Alex Grant Profile picture
May 23, 2023 6 tweets 4 min read Read on X
My entire adult life I've worked on #decarbonization technologies guided by the question, "what can I contribute to humanity to help evolve us into a more advanced alien species?" #Lithium for batteries was a good place to start.
So I spent half a decade developing technologies and natural resources for a new world that emits less CO2 and requires less mining than the old world. However lithium will always have a tiny footprint even at full scale. That's actually the point. ImageImageImageImage
Meanwhile, we produce almost as much structural metal today as we produce coal. And because metal makes advanced alien species possible, it will be produced forever. Even "as time goes to infinity", primary metal will be needed because nothing is "infinitely recyclable". Image
Advanced alien species don't stockpile bauxite residue slurries behind tailings dams and they don't destroy their indigenous sites for iron ore. ImageImage
They don't carry around deadweight in their vehicles making their transport system unnecessarily inefficient, nor do they predicate trillions of dollars of trade and all of national security on a coal co-product of semi-coking ovens in Fugu County, Shaanxi Province, China. ImageImageImageImage

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More from @big_lithium

Dec 9, 2021
Want to make up your own mind about "blue hydrogen"? Recently, we (@MinviroLtd) completed a life cycle assessment (LCA) on a lithium chemical plant in the UK for a client who asked us to quantify carbon risks to make real long term H2 sourcing decisions. This is what we learned!
Just like lithium natural resource extraction and processing to make lithium chemicals for use in batteries, the process technologies used, energy consumed, and reagents needed directly determine the embodied CO2 emissions of making a hydrogen product (of any color).
Here is the key meme. These numbers were developed off of @howarth_cornell and @mzjacobson's study "How Green is Blue Hydrogen?". We looked at scenarios for tight methane wellfield & high CO2 capture, both of which are *theoretically* possible. Also "grey/green H2" scenarios.
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