Buried beneath an ancient volcanic crater on the Nevada Oregon border sits an enormous deposit of lithium rich clay. Scientists now think this quiet landscape may hold enough lithium to influence the global battery market for decades.
A new study argues that McDermitt caldera may host about 20 to 40 million metric tons of lithium, likely the largest deposit yet identified.
Using the recent United States’ average contract price for lithium carbonate, about 37,000 dollars per ton, that estimate comes out to be nearly $1.5 trillion.
Well there goes the US’s chances of being a player in the sodium ion battery race. Our gov won’t support technological advancement while some rich fuck can milk an extant cash cow.
I mean we’ll still need lithium to transportation for its energy:weight properties but still. Hopefully this turns out to be a good thing.
Any bets on whether Musk or an oil company is gonna get the first subsidies to start a mine there?
Sorry for being a downer. I’ve been in a mood this year.
America has bowed out of any actual tech race decades ago when capital decided to go for get-rich-quick schemes by deregulating instead of investing in domestic production. The only thing the US had any kind of edge on was AI and that’s just a bubble that’s going to get out-inflated by China.
We could have done FINE on a service economy, importing raw materials and textiles and tech from other countries and assembling, packaging and marketing it here. We could have built an entire NATION of white-collar workers managing tech companies like this. The whole right-wing “we have to bring coal mining and steel milling back to the US” was pure, pandering bullshit meant to appeal to the country’s midwits who have no idea how the wider world or technology works.
But we’re not only not going that direction, we’ve basically slammed the door on that route. Our principle money-making now comes from investment and finance, and this weird, world’s-largest-ponzie-scheme where private equity is just going around gobbling up smaller businesses and putting them out of business to manipulate markets and force market direction. Nothing in the US is real, nothing is built on anything. Or at least that’s how it will be. We still export shit like fuel corn and soybeans… somewhat.
You can read history and see how this has repeated over and over when there’s an authoritarian/fascist takeover, back to the age of barbarians. They don’t want to inherit their conquered nation’s complex infrastructure and problems, they want to sell off anything cheap and easy to make a dime on before ditching the place and living somewhere disconnected from the raped land they’ve left behind. Things like natural resources like oil, coal, easy-to-access minerals and guns and other easy-to-make hardware for war. This is what happened to a lot of other countries and why some places are utter shitholes now.