Green Irony: Massive US Lithium Source Found - In Fracking Wastewater
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/green-irony-massive-us-lithium-source-found-fracking-wastewaterThe global, government-coerced transition into "green energy" has geologists scouring the Earth for new sources of lithium -- the element that's required for batteries, like those used in electric vehicles.
Now, in a cosmic practical joke on environmentalists, researchers say they've found a lithium mother lode -- in Pennsylvania fracking wastewater.
It turns out that the Marcellus Shale -- a long swath of sedimentary rock in the northeastern United States that holds huge amounts of frackable gas -- holds huge quantities of lithium too. Justin Mackey and other researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pennsylvania were pleasantly surprise when they studied the contents of wastewater dredged up in the fracking process at 515 sites in the Keystone State, reports Science Alert.
Long before the frackers showed up, deep groundwater has been dissolving the lithium in the Marcellus Shale for eons. "It's been dissolving rocks for hundreds of millions of years—essentially, the water has been mining the subsurface," Mackey told the University of Pittsburgh's Brandie Jefferson.
When they analyzed the wastewater data, they were stunned by the volume of lithium. The shale "has the capacity to provide significant lithium yields for the foreseeable future" he says. Their detailed findings were published in Scientific Reports.
Fracking has been able to get lithium. In some areas, fracking is banned. Why no mine lithium through fracking.
Lithium and cobalt mining in third-world countries is often a highly toxic and hazardous enterprise. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, militias have reportedly abducted children and brought them to dig away to fulfill leftists' green dreams.
Here's how Harvard's Siddharth Kara described the horror show:
"You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries. People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.
"Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe — and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out. Young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust."
Compared to that, harvesting Pennsylvania fracking wastewater sounds positively idyllic. Whatya say, Greta?
I wonder what the eco-warriors have to say about that?
