Companies race to mine lithium, a battery essential
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/the-rush-is-on-to-mine-lithium-the-worlds-lightest-metal-and-a-battery-essential
Video & full transcript at Link
SNIP
It's not gold in them thar hills, but Lamont Leatherman is convinced it's as good as it.
We're in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, between Charlotte and the Appalachian Mountains. It was February 2020, before the shutdown and the COVID precautions. Leatherman was laying the underground work for a lithium mine.
Lamont Leatherman:
This is the
spodumene, this greenish-gray mineral here.
Miles O'Brien:
Spodumene, the mineral is an important source of lithium, the lightest metal on Earth.
It's all over the place here, and Leatherman's company, Piedmont Lithium, has the cores to prove it.
SNIP
Lithium will react with almost anything. And it will give up its electrons so easily. It reacts with everything under the sun, including the things that you don't want it to react with.
One of the things it reacts with is ordinary water. Throw lithium into a pan of water, and it will catch on fire.
Miles O'Brien:
This is why the FAA banned lithium batteries in the cargo holds of passenger airliners. Despite the shortcomings, scientists say lithium is still by far the best material for batteries. But that doesn't stop them from looking for something better.
Venkat Srinivasan is director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Science.
Venkat Srinivasan:
So, batteries are all about finding new materials.
We have to go check and see if this material is going to be actually useful in a battery setting. So, what we would do is, we would make these small devices. It looks a lot like these are the coin cells that you might have seen used in your watches and things of that nature.
MORE...
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THIS is a subject that needs the same attention as fossil fuels.
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