C OV ER S T OR I ES
C6 Monday, December 27, 2010 • THE BULLETIN
Lithium
Horacio Dias, a geologist and manager of the mining company Exar, points to the moonscape-like environment high in the Andes where his Canadianowned mine is searching for lithium.
Continued from C1 A typical battery uses only a few pounds of lithium, but other components make such batteries expensive — by some estimates, well over $10,000 each — and bulky. Failure could mean that cars such as General Motors’ new Volt, a gas-electric hybrid that costs $41,000 before a $7,500 federal tax rebate to buyers, will remain too pricey for all but a small number of American car buyers. The Volt can go about 40 miles on an electric charge before the driver must switch to the car’s internal-combustion engine. Fully electric cars can go 100 or more miles between recharges.
Juan Forero The Washington Post
Promising projections “We need to demonstrate that we can reduce the cost of this over the next four or five years to make the sale of these things take off without government stimulus,” said David Vieau, chief executive of A123, which received a $249 million federal grant to build factories in Michigan. “It is a critical component for getting the volume up and helping drive the cost out while we make these batteries more efficient.” Some of the projections on the future of electric cars — and lithium use in cars
Retro Continued from C1 “I thought it would be kind of a lark,” he said. “I didn’t realize there was such demand for them.” Now he is turning out several typewriters a week, with a two- to three-week lead time for new orders.
Like a keyboard Zylkin says he starts with a typewriter that has been refurbished by a retired Remington salesman, then wires it with a sensor board that recognizes when a key is pressed. It leads to a USB plug that makes the typewriter work like any computer keyboard. Even if the type bar doesn’t hit the platen, a computer will recognize the input, but if you bang the keys hard enough you can make an old-school hard copy on paper while a computer also records your keystrokes. The typewriters sell for $600 to $900 at the website Etsy, although it is $400 if you supply your own typewriter. If you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can buy Zylkin’s doit-yourself conversion kit for $70. A variation of this theme of fashioning the old into new relies on the smart design of the old Western Electric Bell telephones. Consider the handset. Unlike today’s telephone earpieces and cabled headphone and mic arrangements, the large handset put the speaker over the ear and the microphone next to the mouth so bystanders weren’t forced to listen to bellowed phone conversations. The gadget purveyors ThinkGeek have taken that old handset and added Bluetooth so you can have some privacy while connected wirelessly to a mobile phone.
— are promising. Nissan has said that by 2020, one in 10 cars worldwide may use lithium batteries. And Pike Research, a consulting firm in Boulder, Colo., said the market for lithium-ion batteries could expand to $8 billion in five years, from less than $900 million this year. “Virtually every major car company around the globe has some sort of a hybrid electric vehicle program going,” Vieau said.
Electric cars and their gaselectric cousins are not new. Ferdinand Porsche’s hybrid was presented at a Paris exhibition in 1900. In the United States, there were 50,000 electric cars plying the roads in 1918. But big oil discoveries and Henry Ford’s introduction of the Model T quickly established the dominance of the internal-combustion engine. It is only now, with the United States consuming more than twice as much oil as it produces, that policymakers are consider-
The $25 handset can transmit and receive at a distance of about 30 feet from your phone. Crosley Radio has been making the old new again since the early 1980s when a group of investors bought a discarded radio brand and started cranking out replica radios. The company has replica Wurlitzer-style jukeboxes that play music from CDs or iPods. “What really rolls out the door is the turntables, that has been a runaway train,” said James LeMastus, president of Crosley. The company has had a hit with the Crosley AV Room Portable USB turntable, made exclusively for the youth-oriented clothing chain Urban Outfitters. The $160 portable player has built-in speakers and an amp, and a USB connection so it can be used with a computer to turn songs on vinyl records into MP3s. The company makes about 25 styles of turntables, some with iPod docks and CD and cassette tape players and recorders. They can be found at stores such as Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn and online.
also popular with podcasters and VoIP users who want to sound as smooth as Orson Welles. The X-Tube looks like a vacuum tube from inside an old radio that would have broadcast Welles. It’s really a small processor that plugs into a computer through a USB connection to produce surround sound for headphones. The warm glow? A blue LED light.
Hi-fi reproduction The Yeti from Blue Microphones may look like something from the golden age of radio, but it is the first THX-certified microphone, meaning it is capable of high-fidelity reproduction. While it looks as if it belongs on the desk of Walter Winchell, it has three built-in miniature mics that can capture sound three ways: from just in front of the mic, in stereo or from an entire room. The Yeti works on PCs and Macs and requires no software drivers to work, although there is a free recording program for it in the iTunes store. Good enough to record your band’s demo, the $150 mic is
Fooling the brain The device processes DTS Surround Sensation software to alter the volume of certain frequencies and add delays to some sounds, all psychoacoustic tricks to fool the brain into perceiving sound as coming not just from left and right, but from the front and back as well. The device, which comes with over-the-ear headphones, isn’t easy to find in the United States, but can be ordered from Japan for about $95. Sometimes, retro designers cloak the electronics in something other than older electronics. Makers of laptop covers usually brag about the high-tech materials they use: high-impact plastics, advanced neoprenes or carbon fiber. Twelve South brags that its MacBook Pro and iPad cases use old-fashioned bookbinding technology. The covers are leather-bound and distressed to look like a collectible volume. The cases have a hard cover on top and bottom, with a zipper around the center to keep your computer secure. The BookBook covers are priced at $80 to $100, depending on the size of your computer. The company says the covers disguise the device inside and could deter thieves — unless they know that many collectible books are worth far more than the next new thing.
