I can definitely clarify that further, but to restate it, there are new sources and new technologies that can allow us to meet the requirements for the transition.
For example, the Salton Sea contains enough lithium dissolved in brines underground to provide lithium to transition 100% of the USA car and truck fleet to electric (18 million metric tons of lithium carbonate = 375 million car batteries).
And they are able to tap this "unconventional resource" in a way that doesn't require the massive pools of evaporating waters like in the Atacama desert using a technology called "direct lithium extraction (DLE).". And guess what, they can all so it while generated geothermal heat :) That is a better process, that has positive co-products.
There is no shortage of lithium... and rare earths aren't rare, just dirty to process. Copper and graphite are the few transition resources that might be in a shortage, but when prices go up, so too does innovation, and we are seeing that with the production of synthetic graphite.
With nickel, the current global production is 3 million tonnes per annum (MTPA). Our minerals are 0.333% nickel, which is well below that ~1.3% that is normally required to make economic sense to extract from. Our mineral source has never been used for nickel to date (making it unconventional).
For our olivine minerals around 1 tonne has to be weathered to remove 1 tonne of carbon dioxide, which liberates produces 0.333% tonnes of nickel. We need to weather 300 tonnes of olivine for 1 tonne of nickel.
The proposed deep sea nodules in the article only have 1% nickel so you need 100 tonnes of them brought to the surface and then refined to get the nickel. For us the plants essentially do the major refining up from the 0.333% to 1%-2.5%, and are then processed to a bi-ore that is 15%-30% nickel, some of the richest nickel ore on the planet.
Carbon dioxide removal needs to be at gigatonne scale, so in pursuit of carbon removal, if we were weathering 1 gigatonne of olivine per year, we would produce 3 megatonnes of nickel as a "by-product." This means we would match the total global production today, while doing carbon removal our main objective...
And we have secured multiple gigatonnes of olivine already, and are not limited by this or land use. Humanity currently mines 30-50 billion tonnes of sand today and farms on the order of billions of hectares of acres, though for us today, we are focused on using natural serpentine soils.
For example, the Salton Sea contains enough lithium dissolved in brines underground to provide lithium to transition 100% of the USA car and truck fleet to electric (18 million metric tons of lithium carbonate = 375 million car batteries).
And they are able to tap this "unconventional resource" in a way that doesn't require the massive pools of evaporating waters like in the Atacama desert using a technology called "direct lithium extraction (DLE).". And guess what, they can all so it while generated geothermal heat :) That is a better process, that has positive co-products.
There is no shortage of lithium... and rare earths aren't rare, just dirty to process. Copper and graphite are the few transition resources that might be in a shortage, but when prices go up, so too does innovation, and we are seeing that with the production of synthetic graphite.
With nickel, the current global production is 3 million tonnes per annum (MTPA). Our minerals are 0.333% nickel, which is well below that ~1.3% that is normally required to make economic sense to extract from. Our mineral source has never been used for nickel to date (making it unconventional).
For our olivine minerals around 1 tonne has to be weathered to remove 1 tonne of carbon dioxide, which liberates produces 0.333% tonnes of nickel. We need to weather 300 tonnes of olivine for 1 tonne of nickel.
The proposed deep sea nodules in the article only have 1% nickel so you need 100 tonnes of them brought to the surface and then refined to get the nickel. For us the plants essentially do the major refining up from the 0.333% to 1%-2.5%, and are then processed to a bi-ore that is 15%-30% nickel, some of the richest nickel ore on the planet.
Carbon dioxide removal needs to be at gigatonne scale, so in pursuit of carbon removal, if we were weathering 1 gigatonne of olivine per year, we would produce 3 megatonnes of nickel as a "by-product." This means we would match the total global production today, while doing carbon removal our main objective...
And we have secured multiple gigatonnes of olivine already, and are not limited by this or land use. Humanity currently mines 30-50 billion tonnes of sand today and farms on the order of billions of hectares of acres, though for us today, we are focused on using natural serpentine soils.
Is that helpful for you?
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/us-department-energy-an... https://blogs.gwu.edu/wagnerm/welcome/research/graphite_synt... https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/SAND/ygd... https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/