ExxonMobil Is a Lithium Company Now (theverge.com) 57
ExxonMobil is venturing into lithium production, targeting a significant market share by initiating its first operation in southern Arkansas. With lithium's rising demand in the tech and electric vehicle sectors, ExxonMobil aims to begin production by 2027. By 2030, the company anticipates producing enough lithium to power over 1 million electric vehicles annually. From a report: Earlier this year, ExxonMobil purchased 120,000 acres of lithium-rich land spanning a geologic formation -- called the Smackover Formation -- in Arkansas. To access the lithium, the company will first drill 10,000 feet below the surface using gas and oil machinery. From there, it will then use direct lithium extraction (DLE) to separate the lithium from the saltwater it's mixed with. Once that's done, ExxonMobil will inject the saltwater back into the ground.
ExxonMobil says the DLE process "produces fewer carbon emissions than hard rock mining and requires significantly less land." The company will produce the battery-grade lithium on-site, which it will call Mobil Lithium. This technically isn't the first time ExxonMobil is getting involved in the battery business, as the company manufactured the first lithium-ion battery in the 1970s.
ExxonMobil says the DLE process "produces fewer carbon emissions than hard rock mining and requires significantly less land." The company will produce the battery-grade lithium on-site, which it will call Mobil Lithium. This technically isn't the first time ExxonMobil is getting involved in the battery business, as the company manufactured the first lithium-ion battery in the 1970s.
Environmental track record (Score:5, Insightful)
I fully trust them to take as much care with this endeavor as they have with their oil business. What could go wrong?
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I fully trust them to take as much care with this endeavor as they have with their oil business. What could go wrong?
Oil companies bad, solar panel and windmill companies good, yawn!
More on topic, The Hudson Bay Company, founded 353 years ago still exists nowadays although they have stopped trading furs with the natives quite a while ago so yes, a company can recycle itself and change its vocation.
Re:Environmental track record (Score:4, Informative)
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You must be able to come up with a link, surely? Unless it's a dumb whataboutism.
Re:Environmental track record (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of that piece was a weird invented story meant to make you frightened of trans people. They'll be thrilled it worked on you I suppose.
The second link is story critical of America's broken campaign finance laws. Well done for completely missing that point too.
Vaccines were completely non-controversial not long ago.
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See in America and most other countries we don't have to "trust" the word of PFizer or other companies that their products work, that's why we have the FDA, EMA, MHRA, PhMDA and such that all require companies to show their work and agree that they work and are safe and in the year of our lord 2023 the evidence is clear they do.
Most left wingers also support restructuring American healthcare and reining in pharma companies and the way we allow them to conduct themselves with terrible marketing and brazen pr
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Re:Environmental track record (Score:5, Informative)
It's none isn't it?
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How many solar power companies have had democratically elected governments overthrown to protect their profits? It's none isn't it?
Give it time. Once the equator is saturated with solar panels it will happen.
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Who is "they"?
The people who overthrow governments for multinational corporations. I thought you knew how it works LOL.
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How many solar power companies have had democratically elected governments overthrown to protect their profits?
It's none isn't it?
It's none for oil companies too. Countries aren't doing that shit for the benefit of Exxon's profits, they are doing it for global trade prices to remain where they want - i.e. for you, so you vote them in again rather than blame them for inaction when the gasoline price rises. Exxon will continue to make profits regardless of the price, they can pass it on to consumers.
Countries also do it to secure energy supply. Pretending that "energy supply" is somehow restricted to oil is just stupid. Tensions have ri
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Another one of my favorites is Abercrombie and Fitch used to sell handguns.
And GMAC's Spark Plug Division worked on Apollo's CSM.
Re:Environmental track record (Score:5, Interesting)
I love how General Mills once unintentionally helped the Soviet Union's lunar probes ;)
TL/DR: The US was working on a high altitude spy balloon programme, Project Genetrix [wikipedia.org]. They turned to General Mills because of its experience in bulk polymer film manufacturing. The balloons were supposed to be too hard to spot (they went through great effort to make them stealthy) and too high to shoot anyway, but they accidentally made a mistake and included a 91cm steel rod, which just happened to be the wavelength of a common Soviet radar, so they were easy to spot. And while during the day they were too high to hit, at night they weren't. So the Soviets shot down a ton of these balloons that General Mills made. Now, their lunar program, running at the same time was having some problems, namely, they couldn't figure out how to develop a radation-hardened film that wouldn't get overexposed by cosmic radiation. But the Genetrix balloons' cameras needed and had such a film. So the Soviets salvaged the Genetrix film and used it in the Luna programme.
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W... T... F... !
Dude, thanks! I really enjoyed that.
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Shell literally got its name because of its origin in trading sea shells. Not a joke. [shell.com]
Re:Environmental track record (Score:4, Insightful)
Solution mining is not a new thing, and oil companies have the expertise to do it.
Would you prefer an open pit mine?
https://books.google.com/books... [google.com]
I took that class from this book back in the day.
Re:Environmental track record (Score:5, Informative)
Yep - it's a natural application.
Lithium isn't like oil. A li-ion battery is only 2-3% lithium. It doesn't get "burned" as you drive. And it gets recycled decades down the line. Basically, you only need truly tiny amounts of it compared to how much oil you need. And unlike neurotoxic, hepatotoxic, carcinogenic polluting oil, lithium chloride only has 1/6th the LD50 (oral, rat) of sodium chloride (table salt), is naturally found in mineral waters that people have been drinking for ages in significant levels, is neuroprotective, and it's been argued that we'd be better off if we maintained minimum sub-therapeutic water lithium standards, ala fluoridation [nytimes.com], if not for how all the conspiracy nuts would freak out thinking it's some sort of mind control attempt to turn the populace into sheep.