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ing a shift that would place less emphasis on gasoline-powered vehicles. If that happens, the role of lithium will expand dramatically, with mining companies scrambling to secure the metal, said Ann Marie Sastry, chief executive of Sakti3, an Ann Arbor, Mich., company that is working to develop batteries with more juice. Lithium is now used in ceramics, to power cell phones and laptops, and even as a component in drugs to
Green Continued from C1 And in April, the state received $20 million in Recovery Act money to expand a Portland pilot program, Clean Energy Works Portland, across the state, creating hundreds of jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Energy and Clean Energy Works Portland. Cylvia Hayes, CEO of 3E Strategies, said all the activity has generated more interest than she’s seen in her 22 years in the field. “It’s really only the last two years that anybody has cared,” she said. “It really has been a sea change.” But Oregon has been ahead of the wave, Hayes said, noting the state was the first in the nation to have a green jobs economist, Charlie Johnson, who works in the Employment Department. The Green Jobs Growth Plan also mentions Oregon’s lead in sustainability efforts. It points out The Pew Charitable Trusts’ reference to Oregon in a 2009 report as one of three states, along with Colorado and Tennessee, with large and fast-growing cleanenergy economies. Being out front helped Oregon when it came time to dole out stimulus money, according to the plan, which the Legislature authorized in 2009. While it contains many recommendations, the green
treat manic depression. Much of the world has had its eyes on Bolivia, which President Evo Morales claims has infinitely more of the metal than all other lithium-producing countries combined. His socialist government is trying to lure mining companies, but Bolivia’s terms call for those investors to also fund a Bolivian-based lithiumion battery industry.
Obstacles While Japanese and South Korean companies have expressed interest, none is producing lithium in Bolivia. And in October, Morales held a news conference to lament that firms “want to invest just to buy lithium.” “And why do they want to buy only lithium carbonate from us?” Morales asked. “So the lithium battery industry remains outside Bolivia.” Jon Hykawy, a lithium analyst at Byron Capital Markets in Toronto, said another obstacle to mining lithium in Bolivia is that the 4,000-squaremile Uyuni salt flats where the metal is found are also laced with high concentrations of magnesium. That, combined with a nationalistic government and substandard roads, would make production highly expensive, he said. “There are major lithium producers,” Hykawy said, “and they’ve all backed away.” Instead, production is picking up in Chile, the world’s largest
jobs plan’s core calls for identifying key industry sectors with the highest potential for creating green jobs and getting measurable results over the study’s eight-year time frame. Four top-priority sectors — energy efficiency, renewable energy production and generation, green manufacturing, and energy transmission and storage — should see 30 percent cumulative job growth over the period. Four second-tier sectors — green building and development, transportation, agriculture and sustainable forestry, and environmental technologies and services — should see 13 percent.
Coordinated approach To achieve the outcomes, the Green Jobs Growth Plan calls for developing a coordinated — or sectoral — approach. It recommends bringing together industry, government, education and labor to identify needed resources, such as financing, training, materials and others. It also calls for support to help construction workers develop green-building skills, recommends enhanced, coordinated green-jobs training and career programs, and suggests increasing sustainability literacy for stu-
producer, and in Argentina. The two countries account for more than half of the world’s lithium production. Among the big players are New Jersey-based Rockwood Holdings and the Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile, both of which mine salt flats in Chile. In Argentina, the companies include FMC of Charlotte, which relocated here from Bolivia, and Orocobre of Australia, which has agreed to provide lithium from Argentina for a major supplier to Toyota. Exar, the Argentine affiliate of Lithium Americas, has been punching exploration holes in the Cauchari-Olaroz salt flats, a moonscape-like plateau in northern Argentina not far from the Bolivian border. Evaporation tanks are used to remove the brine, leaving behind lithium that is then tested in a lab to determine its mixture with other elements. One cannot really see the finished product. Highly reactive, lithium does not occur freely in nature. “We cannot show off lithium as if it were some metal ingot,” Dias, the geologist and Exar manager, said in the company’s lab. “We only have it in a molecular state, or diluted in the brine.” But Exar and its shareholders, among them Mitsubishi, think the salt beds here may contain up to 8 million tons of lithium. That would give the company control over the world’s thirdlargest deposit.
dents in the K-12 system. The plan acknowledges the state’s budget crisis, saying most recommendations will not require additional state funding. But fully developing the top four industry sectors will cost about $1 million in the first biennium. Some members of the Oregon Senate received a summary of the Green Jobs Growth Plan earlier this month, and the entire plan, which was completed in early November, is expected to be presented to the new Legislature sometime after it convenes next month. While federal stimulus money generated much excitement about the green economy, Hayes does not believe the interest will run out with the money. In Oregon, training for jobs in the industry began before Congress approved the 2009 Recovery Act, she said, mentioning the renewable energy technology program Columbia Gorge Community College began offering in 2007. “I believe that it’s an evolution of the entire economy and work force,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s a narrow focus that will shift (when stimulus funding ends.)” Tim Doran can be reached at 541-383-0360 or at tdoran@bendbulletin.com.
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