“Tesla has begun operating a new lithium refinery that the company claims is the largest and most advanced in the United States,” reports The Doomslayer.
Yahoo Finance explains:
This week, Tesla North America and Elon Musk announced that the largest and most advanced lithium refinery in the United States is now operational.
The Tesla Lithium Refinery just outside of Corpus Christi, Texas, is another step toward the U.S. goal of having domestic refined lithium resources to counter China’s market dominance…
The refinery converts spodumene ore directly into battery-grade lithium hydroxide, in a first-of-its-kind process in North America.
Tesla uses a new technology platform that allows a cleaner, simpler, and cheaper process to obtain battery-grade lithium from the raw material, spodumene ore, says Jason Bevan, Site Manager for Tesla’s Gulf Coast Lithium Refinery.
Tesla says it sustainably sources spodumene and brings it to site where it runs it through a series of conveyance systems, takes it through a kiln and a cooler. From there, the material is taken through an alkaline leech and additional purification steps, and then into crystallization to produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide…
The company’s new domestic lithium refinery is one of the first concrete steps for America to reduce dependence on refined lithium supply on China.
America has sought for years to reduce its dependence on China for critical minerals used in batteries and in military and automotive technologies. About two-thirds of the world’s lithium is processed in China.
Recently, the Trump Administration began investing in North American lithium producers and refiners, taking minority stakes in those companies using funds from the Departments of Defense and Energy. It hopes to expand domestic supplies of key minerals.
A new lithium mine near the border between Oregon and Nevada is expected to produce 40,000 tons of lithium a year soon.
Massive lithium production is also planned at the Great Salt Lake. “A startup in Utah has developed a more sustainable way to collect lithium. Using proprietary ceramic beads, Lilac Solutions can extract highly pure lithium while recycling nearly all the water it uses. Their technology, which they plan to license, could boost US lithium supplies without straining scarce water resources in the arid West,” reports The Doomslayer.
Lithium supplements may help with Alzheimer’s disease.
Lithium is needed for electric car batteries, and other things on the green agenda. Yet green activists have blocked lithium mining in other places in America like Maine. In the past, the world’s richest known lithium deposit was in the woods of western Maine, worth perhaps $1.5 billion, but Maine’s greens made it impossible to mine it, reported Time Magazine.
