Adam Simon on Battery Metals
Listen to the podcast here or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the podcast, Simon concentrates on the three metals — nickel, cobalt, and manganese — that form part of a lithium-ion battery’s cathode. He explains how they facilitate transfer of lithium ions into and out of the cathode and improve battery characteristics, such as energy density, charging and discharging capacity, and battery lifetime. But his favorite metal is copper, since it is fundamental to the energy transition in so many ways and because we will need such prodigious amounts of it. He describes his current efforts to help locate new copper deposits from the chemical and isotopic fingerprints they leave in ground water.
Simon is Professor of Economic Geology at the University of Michigan.
Podcast Illustrations
The principle of the lithium-ion battery showing the intercalation of lithium ions (yellow spheres) into the anode and cathode matrices upon charge and discharge, respectively. The anode is lined with a copper sheet to collect the current, and the cathode is made of graphite with varying amounts of the metals discussed in the podcast — nickel, cobalt, and manganese. The metals facilitate the transfer of charge to and from the lithium ions within the cathode.
Ghiji, M., et al (2020), Energies 13, 5117
Battery Metal Deposit Types
In the podcast, Simon talked about the geological origin of the economically important deposit types highlighted in red.
Lithium
Map showing sites of major lithium pegmatite and lithium brine deposits.
Adam Simon
Lithium Pegmatites
As Simon explains in the podcast, in the final phases of the emplacement of a granite, highly evolved, silica-rich melt can crystallize into pegmatites, which can have giant meter-scale crystals of the lithium-bearing mineral spodumene. MPa: megapascals.
David Silva
Greenbushes lithium pegmatite mine in Australia, where the lithium mineral spodumene occurs in pegmatite veins associated with a granite intrusion.
Talison Lithium Pty Ltd.
Sample of spodumene, the lithium mineral that occurs in economically important quantities in pegmatites associated with granite. It is a pyroxene consisting of lithium aluminum inosilicate, LiAl(SiO3)2. This sample is about 14-cm long.
Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com
Lithium Brines
The diagram shows how ground waters rich in lithium accumulate in salars and are then concentrated by evaporation.
Bradley Cave
Brines
As Simon says in the podcast, the largest lithium brine sources occur in a triangle spanning Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. The Salar de Uyini, the world’s largest lithium deposit, occurs in western Bolivia.
Economist
Lithium brine evaporation ponds in the Atacama desert. Brine is pumped out of a nearby lake into a series of evaporation ponds. Over a period of 12-18 months, the water evaporates and salts precipitate, including lithium in the form of lithium carbonate.
Photo: Sociedad Quimica Mineral de Chile
Schematic of direct lithium extraction from lithium-rich ground water. This process does not result in the depletion of ground water, which is important, especially in desert regions.
LazerRocDoc
Copper
Location of major copper deposits. Not all deposits shown have been mined.
Adam Simon
Formation of Copper Porphyry Deposits
In the podcast, Simon describes how, in magmatically active environments such as above subduction zones, water exsolves from a rising, decompressing granitic melt to form bubbles. These accumulate at the top of a magma chamber. The copper present in the magma preferentially partitions out of the magma into the bubbles. Then, as the bubbles rise toward the surface, cooling and further decompressing, copper minerals precipitate out to form veins in the groundmass of the porphyritic rock that forms. In the figure, the copper-bearing veins are shown diagrammatically in red. Porphyritic deposits supply 60 percent of global copper.
W.J. McMillan for the B.C. & Yukon Chamber of Mines
Bingham Canyon open cast porphyry copper mine, Utah, U.S.
Eric Prado
Sample of copper-sulfide-rich ore from the Golpu porphyry copper deposit, Papua New Guinea. This ore is 2.15 percent copper by weight and also contains 2.23g of gold per ton.
GeoInsite
Copper sheets produced at the Ruashi copper-cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The sheets are sent to battery manufacturers who machine it to size. Left to right: Brandon Finn, Pascal Mambwe, and Adam Simon.
Adam Simon
Nickel
Location of laterite and magmatic nickel deposits and of sedimentary cobalt deposits. Most of these deposits contain cobalt, as indicated on the map.
Adam Simon
Open cast laterite nickel deposit, New Caledonia. New Caledonia contains over 7 million tons of nickel, or about 10 percent of the world’s nickel reserves.
Garnierite nickel ore sample from Camps Des Sapins mine, New Caledonia. Garnierite is a complex nickel silicate mineral that precipitates out at the base of a weathered zone of ultramafic rocks from the breakdown of olivine.
Didier Descouens
Cobalt
World map showing the distribution of major cobalt-bearing mineral deposits, which contain at least 500,000 tons of cobalt, and selected smaller deposits that represent minor types. The sizes of the symbols for terrestrial deposits reflect the amounts of cobalt they contain.
USGS
The Ruashi sediment-hosted copper-cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Adam Simon
Cobalt and copper ore from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The black mineral is a cobalt oxy-hydroxide mineral called heterogenite, and the green mineral is the common hydrous copper phyllosilicate mineral called chrysocolla.
Adam Simon
Manganese
World map showing distribution of terrestrial sedimentary and supergene manganese deposits and manganese nodule concentrations in the oceans. Supergene ore deposits are those that are formed by rain-water circulation and concomitant oxidation and chemical weathering of manganese-bearing rocks near the Earth’s surface. The manganese is present in the rocks as oxides, hydroxides, silicates, and carbonates. The term “supergene” in ore deposit geology refers to processes or enrichments that occur relatively near the surface as opposed to deep hypogene processes.
Adam Simon
The Groote Eylandt manganese mine in Northern Territory, Australia. The ore is mined by shallow open-cut mining methods and is transported by road to a nearby port.
Northern Territory government
The manganese dioxide mineral pyrolusite is one of the most common manganese minerals.
Shutterstock