Uh oh, it’s fixing to be a battle between reality and leftist ideology—but who will win?
Writing for Fox News, Charles Creitz recently reported on a very inconvenient truth, from a new study: fracking wastewater is full of lithium, making it a “promising domestic source” if tapped, and the process to extract it “reduces the cost” of traditional water decontamination efforts. Here are the details, from Creitz:
Major lithium discovery in fracking wastewater leaves the left facing EV ‘irony’
A University of Pittsburgh study suggested processing byproducts from natural gas production in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale basin could potentially meet nearly half of U.S. lithium needs.
…
In the study, published in Nature’s ‘Scientific Reports,’ estimates of annual lithium yields from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale totaled 1,278 tons. The Marcellus Shale range covers large swaths of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia.
One of the researchers, Justin Mackey, told KDKA that in addition to supplying substantial amounts of lithium, processing the wastewater in that way ‘reduce[s] the cost of remediating and handling’ it….
Not only is lithium a crucial component for everything the left likes to inaccurately file under “net zero” technologies (electric vehicles, solar panel energy storage systems, wind turbines), but it’s necessary for basically all electronics—the computer I’m using to write this blog, and the phone from which you may be reading it. In the U.S., we’re largely reliant on foreign lithium, as Australia, Chile, and China produce 90% of the lithium on the global market—which leaves us in a precarious position if there are any supply chain disruptions or price fluctuations—so sourcing it from dirty fracking water, in a process that reduces the cost companies already pay to clean the contaminated water, is quite a good deal for the American consumer, economy, and environment.
And, not only that, but considering how utterly filthy and destructive to the environment the traditional lithium mining process is—just think how much worse it is in unbound-by-climate-deals China—it’s an even better deal to use the market, or the law of supply-and-demand, to diminish our dependence on products that come with ecologically devastating consequences.
If we were to implement this lithium-from-fracking-water process only at the Marcellus Shale, with its almost 1,300-ton annual yield of lithium, it would bump the U.S. into one of the top lithium producers in the world, contributing more lithium to the market than 185 nations combined. (Out of 193 nations, the bottom 185 produce together 700 tons of lithium each year.)
Creitz also reported that the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania alone employed more than 100,000 union jobs—and in an era of Bidenomics, those private sector jobs are beyond crucial, because they’re what’s keeping everything from totally collapsing.
I mean, we’ve got natural gas, we’ve got tons (literally) of lithium, we’ve got tons (figuratively) of jobs, and a seriously low environmental impact—this is like a win-win-win-win.
And you know what that means? The political class and the bureaucracy will shut it down, and shut it down fast.
