According to The Daily Galaxy, The McDermitt Caldera, an ancient supervolcano straddling the Nevada-Oregon border, may hold the world’s largest lithium deposit ever discovered. With estimates ranging between 20 and 40 million metric tons. This is roughly $433 Billion and with this discovery adding to those already made in the USA, the US is now poised to become the worlds greatest producer of lithium.
China has held this distinction so far, and has used it to dominate the lithium battery market that the world is rapidly becoming more dependent on. For the US, lithium is crucial for it’s increasing military needs as well as powering everything from automobiles to hedge trimmers.
When lithium mining in the US starts increasing, manufacturing of goods will also start increasing. Because when the batteries are made here instead of being imported from China, many of the products that use them will be too. Between the tariffs on foreign goods and the cost of shipping, it will be cheaper to make many products here, in part or in whole. Shipping those batteries is expensive, they’re very heavy. Right now, the weight of the lithium batteries in cars is more than the motors that they power, though work continues to make them both lighter and more efficient.
What this means is at least a partial shift away from China’s manufacturing dominance back to the USA. China’s economy is said to be weakening for a variety of reasons and if true, this will contribute to that decline.
For that reason alone this is an extremely fortuitous discovery, since China’s ambitions of global domination are no secret and their near monopoly of lithium has helped fuel their goal. Those days are now ending.
Uncertainty is more than a principle of math, it’s a fact of existence. Just when we think our future is set in cement, something new always comes along. By the way, have you heard about Asteroid 2024 YR4?