Wow, a small under 2k sub channel having such quality content. Well done and keep going! Would recommend for you to start tiktok and youtube shorts too, as this type of stuff interests quite many in the world.
Thanks a lot for the VERY kind feedback! I'm actually a part-time one-man band, so there's only so much I can produce, but thanks for the advice as well!
For me the main takeaway was that lithium apparently comes from sub-terrestrial brine. The brine seems to have been harvested in situ in the locations where the evaporation ponds are, so no energy was expended in (horizontal) long-distance transport of water. The main concern about water waste seems to be that in-situ non-salty aquifers would spill into the vacuum left by the extracted brine. This migrated freshwater would presumably get contaminated and turned itself into brine(?)... This begs a number of questions: if these lithium extraction operations are carried out in remote locations where no agriculture is being conducted and not that many people live, the spoiling of in-situ freshwater aquifers may not be an enormous problem (? I'm also assuming these freshwater aquifers have no significant intrinsic ecological value)... Also, around 10:05 in the argument of the CEO I thought he was going to argue that potentially a large fraction of the evaporated water will rain out (e.g. orographically) over land in a region where this water is more valuable than in the location where it was pumped to the surface? Especially when this lithium extraction is being carried out on an elevated plateau (4000m was it?) it seems plausible a large part of this water will rain out somewhere over land? But then it begs the question whether it is really worth to invest in desalination and recuperation equipment (and horizontal long-distance water transport)
That’s a great question - many have been toying with the idea for years. It is technically doable to extract lithium from desalination brines, but if you do it in isolation, it is not economical today. So the trick might be to combine it with additional recoveries of more stuff - you can even recover uranium from that seawater brine. But building the value chains around it is a long shot! The closest to that circular seawater desalination brines economy is Neom in Saudi Arabia - and at this stage, it’s still a project. Closer to us in time, we might want to recover lithium from produced water (oil fields’ water). The concentration is 10 times lower than in the Lithium Triangle, but still 10 times higher than in desalination brines.
Very true! It puts everything back in context - wherever you're from, when you're abroad, you're a stranger. The world is a village, but still with some rules 😅
Why dont they build a dome over the evaporation ponds, use lenses on the top to magnify the sun, and all the water that evaporates off of the ponds will condense on thè outside walls of the dome can be collected and reused to pump up more brien
Theoretically, that would be doable! But that sounds like quite expensive and cumbersome, when DLE can do the same trick in a straighterforward fashion 😅
Those evaporation ponds are really, really huge! You would need quite a good bunch of aluminium frame and plastic film! On top of which; there’s a reason why it evaporates so well in the Andes: you have quite some wind - so your dome would have to withstand that. Tricky! 😀
How much "water" it takes is irrelevant. In the end, the water doesn't go with the product, so it whatever process used doesn't consume water. It is a question of where the water comes from, and how difficult it is to treat when you are done, and how thoroughly it is likely that the water is treated, and what are the impacts in any deficiencies in water treatment.
True, or almost true. The point is: when you're using a natural evaporation process (as you do with evaporation ponds), you can't treat the water when you are done, it simply evaporates away. And as those places are naturally already arid, it can, over time, have some impact on the local aquifers, which ultimately raises questions. Now, the "difficulty" to treat is, before anything else, a matter of economics, so the likeliness of water treatment depends on the financial incentive to do so. But your comment brings together my thesis in the video: all processes (except the evaporation ponds) can be more or less water-intensive, depending on how much effort you're willing to give in looping the water!
