There are at least one-and-one half billion internal combustion engine-powered motor vehicles used solely for land transportation globally today. The equivalent of 100’s of millions more of such vehicles sail the oceans and fly in the skies.

Can all of this be replaced by vehicles powered by electric motors using on-board battery storage?

The “laws” of nature are logical and experimentally “proven” and reaffirmed by computational rules, not just by observations of behavior by selected groups of human beings. Laws of nature can be replaced with improved computation rules that give results more closely aligned with observed data; Einstein’s gravitational theory has replaced Newton’s for that reason.

The “rule” of supply and demand is not a law of nature; it is an action guideline that takes into account how much human beings will give up of their time, possessions, and promises of future actions (aka, money) in order to obtain a physical good or a service. It is NOT a law of nature, but rather an observation of the most common reaction of human beings to shortages of goods and services, which human nature deems important.

Human desire may create a demand for, but it does not create a supply of natural resources. Technology, the engineering of science, is necessary for obtaining supplies of natural resources, but it is not sufficient.

The availability of natural resources for use by the human race is a function of:

1. The logistical accessibility of deposits of those resources, i.e., can they be reached by road (or rail), or ship,
2. Are they of sufficient grade (concentration) so that available mechanical and chemical engineering technologies can SELECTIVELY extract the minerals containing them and concentrate them ECONOMICALLY enough to be AFFORDABLE for intended use,
3. Is there a downstream processing regime (group pf technologies) that can economically transform the mineral concentrates produced by mining into forms necessary for mass production of the resource into an end user product or necessary part of a product?
4. Is the above regime ECONOMICAL or AFFORDABLE (e.g., the transformation of U3O8 into enriched U-235, which is only necessary if you wish to build nuclear reactors or weapons, and which would never have been affordable other than through the driver of war allowing massive “investment” in the processing regime, and, most important of all
5. The recognition that there is a grade limit below which the resource is not available to contemporary human economically deployed technology.

ALL of the deposits of natural resources, upon which human life and leisure depend, were laid over hundreds of millions and billions of years ago. Those resources are not organic; they do not grow back in mines.

The easiest deposits to work are those of the highest grade of the desired element which also have the least “contaminants” of other related elements that must be removed to purify the desired resource into a form useful to mankind.

The only factor to be considered when planning for mass producing a consumer good that requires a specific natural resource is the cost of that resource in the form necessary for the intended use. There must be a strong indication that the capital deployed to recover and process the natural resource will be repaid by the sales of the product into the general or, in the case of the military, specific, market. Capital must be repaid through wealth creation. It cannot just be wasted in a rational society, because if it is, it will eventually run out.

Note well that subsides by government are merely a way of socializing waste of capital (aka in government as “investment”). Note also that American elites always benefit from the subsidies through the ownership of the perpetually non-going concerns the losses from which are covered by the subsidies.

There is no scheme in the green universe to repay the capital; it’s use is intended to impoverish the mass of mankind to enhance and preserve a static world (fantasy) to be enjoyed only by elites.

There is NOT sufficient lithium accessible or available, economically, to replace more than a fraction of today’s transportation fleet, much less tomorrows. Deglobalization is a necessary concomitant of less availability of cheap fossil fuels. This is already happening in the guise of protecting “democracy’ from the evil scheming of those Chinese leaders who recognized the West’s propensity for cultural suicide long ago and can think of nothing better than granting the green wishes. China now has all the lithium it needs for its domestic use of reducing urban pollution. And China uses its monopoly of the necessary critical materials to dominate the global solar panel manufacturing and wind turbine industries.

Only those transportation vehicle makers who continue to make, improve, and market internal combustion engines (ICE’s) will survive the cull as electric vehicles (EV’s) get increasingly expensive and the infrastructure to support their use with power and service fails to appear. The price for lithium itself is already too high to sustain the mass production of affordable EVs. I predict that lithium prices will come down, but, of course, that will extinguish unsubsidized low-grade production, so that an ICE/EV equilibrium production will be reached, in this decade. Oil prices will also decline as production resumes, so that the energy economy recovers it normal path.