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What could go wrong?
I think it would be tough to fuck up lithium mining badly enough that thousands of marine animals end up drenched in the stuff. Accidentally summoning Cthulhu is probably still on the table, though.
Re:Great timing (Score:4, Funny)
Raise your expectations please! Why not a bug-free whip factory? /s
Like a fast food company selling salads. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Yet still continuing their core product.
This reminds me of some Hollywood actress talking about how it felt good to go to far off places to do charity work, thinking it would be nice to quit acting in movies and TV shows to do this full time. Then she commented on how it was because she made so much money with acting that allowed her the luxury to take the time and spend the money to do this charity work. This is much like how ExxonMobil isn't going to switch to selling EV batteries so long as it is their sales of fuels, lubricants, and plastic
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Oh, one more thing, consider where the energy comes from to charge these batteries.
Even if the grid was just as filthy as the average car (and at least in the USA, it's not), take a look at the MPGe rating of current EVs. They're still ridiculously more efficient than ICE. So, even if you're plugging in to coal, the environment still comes out slightly ahead.
And of course, if the grid gets updated with more renewable energy, EVs become all the more cleaner to drive.
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I'll never cease to be amazed about how people have trouble understanding the really basic concept that "The world is big", and doing any major thing globally involves truly huge scale - which we readily do because we're eight billion people, putting in like 10-15 trillion hours of work per year..
Put it a different way. Call it 1% of global lithium demand. So it's meeting the lithium need
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The transition isn't going to happen overnight, not at all. But the trend is clear.
It appears I wasn't clear because that was my point. ExxonMobil isn't going to stop producing natural gas overnight just because they starting mining for lithium. The transition is going to take years, if not decades, because from the fine article they point out that it will take years before they are producing lithium in any quantity. During that time they will have to keep producing natural gas, and likely for some time after as the transition off natural gas continues. A sudden drop in natural gas su
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Put it a different way. Call it 1% of global lithium demand. So it's meeting the lithium needs for transportation for of eighty million people. One project, probably staffed by a couple dozen people (maybe a couple hundred tops). Serving eighty million people. Do you see a problem with this ratio? I certainly don't.
Or put it another way: This might make a dent in the production of single-use disposable vape cigarettes that go into landfill. It seems that whatever we do to try to be more efficient & sustainable, someone somewhere along the line finds a way to do more of the opposite. It's called consumerism, i.e. Let's measure our success by how quickly we can dig stuff up out of the ground & turn it into pollution, & it's precisely this that is killing us.
I reckon we'd need an economic revolution/comple
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ExxonMobil is actually late to the game. Many oil producing countries have been diversifying for years now. Look at the Saudis, developing tourism.
If they don't do it, their oil business will shrink. It's inevitable, despite all their efforts to prevent it.
Ironic you would use Germany as an example for charging EVs. They do most charging at night, when demand is otherwise low and the grid is very green. They built a lot of wind turbines.
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Oil isn't going away [statista.com], even when EVs fully take over all road traffic (including truck shipping), and parts of other fields.
The market will however slowly shrink. Diversification is a way to make up for that and potentially grow. Oil companies are experts in things exactly like this project; this sort of thing is their bread and butter. And IMHO, in-situ resource production is very much a good thing. Not risk-free, but in general much lower impact than surface mining of minerals.
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And why wouldn't they? If you continue to buy it and it continues to be largely profitable what reason do they have not to produce it?
Re:Sounds a little like fracking (Score:4, Informative)
If you drill down 10,000 feet and find water it is likely already salt water.
So they are drilling down to salt water in the formation, pumping it up and removing the lithium from the salt water and them returning the same salt water.
Oil drilling has the same issue, on most wells there is always some salt water coming up with the oil, on the less economical wells that amount of salt water is several times the amount of oil and they separate it and return the salt water from close to the same depth it came from (usually far enough above or below that it does not dilute what the care about).
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And this "saltwater". Are they pumping it from the ocean*? Or producing it using fresh water from an aquifer they are likely to poison?
Why ask? Is it because they are an eeeeeEEEEEEeeeeevil oil company? Or because lithium production in 3rd world nations has a history of polluting the water? I'm sure that there's jokes to be made about Arkansas being a 3rd world nation but they clearly graduated to 2nd world status by now.
I hope we find a better material for batteries, quickly..
Not likely, chemistry and the rules of physics are working against us on this. The lithium atom is the lightest element that is solid at room temperature which means for the mass we get the most energy with each shift
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Yes, because when I think of drinking water, I think of "saltwater located at a depth that's 20% of the way through Earth's crust"
Smackover formation (Score:2)
Sounds like the booty of a girl I dated, if that's even the right word.
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Sounds like the booty of a girl I dated, if that's even the right word.
Did you see the names of the other places they are considering to look for lithium salts? They also look like some kind of pun to be made, there's Thacker Pass and Salton Sea.
About goddamn time (Score:1)
This is what pisses me off about Big Oil and world governments' relationship to it. The oil companies could have pivoted to being the other-energy-sources companies decades ago, but it was just easier and more profitable to keep pumping and burning oil so that's what we've been doing. We deserve to die for our stupidity and cowardice, and we're gonna.
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Yes, moderate in favor of setting the world on fire!
We're only gonna die... from our own Arrogance [youtube.com]