Rocks Reads Roundup, 9/27
Arkansas lithium, more coal-based REE research, fossilized fish, unfortunately Elon, and more
Hello everyone and welcome new readers! It is cool to have you here.
I try to put the links roundup out on Fridays, but we live in fascist end times and I imagine you're familiar with the experience of "time" being "meaningless." Also, my dog was sick on Friday (she seems to be doing better?).
Here’s some things I read and watched this week.
Yet another funding round from the Department of Energy for rare earth/critical minerals and coal research! The DOE has been supporting research into rare earth recovery from coal ash and coal mining waste products since 2014, with most of the research happening in Appalachia; in 2019 the research expanded to include other materials on the federal government's critical minerals list. This new call for proposals suggests a larger-scale vision than the demonstration plants that have emerged thus far: it explicitly seeks out projects to build out job training programs and treat the coal-critical minerals projects as part of regional revitalization. (I'm now wondering if the San Juan Basin rare earth proposal mentioned a few weeks ago here was gearing up to apply for some of this funding?)
For as long as I've been following the coal ash-rare earth stuff, it's always read very confusingly–on the one hand, it's so easy for this research to be used as greenwashing propaganda for further coal extraction; on the other I've talked to grantees who grew up in Appalachia and seem to sincerely believe in this research supporting both local employment and environmental remediation. I'm more inclined to view these efforts moving more toward the latter based on the administration's policies in general, and some of the language in the RFP and press release (such as: "[this program] has been specifically designed to develop the upstream and midstream critical minerals supply chain and enable the downstream manufacturing of high-value, nonfuel, carbon-based products. This will help us realize the full potential for carbon ores and critical minerals within U.S. basins.").
Almost certainly not part of the same funding stream, but Texas Mineral Resources Corporation announced they'd received DOE funding to work on a new pilot plant for extracting rare earths at the Jeddo coal mine in Ebervale, Pennsylvania. (This is the same coal mine Rick Perry visited in 2017 marveling at the potential of rare earth recovery–why do I remember these things, ugh.) TMRC has been in this racket since 2016, and they I don't know, haunt me kind of because I tried to go see their Texas mining site and office on a road trip back in 2017 and the office was literally an empty parking lot?
In not-coal-based critical mineral recovery from mining-waste research: Standard Lithium had a virtual ribbon-cutting for its new extraction demonstration plant in El Dorado, Arkansas (pronounced doh-ray-doh, not doh-rah-doh), on YouTube. It is exactly as awkward as you expect it would be.
Lithium mining isn't really a thing in El Dorado; where the town is known it's known for oil (and, according to its very brief Wikipedia history section, racism–content warning on that one, describes a pretty horrific incident). But in addition to oil Arkansas has a lot of mining, including of bromine from brine aquifers. The aquifers have lithium as well, but traditional evaporation pond methods (like the kind in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia) don't make sense with the climate and landscape of the region (i.e., it's not arid desert). Standard Lithium, a Canadian company, partnered with local bromine company Laxness to create a pilot plant that extracts lithium directly from Laxness' wastewater brine, using a proprietary method they call LiSTR (they don’t explain what the acronym stands for in the video or on their website–Lithium STuff, Rad?).
As with other novel extraction methods from mining waste material, I'm intrigued, but not pinning all my hopes to its viability. But worth continuing to follow and learn more about.
Some highlights from the video:
The CEO mentioning he works with "a rock-star team" without even cracking a smile (which like OK you’re brining, not doing hard rock mining, but COME ON)
Lots of sweet footage of industrial equipment!!
A cameo from Tom Cotton (also known as "low key one of the most fasicst senators in America") not even wearing a tie or a little American flag lapel pin?? Rude
The mural behind the chair of the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce, specifically the extremely old-looking baby to his right
The walkthrough of the brining process and its very dramatic music
The chat isn't that exciting but I kind of feel like the fact there is any activity in the chat at all is wild
It was Battery Day (and the annual stockholder meeting) at Tesla last week, which was also livestreamed at slightly higher production value than the Standard Lithium livestream. The event did have some in-person attendance, held in I kid you not a parking lot with attendees in cars. (Is this a thing now? I don't watch a lot of stockholder meetings.)
Gentle readers, I will not pretend I actively watched all two and a half hours of this (can anyone endure that much Elon?), but seeing cutaways from Elon to...rows of parked Tesla cars honking in lieu of applause is pretty incredible. The company made some pretty big announcements, including a new tabless battery design that should improve electric car range–and, more importantly, bringing that battery production in-house instead of sourcing from Panasonic.
Musk announced that the company had obtained rights to 10,000 acres in Nevada where they plan to mine lithium from clay deposits using an environmentally friendly in-house method involving...table salt. People in industry already have expressed skepticism about Musk's plans (this op-ed from mining.com is especially snarky)–for instance, if there was a non-acid leaching method of extracting lithium using something as cheap as salt why is literally no one doing it? Tesla also announced that they're trying to work toward making a cobalt-free battery, which once again plays into the "if we just don't use resources from DRC everything is fine" and is confusing since Tesla recently signed onto the Fair Cobalt Alliance, which was mentioned a couple of newsletters ago.
Probably the biggest question mark I have from this presentation: Musk states in this that there's enough lithium just in Nevada to power electric cars for all of the United States. This goes against pretty much everything I've read about Nevada’s lithium? But you know, Elon says a lot of stuff and then claims he was just overworked and definitely not on coke and misspoke or whatever.
Rare earths might be fossil fuels after all, according to a paper written up in Scientific American last week. The authors of the paper were studying a deposit of fish fossils buried along the coast of Minami-tori-shima, an area that the Japanese government has been surveying as a potential source for domestic rare earths (if not for all those pesky rules about ocean mining). Honestly this isn't super-newsy and the linked piece is more just a nicely written treatise on the risks of deep sea mining with cool fish bone science thrown in. The only part that I didn’t really love was toward the end the author does the like “people wanting new consumer tech is the problem, not me though I still have an iPhone 4”, but that’s partly because I just think that’s not a tactically useful approach to making people care about this stuff and it plays into neoliberal consumer solutions to systemic problems imposed onto said consumers. Anyway. Fish fossils! That’s it, that’s the joke.
A really brief entry that I wish I had more on: the Chinese government's Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) has accused a state-owned rare earth mining operation of violating pollution regulations in southwest China. This isn't Guangxi Nonferrous Rare Earth Development Co Ltd's first time getting called out and punished for bad environmental practices, and seems to have a pretty bad financial history, but I honestly need to dig a little more at this and try to navigate some shitty Google-Translated material to see if there's anything more interesting here.
Thanks again for reading! I hope you will forgive me as I come to accept that the longer pieces are all going to take longer than I hoped to turn them around (still working on the one that should have gone out two weeks ago). It at least means I can start to build up any requests readers have. Here’s a picture of my dog:
Caption: A German Shepherd mix with a nice little bandanna and a little bow on top of her head, lying in some nice afternoon light on a painted gray wood floor next to her water bowl. Side note, is there a secret trick to doing alt text on images in Substack or is it actually a bad ableist platform that should feel bad?