Lithium News

The next big trend in solar energy has arrived in Nevada, and for once the batteries are included.

Construction is slated to begin in Clark County next year on two of the largest solar arrays ever built in the state and the first to incorporate batteries to enable power delivery at night.

The proposed Yellow Pine Solar Project, 10 miles southeast of Pahrump, would combine photovoltaic panels and lithium-ion batteries to generate up to 500 megawatts of electricity for use in Nevada on about 3,000 acres of public land near the California border.

The Gemini Solar Project, 25 miles northeast of Las Vegas, would eventually generate up to 690 MW with some battery storage on about 7,100 acres of public land just east of Interstate 15 along the road to Valley of Fire State Park.

Industry experts expect to see more developments like these as battery costs decline and the technology continues to improve.

“Solar and storage go together like peanut butter and chocolate — great on their own and even better together,” said Jessica Scott, regional director for the Oakland, California-based advocacy group Vote Solar.

BLM seeking input

The Yellow Pine project is being developed by a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources, a Florida-based company that ranks as the largest renewable energy producer in North America. NextEra already operates two solar arrays in Clark County — the 250 MW Silver State Solar Power South in Primm and the 20 MW Mountain View Solar plant in Apex.

Gemini is a joint venture by Australia’s Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners and California-based Arevia Power, which plan to develop 440 MW of solar capacity for use in Nevada in the first phase of development. Another 250 MW of generating capacity would be added in the second phase, with the power to be sold in Nevada or exported to Arizona and California.

The Bureau of Land Management is now accepting public comment on both projects as part of separate environmental reviews.

Some conservationists have raised concerns about clearing large swaths of desert for utility-scale arrays instead of placing solar panels on rooftops or in already disturbed areas. The Nevada-based environmental Basin and Range Watch is opposed to the Yellow Pine in particular because of all the Joshua trees, yuccas and desert tortoise habit that would be destroyed to make way for the project.

“Basin and Range Watch supports renewable energy, but we believe it can be used on already developed space,” Kevin Emmerich, the group’s director, said in an email. “Las Vegas is having another major growth boom, and all of the rooftops can be utilized for solar panels. Why destroy valuable habitat for desert species when more environmentally friendly options are out there?”

Solar projects

The BLM held a pair of public meetings in Pahrump and Las Vegas last month on the Yellow Pine project.

Public meetings on the Gemini project are scheduled for 5-8 p.m. Aug. 1 at the Suncoast in Las Vegas and 5-8 p.m. Aug. 2 at the community center in Moapa.

The 45-day comment period for Gemini closes on Aug. 27. The 90-day comment period for Yellow Pine closes on Aug. 30.

The next big thing

Herman Pinales, energy and infrastructure project manager for the BLM in Southern Nevada, said Gemini’s comment period is so much shorter because of a new directive from the Trump administration aimed at speeding up and streamlining federal environmental reviews.

He said the reviews for both projects should be finished by next year.

Currently the only solar facility in Nevada with large-scale storage capability is SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes power plant, 225 miles northwest of Las Vegas, which stores the heat from concentrated sunlight in molten salt and uses it generate power day or night.

The $1 billion, 110 MW facility has operated off and on since November 2015 with NV Energy as its sole customer.

Pinales said he doesn’t know of any solar arrays in Nevada that use batteries to produce power after the sun goes down.

It’s the next big thing, according to Dan Whitten, spokesman for the Solar Energy Industries Association, a national trade group.

“They are popping up all over the place,” Whitten said. “Storage is definitely becoming a part of a lot of projects. It’s a potential game-changer.”

Tesla shares will fall dramatically the rest of this year due to its high valuation and rising competition, according to J.P. Morgan.

The firm reaffirmed its underweight rating on Tesla shares, saying other automakers may price their electric cars aggressively.

Tesla has a “highly differentiated business model, appealing product portfolio, and leading-edge technology, which we believe are more than offset by above-average execution risk and valuation that seems to be pricing in a lot,” analyst Ryan Brinkman said in a note to clients Friday. “We have highlighted more concerns regarding increased competition, including from automakers looking to use the sale of battery electric vehicles to subsidize their more lucrative internal combustion engine portfolio vehicles from a legal, regulatory, and compliance perspective, rather than trying to generate profit on the sale of these battery electric vehicles in and of themselves.”

Tesla’s stock fell 2.1 percent Friday. Its shares are up 3 percent so far this year through Thursday versus the S&P 500’s 5 percent gain.

