Month: September 2024
Arkansas’ Lithium Rush
These days, companies in the area aren’t looking to find more oil—they are instead prospecting for lithium, a metal that is increasingly prized around the world as an essential ingredient in electric-vehicle batteries.
If the U.S. is to ease its dependence for lithium on other countries such as China, it may need this quiet corner of southwest Arkansas to lead the way.
Exxon Mobil XOM 1.76%increase; green up pointing triangle, a new player in the hunt for U.S. lithium, is planning to build one of the world’s largest lithium processing facilities not far from Magnolia, with a capacity to produce 75,000 to 100,000 metric tons of lithium a year, according to people familiar with the matter.
At that scale, it would equate to about 15% of all finished lithium produced globally last year, according to one analyst.
Russia, Ukraine, and the Energy Transition
I think I timed this to open at the 11:42 mark, unless you want to watch the whole thing, in which case, start at the beginning.
Anyhow, if you thought, as I do, that the Ukraine war has something to do with the transition away from fossil fuels, this well done video adds some data points.
Description:
Why did Russia invade Ukraine in February 2022? This video dives into the complex motives behind Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion, despite the immense cost. We explore potential reasons such as NATO expansion, Putin’s revanchist ideology, and demographic challenges, but focus on a crucial factor: Ukraine’s vast mineral resources. With increasing global demand for lithium and rare earth minerals essential for a green energy transition, could these resources be a key reason behind the timing of the invasion?
Francine Will Bring Big Rain to Saturated South
Weeks of rainfall have saturated the Louisiana coast like a sponge. Francine could bring up to eight more inches of rainfall, with a few locations measuring up to a foot, which could cause flash flooding concerns in the region. “The cities of Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans (along with their suburbs) would be most susceptible for flash flooding as hourly rain totals up to four inches (if not more) should be possible,” Weather Prediction Center forecasters warned Tuesday.
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Saturated ground, and the possibility of storm surge, importantly amplified by sea level rise, will test Louisiana levees.
North Korean Dictator Executes Officials for Climate Change
Off with their heads.
If you did this to enough bureaucrats, and then buried them, does that count as carbon sequestration? Just asking.
North Korea is suspected of executing a number of officials held responsible for devastating floods this year and South Korea’s spy agency said it was “monitoring signs” to try to determine what had happened.
The agency’s announcement came a day after a South Korean broadcaster reported that up to 30 officials in flood-hit regions of North Korea had been shot to death.
Heavy rains in July flooded large areas along the Amnok River in North Korea’s North Pyongan, Jagang and Ryanggang provinces with some South Korean media outlets reporting that more than 1,000 people were killed or were missing.
At that time, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said that he would punish officials for the damage, which a South Korean government ministry said appeared to be an attempt by Kim’s to dodge blame for the disaster.
Since then, Kang Pong Hun, the chief secretary of the Jagang Provincial Committee of the North’s ruling party, and other senior officials, including Public Security Minister Ri Thae Sop, were dismissed from their posts over the flood damage, according to North Korea’s state-media.
The South’s National Intelligence Service, or NIS, said Kang was possibly among the executed officials.
A Bridge Too Near: Heat Accelerates Damage to Critical Spans
On a 95-degree day this summer, New York City’s Third Avenue Bridge, connecting the Bronx and Manhattan, got stuck in the open position for hours. As heat and flooding scorched and scoured the Midwest, a steel railroad bridge connecting Iowa with South Dakota collapsed under surging waters. In Lewiston, Maine, a bridge closed after the pavement buckled from fluctuating temperatures.
America’s bridges, a quarter of which were built before 1960, were already in need of repair. But now, extreme heat and increased flooding linked to climate change are accelerating the disintegration of the nation’s bridges, engineers say, essentially causing them to age prematurely.
The result is a quiet but growing threat to the safe movement of people and goods around the country, and another example of how climate change is reshaping daily life in ways Americans may not realize.
“We have a bridge crisis that is specifically tied to extreme weather events,” said Paul Chinowsky, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder who researches the effects of climate change on infrastructure. “These are not things that would happen under normal climate circumstances. These are not things that we’ve ever seen at this rate.”
Planetary Temp Jump Still a Mystery
Zeke Hausfather is the Global Temperature Expert’s Global Temperature Expert – and someone I always look to for perspective on events like the accelerated warming we have seen during the just-fading El Niño event.