@@AntoineWalterDWW I think my comment captures your issues about aquifers since I did point out that part of the issue is where the water comes from. In an incredibly arid area, water is very valuable. But even very valuable water might be insignificant compared to the value of the lithium. In practice, much of the world has no significant population. That with lithium being valuable, there might be parts of South America that end up having just as low population density as arctic Canada isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That is a very objective answer to a very subjective question. 😅 You're right on population density: Santa Rosa de los Pastos Grandes, where I slept while working at Eramine, is the 3rd largest city of the "Andes" department of the Salta Province. And it has... 136 inhabitants (I guess 138 while we were there with my colleague). Yet, water has a role in an ecosystem, and wherever you go to mine for even the most precious resource, there is (at least) a social license to operate. The "Litio" skull head I'm picturing at the very beginning of the video was the neighbor of an "Uranio" skull head in Purmamarca - and this opposition got the uranium mining project canceled. Similarly, the entirety of mining in the Atacama "only" represents 3% of the Water abstractions in the most arid place on Earth (as per the World Bank's count), yet permitting existing project extensions and new projects in Copper and/or Lithium is not a given, as populations and species living on a certain place have also certain rights over those certain places. Even in different geographies, the same applies: a Lithium project got cancelled around the Great Salt Lake in the US, for water access/consumption reasons. My cautionary answer, hence, is - it's a subjective matter with very little room for black or white, it's really about shades of gray. As often to always when it comes to water!
@@AntoineWalterDWW I guess after being an Objectivist in my early life, I can't complain when some one is pointing out that I'm being objective, rather than being subjective! Who owns the area and the water? My current break from Libertarian thoughts is based on not buying into what I consider as a weak logic of acquiring property via homesteading. In practice, most property rights have been acquired via conquest, rather than homesteading.
Me preserving water... never flying anywhere ever. Other ppl preserving fresh water... in our earp .. flies to every corner of the world... xD ouh wait it's a mandarin not flat, so flies all over the world.. Yeah... That aside a good video.
Yeah, I know there’s a dichotomy here - but I made peace with it through two things. First: I’m paying the (scam 😅) carbon compensations for my flights. But more importantly, I’m not flying to the places, TO fly to the places, I’m going there for a reason (I’m not a journalist, I’m an engineer), usually linked to getting the place to work properly, and hence optimize its water use. So, I try to only fly to a place where my “professional” impact justifies flying (does it, at the height of the carbon impact? Honestly I don't know - I’m not THAT good of an engineer either 😂) And then, if I’m able to leverage it for a video, the video is the cherry on the cake that acts as a “welcome side effect!”
Interesting material. Camera jumping... Not make me personally dizzy, but I hate it as Hell. Illustration time to time are good and for my taste better add more illustrations of topic instead of jumping camera... Because viewing it feels like BDSM, it is still awesome, but pain persuade You never more to do it.
Let me give you a behind the scenes: I’m still suffering from CoVid, which was quite annoying while recording. So, you can guess that every change of camera angle is there to hide a coughing pause 😅
Reality states electric cars are not the future....but then again they messed up something genuinely renewable hydrogen cars...but maybs we have hope...and buses and trains for the masses
I looked into hydrogen (it’s on this channel - but not commenting here for advertising reasons!) - the problem is thermodynamics. The production of hydrogen is quite “costly” energetically speaking, so the yield is low. And the subsequent step where you use the hydrogen as a fuel is also quite constrained by the low power density of hydrogen as a fuel. Today, 92% of the hydrogen used in the World is used directly where it’s produced - that’s the extent to which it’s moving. Now hydrogen has a role in the green transition (think of: the way we feed the World with the Haber-Bosch process, the way we make our steel and many other uses), but I’m not quite sure it should be used for transportation, in places where batteries can make it. Cargo ships could be an option though! (probably through Ammonia)
Totally not shitting on you cuz Arkansas is kind of a stupid word especially when we have Kansas but for future reference Arkansas is pronounced Ark-in-saw despite it being spelt Ar-Kansas
Thanks a lot for the correction! It took me quite some time to stop pronouncing the last « S » so know let’s move to using the right sound in the middle - I promise, one day I’ll say the whole word right! 😅
Wow, a small under 2k sub channel having such quality content. Well done and keep going! Would recommend for you to start tiktok and youtube shorts too, as this type of stuff interests quite many in the world.
Thanks a lot for the VERY kind feedback! I'm actually a part-time one-man band, so there's only so much I can produce, but thanks for the advice as well!
