TheNext Lithium Boom? Assessment of U.S. DomesticProduction Pathways through Economic and Environmental Lenses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines current and future lithium production from primary resources in the United States, with a focus on economic viability and environmental sustainability using factory-level data. Four production methods/resources were evaluated: conventional brine extraction from Silver Peak, direct lithium extraction from Clayton Valley, sedimentary rock in Thacker Pass, and hard-rock spodumene sourced from Canada and refined in Texas. The key economic performance indicators include capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX and OPEX), net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR), and payback period (PBP) across 21 lithium carbonate price scenarios ($10,000 to $50,000/ton LCE) over 20 years. DLE shows the lowest CAPEX but the highest OPEX due to higher energy use. Estimated OPEX per ton LCE is $6350 for Thacker Pass, $4600 for Silver Peak, $7850 for DLE, and $6100 for Hard Rock. Environmental assessments show CO<sub>2</sub> emissions (tons per ton LCE) of 10 for Thacker Pass, 4.3 for Silver Peak, 17.4 for DLE, and 17.6 for Hard Rock. While DLE and hard rock methods have higher emissions, Silver Peak stands out as the most environmentally efficient due to its use of solar evaporation and low chemical usage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.067 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".