Zeke was pushing back on some of the alarmism we saw a year ago as global temps seemed to jump higher than expectations, counseling patience and expressing confidence that a return to baseline was coming.
Now he admits he’s surprised, and not quite sure what is going on –
“some combination of forcings or changes in feedbacks may be driving higher global temperatures going forward.”
Zeke Hausfather in Climate Brink:
My inaugural post on The Climate Brink 18 months ago looked at the year 2024, and found that it was likely to be the warmest year on record on the back of a (than forecast) El Nino event. I suggested “there is a real chance that the world exceeds 1.5C above preindustrial levels in 2024 in the Berkeley Earth record” but that “it is still more likely than not that 2024 temperatures come in below that level.”
Since that post, I think its safe to say that the intervening year and a half surprised us all. We saw extreme (one might even say gobsmacking) global surface temperatures in the second half of 2023, which pushed the year above 1.5C in the Berkeley Earth record (and just shy of 1.5C in Copernicus).1 This heat arrived far earlier than any of us anticipated; even before the El Nino event that we expected to drive record warmth had fully developed. Global temperature records were shattered by between 0.3C and 0.5C in each month from July to December 2023.
In early 2024 it appeared as if the world had potentially returned to a more predictable (though far from good!) regime, with global temperature records exceeding the prior records set in the winter of 2016 by around 0.1C, which is reasonably in-line with what we would expect to see for a big El Nino event 8 years after the 2016 super El Nino.
At the time I (and others) suggested that global temperatures would likely begin to fall back down to around 1.3C above preindustrial levels by June, and end up well below 2023 for the second half of the year as El Nino faded and La Nina conditions potentially developed. This seemed like a reasonable expectation based on the trajectory of prior El Nino events (e.g. 2016). However, nature had something else in mind:
Indigenous Insight into Hurricane Dynamics is Written in Glyph
Above, symbol for Hurricane from the Taino people, who were native to the Caribbean area.
Guabancex is the zemi or deity of chaos and disorder in Taíno mythology and religion, which was practiced by the Taíno people in Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Cuba, as well as by Arawak natives elsewhere in the Caribbean. She was described as a mercurial goddess that controlled the weather, conjuring storms known as “juracán” when displeased. The latter term was later used to name the climatological phenomenon that is now known as a hurricane in the Western Hemisphere.
The Taínos were aware of the spiraling wind pattern of hurricanes, a knowledge that they used when depicting the deity. Her zemi idol was said to depict a woman, but the most common depiction of Guabancex presents a furious face with her arms extended in a “~” pattern.
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Below, National Hurricane Center’s symbol for Tropical Storms and hurricanes indicates the counter clockwise rotation of these storms in the Northern Hemisphere.
The indigenous people in the Caribbean had deduced from observation something that satellite imagery confirms – the rotational drive of the Coriolis Effect.
Francine Could be a Hurricane Before Landfall
Remembering that in a climate changed world, a “mere” Cat 1 can be a major rainmaking event. The Storm’s projected track takes it deep into the heartland.
Ohio Plant to Mine Nickel, Cobalt from Scrap
In a step forward for efforts to acquire the metals crucial to addressing climate change, on Monday a new plant that can extract nickel and cobalt from scrap material opens in Fairfield, Ohio. The resulting metals will be used in new batteries and other clean energy markets.
Extracting metals out of old material avoids the environmental damage of open pit mining and prevents the metals from ending up in the landfill. Many see this as the future, even if it takes decades to become reality.
Climate change is largely caused by burning dirty fuels for two broad purposes: to make electricity and to move vehicles. Batteries can substitute for both much of the time, but this changeover is still in its infancy and the need for more minerals is great.
The metals refining company Nth Cycle builds systems that yield nickel and cobalt from a form of shredded lithium ion batteries and nickel scrap from electric vehicles and consumer electronics. There are a growing number of companies, including Redwood Materials and Li-Cycle, that are expanding the young U.S. battery recycling industry.
Currently, even when battery materials are collected for recycling in the U.S., they’re mostly shipped overseas to be refined. Building a traditional metals refinery in the U.S. could cost upward of $1 billion, but Nth Cycle uses a modular design it says is ideal because it can be added onto existing manufacturing facilities.
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