For me the main takeaway was that lithium apparently comes from sub-terrestrial brine. The brine seems to have been harvested in situ in the locations where the evaporation ponds are, so no energy was expended in (horizontal) long-distance transport of water. The main concern about water waste seems to be that in-situ non-salty aquifers would spill into the vacuum left by the extracted brine. This migrated freshwater would presumably get contaminated and turned itself into brine(?)... This begs a number of questions: if these lithium extraction operations are carried out in remote locations where no agriculture is being conducted and not that many people live, the spoiling of in-situ freshwater aquifers may not be an enormous problem (? I'm also assuming these freshwater aquifers have no significant intrinsic ecological value)... Also, around 10:05 in the argument of the CEO I thought he was going to argue that potentially a large fraction of the evaporated water will rain out (e.g. orographically) over land in a region where this water is more valuable than in the location where it was pumped to the surface? Especially when this lithium extraction is being carried out on an elevated plateau (4000m was it?) it seems plausible a large part of this water will rain out somewhere over land? But then it begs the question whether it is really worth to invest in desalination and recuperation equipment (and horizontal long-distance water transport)
Is the brine from desalination plant to low in lithium to be cost-effective.
That’s a great question - many have been toying with the idea for years. It is technically doable to extract lithium from desalination brines, but if you do it in isolation, it is not economical today.
So the trick might be to combine it with additional recoveries of more stuff - you can even recover uranium from that seawater brine. But building the value chains around it is a long shot!
The closest to that circular seawater desalination brines economy is Neom in Saudi Arabia - and at this stage, it’s still a project.
Closer to us in time, we might want to recover lithium from produced water (oil fields’ water). The concentration is 10 times lower than in the Lithium Triangle, but still 10 times higher than in desalination brines.
10:42 - Description of any Indian passport holder getting visa to anywhere in the world! Nice episode @antoine
Very true! It puts everything back in context - wherever you're from, when you're abroad, you're a stranger. The world is a village, but still with some rules 😅
new upload 🥳🤯
Always a blast to have you here! 🥳
Why dont they build a dome over the evaporation ponds, use lenses on the top to magnify the sun, and all the water that evaporates off of the ponds will condense on thè outside walls of the dome can be collected and reused to pump up more brien
Theoretically, that would be doable! But that sounds like quite expensive and cumbersome, when DLE can do the same trick in a straighterforward fashion 😅
@AntoineWalterDWW use plastics over an aluminum frame
Those evaporation ponds are really, really huge! You would need quite a good bunch of aluminium frame and plastic film!
On top of which; there’s a reason why it evaporates so well in the Andes: you have quite some wind - so your dome would have to withstand that. Tricky! 😀
How much "water" it takes is irrelevant. In the end, the water doesn't go with the product, so it whatever process used doesn't consume water. It is a question of where the water comes from, and how difficult it is to treat when you are done, and how thoroughly it is likely that the water is treated, and what are the impacts in any deficiencies in water treatment.
True, or almost true. The point is: when you're using a natural evaporation process (as you do with evaporation ponds), you can't treat the water when you are done, it simply evaporates away. And as those places are naturally already arid, it can, over time, have some impact on the local aquifers, which ultimately raises questions.
Now, the "difficulty" to treat is, before anything else, a matter of economics, so the likeliness of water treatment depends on the financial incentive to do so. But your comment brings together my thesis in the video: all processes (except the evaporation ponds) can be more or less water-intensive, depending on how much effort you're willing to give in looping the water!
@@AntoineWalterDWW I think my comment captures your issues about aquifers since I did point out that part of the issue is where the water comes from. In an incredibly arid area, water is very valuable. But even very valuable water might be insignificant compared to the value of the lithium. In practice, much of the world has no significant population. That with lithium being valuable, there might be parts of South America that end up having just as low population density as arctic Canada isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That is a very objective answer to a very subjective question. 😅
You're right on population density: Santa Rosa de los Pastos Grandes, where I slept while working at Eramine, is the 3rd largest city of the "Andes" department of the Salta Province. And it has... 136 inhabitants (I guess 138 while we were there with my colleague).
