than what would it be?”
Lithargic? Lethargic?
It will be rockin’ if we’re not too petrified to exploit it.
The Rock Springs uplift is a geologic feature, a giant forland structure. If you have Google Earth, you can easily view the anticline by going to Rock Springs, WY, then zoom out a lot. The brine is coming from the Madison formation, a very porous limestone that covers much of Wyoming and Montana. This formation forms many of the large white cliffs in Wyoming and was the cause of the deaths in Madison Canyon, MT during the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake. For a more accurate description of the lithium discovery see:
http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2013/04/uw-researchers-lithium-discovery-could-boost-co2-storage-prospects.html
The article also states that they are getting brine from the Weber/Tensleep formations. These formations are porous sandstones that were once sand dunes.
Marty
Burying CO2 in the ground… tsk, tsk, tsk.
We cannot hide our Carbonshame from Gaia by burying our Carbonshame inside Gaia.
Lithium is extracted from ores by adding CO2:
Li2CO3 + CO2 + H2O → 2 LiHCO3
The product, lithium bicarbonate LiHCO3, is much more soluble than the simple carbonate Li2CO3.
Adding CO2 to a brine permeating a lithium-rich salt matrix will dissolve the lithium into the brine by forming the bicarbonate, which is about 10x more soluble than the carbonate.
The brine can then be pumped out and depressurized to recover FAR more lithium than the brine originally bore.
Lithium is the key ingredient in MANY ‘green’ (read “lightweight rechargeable”) batteries.
Of course, the depressurization gives you all your CO2 back. 😉
tadchem says:
May 3, 2013 at 11:36 am
Lithium is extracted from ores by adding CO2:
Li2CO3 + CO2 + H2O → 2 LiHCO3
The product, lithium bicarbonate LiHCO3, is much more soluble than the simple carbonate Li2CO3.
Adding CO2 to a brine permeating a lithium-rich salt matrix will dissolve the lithium into the brine by forming the bicarbonate, which is about 10x more soluble than the carbonate.
The brine can then be pumped out and depressurized to recover FAR more lithium than the brine originally bore.
Lithium is the key ingredient in MANY ‘green’ (read “lightweight rechargeable”) batteries.
Of course, the depressurization gives you all your CO2 back. 😉
That would be efficient, it would only work if the Lithium Carbonate dissolved in the brine is in contact with the solid Lithium matrix.
If you think the wind blows in Wyoming, you should see (or better, feel) the wind in the Atacama Desert of Chile where much of the lithium comes from. Summer afternoon winds frequently reach and maintain 100 kph across those flats. This helps the evaporation which concentrates the brines, but the waves on the concentration ponds are a problem.
But the chemical companies operating there chose to use electricity from the national grid to power their pumps to lift the brine, not windmills.
Steve F – is that 2.1 GW annual production capacity for Jim Bridger? I read something that total annual US solar output is under 2 GW.
Senores, it’s a salt. Have they even looked in Utah and Nevada in the enormous evaporate basins of Lake Bonneville? Or is it an exclusive residue of the Mesozoic evaporate basins of Wyoming?