The law of supply and demand can be applied to money, but not to wealth or value. Their creation is limited by the supply of resources, productivity, and innovation.

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As reported by The Wall Street Journal, new lithium extraction technologies are attracting attention as these “methods “could help increase supplies, while attracting investors for their potential to speed up production and reduce the environmental impact compared with most current lithium-extraction methods, but none are, so far, proven at commercial scale.”

How is Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) defined?

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) states: “DLE technologies can be broadly grouped into three main categories: absorption using porous materials that enable lithium bonding, ion exchange, and solvent extraction.

Scaling up any of these techniques to full production capability remains a challenging task. For example, developing a solid material that bonds with just lithium is a huge challenge in geothermal brine that contains many minerals and metals at high temperatures and pressures. Successful DLE implementation will depend on expanding innovation and creating new technologies.”

“It’s such a game changer. There are huge opportunities,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told an energy conference in April 2022 about DLE.

In March 2022, One World Lithium announced the signing a licensing agreement with the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory division for a patent developed by the NETL for selectively recovering lithium from solutions of mixed metallic ions.

The DOE patent is an advanced direct lithium extraction (DLE) process for the extraction of lithium from natural brines, rapidly generating a pure lithium carbonate. The method uses unique carbon dioxide injection mixing techniques to quantitatively precipitate lithium carbonate from brines. This process requires no solvent, electrodes, membranes, or sorbents, but only uses carbon dioxide which can be sourced from industrial sources, waste or exhaust gas streams or, even, ambient air. It significantly reduces capital and operating costs, process time, energy requirements, and, paradoxically, overall carbon dioxide emissions.

The process can be fully deployable and operational at the brine source, eliminating the need to evaporate the brines and/or transport brine concentrates to a chemical processing facility to form and purify lithium carbonate. Deployment of this technology will reduce dependence on foreign lithium sources.

Many DLE Technologies Tap Significant Water Supplies

A major automobile manufacturer is relying on DLE technology to supply a lithium from the Salton Sea region of California. which purportedly “uses 10 tonnes of water for every tonne of lithium produced.”

By way of background,most of thelithium extraction processes use a lot of water —approximately 500,000 gallons per metric ton of lithium produced. Mining can consume the majority of a region’s fresh water, which negatively impacts the community and reduces the number of locations that are feasible. Lithium extraction technologies also have the potential for toxic chemicals to leak from the evaporation pools, or membrane filters, into the water supply. This includes hydrochloric acid, which may be created in the processing of lithium, and waste products that are filtered out of the brine.

While current extraction methods yield about 40% to 50% of the lithium present in a mined or brine resource, processes using DLE can extract 75% to 90%.

As The Wall Street Journal reported “many DLE technologies that work well in the laboratory often run into trouble in the field. Many of the technologies would likely still require large amounts of water and power to run the devices on a large scale.”

One World Lithium Inc.’s license agreement with the US Department of Energy and its National Energy Technology Laboratories (NETL) is focused on profitably separating high-purity lithium carbonate from a brine. The DOE patent is an advanced direct lithium extraction (DLE) process for the extraction of lithium from natural brines, rapidly generating a pure lithium carbonate. The method uses a unique multi-step high pressure/temperature application of carbon dioxide injection-mixing to ultimately directly and selectively precipitate lithium carbonate from brines. One World’s DLE technology competes favorably vs. competitors as:

• The process requires no solvent, electrodes, membrane, or sorbents and only uses carbon dioxide which can be sourced commercially or from industrial waste streams or ambient air.

• It significantly reduces capital and operation costs, process time, energy requirements, and, paradoxically, overall carbon dioxide emissions.

• The process can be fully operational at the brine source, eliminating transportation of brine derived solids to a chemical processing facility to form pure lithium carbonate. Deployment of this technology will reduce dependence on foreign lithium sources.

The stakes are high for DLE to be successful. The US Energy Department reports that at least 70% of U.S. lithium deposits are held in brine reserves. DLE could produce lithium in areas where open-pit mines face strong opposition. If a successful DLE technology is created, miners will increase global lithium production with a footprint significantly smaller than evaporation ponds or open-pit mines.

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