What an odd headline. Was that mine lost and they stumbled upon it again? Or did they discover new deposits?
I don’t see what you mean.
A “mine” would suggest there is already infrastructure.
If you just found some new place with a ton of lithium, it’s not a mine until you actually build all the stuff around it to get it out of the ground.
You can’t “find” a mine, unless you already built one, and then forgot it existed.
This is not very clear, it says a 1 million ton mine has been discovered, but then says that Chinese lithium deposits are scattered all around and they’re still in early exploratory stages.
Is this an estimate of what they could have if the pool together a bunch of estimated mines in Sichuan?
IIRC it’s because they know that an aggregate area contains 1 million tons, but that it’s geographically distributed into smaller clusters… If that makes sense.
It’s more challenging to extract, but it’s there.
Okay, thanks.
What are the odds China actually extracts from it? Seems like lithium batteries are soon going to become a dead tech with the rise of sodium-ion batteries.
Lithium is going to be used in most batteries for many many years at least
I refer you to the coal mines being built in Australia.
Lithium is still going to be king in small batteries, i.e. for appliances, laptops, phones, toys etc and those uses are only growing and won’t be replaced by Sodium-Ion unless we see even more breakthroughs there and none in Lithium-Ion.
Sodium ion sounds like a very promising battery tech for a lot of things due to sodium’s abundance and ease of access, but it’s less energy dense than lithium so I still see lithium battery tech being king in most applications where battery size and weight matter - portable electronics and EVs mostly. Sodium ion tech sounds best suited for grid-scale energy storage, home backup/solar batteries, and other such applications where cost is more important than size or weight.
Seems like lithium batteries are soon going to become a dead tech with the rise of sodium-ion batteries.
They are? As I understand it, sodium-ion batteries have lower energy density and smaller lifespan. They will probably fully replace lead-acid batteries and will be used as substitute for lithium batteries in vehicles and others similar scenarios due to their hazardous nature.
There are so many applications for lithium ion batteries right now though, even if we had production-ready commercial and personal sodium batteries, it would take years to replace all of the production lines that lithium batteries are going into right now.
So if it’s a real mine, I expect they’d want to extract, refine and export as much as possible in the 10 to 20 years lithium batteries will still be viable.