Brinkman reaffirmed his $180 December 2018 price target for Tesla shares, representing 44 percent downside from Thursday’s close.

The analyst is cautious on the company’s second-quarter financial numbers. It is slated to report its June quarter earnings results on Aug. 1, according to its website. Tesla said on July 2 that it reached its one-week production goal of 5,000 Model 3 cars during the last week of the June quarter.

“We continue to be concerned that free cash flow has the potential to be a larger outflow, given the fact that the much heralded production rate improvement,” he said. “Additionally, we worry about margin, given the potential for overtime, premium freight, and other expenses employed to ramp production in a seemingly inefficient manner.”

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The race to produce safe, powerful and affordable solid-state lithium batteries is accelerating and recent announcements about game-changing research using a solid non-flammable ceramic electrolyte known as garnet has some in the race calling it revolutionary.

“This is a paradigm shift in energy storage,” said Kelsey Hatzell, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. A paper – “The Effect of Pore Connectivity on Li Dendrite Propagation Within LLZO Electrolytes Observed with Synchrotron X-ray Tomography” – describing her novel research on the failure points of a garnet electrolyte was published online in March in the American Chemical Society’s Energy Letters, which was among the most read ACS Letters articles that month.

Lithium-ion batteries typically contain a liquid organic electrolyte that can catch fire. The fire risk is eliminated by the use of a non-flammable garnet-based electrolyte. Replacing liquid electrolytes with a solid organic like garnet also potentially lowers the cost by increasing battery life.

“Solid-state batteries are desirable for all-electric vehicles and other applications where energy storage and safety are paramount,” Hatzell said.

Hatzell’s team tested Li7La3Zr2O12 – Lithium lanthanum Zirconium Oxide or LLZO – a garnet-type material that shows great promise for all-solid-state battery applications due to its high Li-ion conductivity and its compatibility with Li metal.

“Understanding the failure mechanisms within these electrolyte systems is critical for designing resilient solid electrolyte systems,” said Hatzell. “The primary limitation of LLZO is the propensity for short-circuiting events at low current densities.”

Hatzell’s study tracks structural changes in LLZO after realistic charging and discharging events using synchrotron X-ray tomography. This technique allows the researchers to look inside the battery and view 3D structural features with sub-micron resolutions.

“Most techniques that image lithium in a solid electrolyte are done destructively or ex situ using scanning electron or optical microscopy techniques. Testing the material under more realistic conditions using synchrotron tools allows us to probe buried interfaces,” said Hatzell, whose co-authors are Fengyu Shen, a postdoctoral scholar, and graduate students Xianghui Xiao and Marm Dixit.

“There are only a handful of synchrotrons and neutron sources that exist in the world. Marm was one of 60 graduate students selected for the 2017 National School on Neutron and X-ray Scattering. “As a part of this program he spent one week at Oak Ridge National Lab and one week at Argonne National lab,” Hatzell said.

Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source and ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotope Reactor allow nanoscale study of advanced materials and interactions. Dixit was able to work and learn synchrotron characterization techniques from leading scientists and experts. Hatzell’s team conducted all of its testing at Argonne.

“These results can potentially inform materials design for the next generation of all solid-state battery systems. The results concluded that the presence of voids or connected pores led to a higher failure rate,” Hatzell said.

“While there is still a lot of research to be done to bring solid state devices to the market, their promise for applications in high-energy density batteries and electric vehicle applications is stirring a lot of interest across the globe.”

Dual-listed Namibian lithium developer and emerging lithium concentrate producer Desert Lion Energy’s off-take partner, Jiangxi Jinhui Lithium Co., has cleared the first 30 000 t shipment of lithium concentrate and will shortly begin processing the product at their facility in China.

Namibia – Desert Lion Energy expects to deliver an additional 60 000 t of lithium concentrate from its sorting operations by the end of the third quarter of 2018, ahead of the anticipated start of production from the floatation plant in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Desert Lion Energy entered into a binding offtake agreement with Chinese lepidolite converter Jiangxi Jinhui Lithium Co. in March to acquire all the lithium concentrate from Phase 1 production of stockpiled material that contains not less than 2.0% lithium oxide (Li2O) and up to a maximum of 120 000 tonnes of lithium concentrate containing not less than 1.7% Li2O located on Desert Lion Energy’s Rubicon and Helikon properties in Namibia.

Management estimates that there are approximately 700 000 – 750 000 t of stockpiled material located on the Rubicon and Helikon properties that will produce approximately 150 000 – 160 000 t of lithium concentrate for sale to Jiangxi Jinhui Lithium Co. under the agreement over the next 12 to 18 months.