Yet, water has a role in an ecosystem, and wherever you go to mine for even the most precious resource, there is (at least) a social license to operate. The "Litio" skull head I'm picturing at the very beginning of the video was the neighbor of an "Uranio" skull head in Purmamarca - and this opposition got the uranium mining project canceled.
Similarly, the entirety of mining in the Atacama "only" represents 3% of the Water abstractions in the most arid place on Earth (as per the World Bank's count), yet permitting existing project extensions and new projects in Copper and/or Lithium is not a given, as populations and species living on a certain place have also certain rights over those certain places.
Even in different geographies, the same applies: a Lithium project got cancelled around the Great Salt Lake in the US, for water access/consumption reasons.
My cautionary answer, hence, is - it's a subjective matter with very little room for black or white, it's really about shades of gray. As often to always when it comes to water!
@@AntoineWalterDWW I guess after being an Objectivist in my early life, I can't complain when some one is pointing out that I'm being objective, rather than being subjective! Who owns the area and the water? My current break from Libertarian thoughts is based on not buying into what I consider as a weak logic of acquiring property via homesteading. In practice, most property rights have been acquired via conquest, rather than homesteading.
Me preserving water... never flying anywhere ever. Other ppl preserving fresh water... in our earp .. flies to every corner of the world... xD ouh wait it's a mandarin not flat, so flies all over the world.. Yeah... That aside a good video.
Yeah, I know there’s a dichotomy here - but I made peace with it through two things. First: I’m paying the (scam 😅) carbon compensations for my flights.
But more importantly, I’m not flying to the places, TO fly to the places, I’m going there for a reason (I’m not a journalist, I’m an engineer), usually linked to getting the place to work properly, and hence optimize its water use.
So, I try to only fly to a place where my “professional” impact justifies flying (does it, at the height of the carbon impact? Honestly I don't know - I’m not THAT good of an engineer either 😂)
And then, if I’m able to leverage it for a video, the video is the cherry on the cake that acts as a “welcome side effect!”
Interesting material. Camera jumping... Not make me personally dizzy, but I hate it as Hell. Illustration time to time are good and for my taste better add more illustrations of topic instead of jumping camera... Because viewing it feels like BDSM, it is still awesome, but pain persuade You never more to do it.
Let me give you a behind the scenes: I’m still suffering from CoVid, which was quite annoying while recording.
So, you can guess that every change of camera angle is there to hide a coughing pause 😅
Reality states electric cars are not the future....but then again they messed up something genuinely renewable hydrogen cars...but maybs we have hope...and buses and trains for the masses
I looked into hydrogen (it’s on this channel - but not commenting here for advertising reasons!) - the problem is thermodynamics.
The production of hydrogen is quite “costly” energetically speaking, so the yield is low. And the subsequent step where you use the hydrogen as a fuel is also quite constrained by the low power density of hydrogen as a fuel. Today, 92% of the hydrogen used in the World is used directly where it’s produced - that’s the extent to which it’s moving.
Now hydrogen has a role in the green transition (think of: the way we feed the World with the Haber-Bosch process, the way we make our steel and many other uses), but I’m not quite sure it should be used for transportation, in places where batteries can make it.
Cargo ships could be an option though! (probably through Ammonia)
Totally not shitting on you cuz Arkansas is kind of a stupid word especially when we have Kansas but for future reference Arkansas is pronounced Ark-in-saw despite it being spelt Ar-Kansas
Thanks a lot for the correction! It took me quite some time to stop pronouncing the last « S » so know let’s move to using the right sound in the middle - I promise, one day I’ll say the whole word right! 😅
i had a headache 22sec into your mess of a video.
Sorry about that. Try spending more than 22 seconds in the mess of my brain, you’ll understand what triggers what 😂