With EVs now accounting for 10 percent of all new-car sales globally, there’s a scramble to get more lithium. For now, there are two ways to extract it from the earth.
Lithium has never been more in demand. The soft, silvery metal gives batteries more life and allows them to hold a longer charge. A lithium-ion battery is likely powering the device you’re using right now to read these words. And if you own an electric vehicle, these batteries make it go.
Once the concentration of lithium in the brine is high enough, the slurry is pumped to a processing plant to be filtered and dried. This leaves behind a white powder, which needs to be further purified./Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post/Ricky Carioti/The Washington PostSilver Peak produces about 5,000 metric tons of lithium a year, enough to power about 80,000 electric vehicles.
It’s a gritty industrial affair, as is all the crushing, smelting and digging of metals and minerals required to create green energy. The U.S. government is creating incentives to mine these materials, but the prospect of extraction angers some landowners and residents who live near sites of future mines.
These batteries can hold a tremendous amount of energy in tight spaces, such as the floor of a car. With enough cells packed together, an EV can drive for several hundred miles./Lee Powell/The Washington PostTo meet the demand for lithium, Albemarle Corp. is looking to expand production in Nevada and reopen a mine in North Carolina next to its processing plant in Kings Mountain.
But even before batteries, lithium had an array of uses — in glass, grease and nuclear weapons. In medicine, lithium salts are mood stabilizers, treating mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder.After its closure, the open-pit lithium mine in Kings Mountain filledIn this drone footage, you can see remnants of benches, or terraces, ringing the pit that help miners get rock from greater depths.
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