Mineral resource estimate and PEA under way

Moreover, Desert Lion Energy is currently completing work on its mineral resource estimate (MRE) and preliminary economic assessment (PEA), which is expected to be complete in the second half of August 2018.

The MRE will focus on exploration work conducted at the historic Rubicon and Helikon mines, including the 20 000 m drill programme concluded earlier this year, and the PEA will contain economics on all of the proposed phases of Desert Lion Energy’s production plan.

Following the production of lithium concentrate from stockpiled material in December 2017, Desert Lion Energy will commence production of lithium concentrate from in situ ore, which is expected to commence in the second half of 2019.

Sociedad Quimica y Minera (SQM) has started the process of gaining approval from the Chile Government for the $450m expansion of a lithium carbonate plant in the Salar del Carmen near Antofagasta.

The expansion project is expected to allow the company to double its lithium carbonate production and meet growing demand from manufacturers of batteries and electric cars, Reuters reported.

In an environmental impact statement, the miner was cited by the news agency as stating that the planned two-phase upgrade would ramp-up production of lithium carbonate from 70,000t to 180,000t per annum.

SQM is planning to bring the facility online in 2020. The company was quoted by Reuters as saying: “In the first operational phase, production will be increased to 110,000t per year by increasing the current operating capacity of our equipment and processes.”

Under the second expansion phase, the company has plans to install new equipment and undertake modification of existing equipment to step-up production at Lithium Carbonate Plant 3.

In January, SQM reached a truce deal with the Chilean Government to settle a dispute over a key lithium deposit and increase its production share in the Salar de Atacama region.

The lithium plant project is likely to start at the end of this year.

SQM produces lithium carbonate based on lithium chloride solutions obtained in the Salar de Atacama as a by-product of potassium chloride production.

Salar de Atacama is a saline body containing brine deposits and hosts high-quality reserves of lithium.

Battery-electric buses have noticeable environmental benefits over diesel and natural gas buses in the form of fewer greenhouse gas emissions, even when taking into consideration the electricity generated to operate and charge the buses, according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The study examined electricity generation in all parts of the country and factored that into the environmental friendliness of electric buses throughout their lifecycle. It found that when averaging results from across the country, electric battery buses are 2.5 times cleaner in terms of lifecycle emissions than diesel buses.

Operating electric buses on the West Coast is the cleanest because of the amount of hydro, wind and solar power used to generate electricity there. Places like the Midwest that still use coal power have more emissions for generating the electric buses’ electricity, yet the emissions produced are still fewer than operating diesel buses.

The study notes that more than 85 transit agencies throughout the country have begun adding electric buses to their fleets. The number has grown quickly just in the last year, with cities including Dallas, St. Louis, MO, New York City and Washington, DC all investing in some electric buses. The federal government recently granted $264 million to cities to improve their bus systems, with a significant portion going toward adding electric buses.

Electric buses are lauded not just for their lower emissions but also for being quieter and having lower operating costs than diesel and natural gas buses.

This study is interesting because it considers the environmental effects of generating the electricity used to power the buses. A lot of other research solely looks at the emissions from the buses themselves, which doesn’t necessarily provide a complete analysis of the vehicles’ effects.

One lifecycle factor that the study did not include, though, is end-of-life battery disposal. “This analysis focused on direct global warming emissions during the production of fuel and operation of the bus,” Jimmy O’Dea, senior vehicles analyst at UCS and study author, told Smart Cities Dive.

Although battery-electric vehicles create fewer emissions, they do create waste if the vehicle outlives a battery and therefore require a new one. Electric batteries are lasting longer and longer as the technology advances, but the average standard electric car battery still is only estimated to function optimally for 8-10 years, and factors like high temperatures can shorten life. The average useful life of a bus in the United States is 12 years.

Even so, researchers view electric-battery buses as a more long-term environmentally friendly option than diesel or natural gas buses. Plus, research and development on electric vehicle batteries is advancing new uses for the spent batteries as well as better recycling options.

“Battery recycling and disposal is a smaller greenhouse gas issue compared to the rest of the lifecycle of the bus, but it is an important consideration as more and more electric vehicles hit the road,” O’Dea said. “I’m encouraged to see many companies considering secondary uses for batteries after they reach the end of their useful life in a vehicle and other companies exploring the recycling of battery materials. This is encouraging because re-purposing spent fuel is not an option we have with combustion vehicles.”