Hello,
It was a bit of a tossup as to which of our articles got the lede in today's newsletter, but in terms of environmental impact, product cost, and long term significance, a new EV car model announcement got second place, right behind Lee's "spodumene" lithium extraction coverage.
At a first dyslexic glance, it appears to be some kind of snarly Irish potato cartoon character, but it isn't...spud-o'mean, more correctly "spodumene", is a fairly common rock that contains some interesting chemical constituents in it. The boffins at MIT have managed to unlock the ore's constituents using a low-energy, room-temperature, "Home Depot", chemical process that you can read about in Lee's article.
I did do a bit of a back check after reading Lee's piece, because these kinds of announcements are usually a very narrow, non-scalable, methodology that pops out of academia, but this one's different, and not merely because MIT have spun out a commercialization effort.
How's it relevant to Automotive, you ask? Because it's a new way of unlocking lithium and aluminum, for starters (assuming none of you are building concrete cars, which is another useful compound that comes out of all this) and it promises cost parity with brine solar evaporation pools, now the most economical way to extract lithium from earth resources that are primarily in South America at $4,000-5,000 per lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) ton (you metric folks can add 10% to get the per tonne cost). The General Motors joint venture in Nevada/Oregon at the McDermitt Caldera is mining a volcanic clay, is estimated to cost around $7,000-9,000 per LCE ton, and requires a sulfuric acid process that means baking sulfur to get the acid and leaves behind a calcium/magnesium salts mess.
Because everything from the process is sold as useful feed stock, or is recycled, the MIT process leaves close to zero waste/tailings after all is said and done, AND it adds about 50% more available lithium to the low cost LCE bin, so it gets a double thumbs up from Mr Skeptical, here.
Lotsa other great coverage below, also, including Murray's writeup on the latest Chinese hotrod kicking the sleepy Detroit 3's butt in the EV space. Wake up - you're one cheeseburger away from being allowed to make EV's again, lol.
enjoy,
-andyT
