Why Your Next Phone Could Be Powered By Seawater
Lithium is more than just a pretty solid Nirvana track – it’s also the reason that the portable computer in your pocket can keep on tweeting, e-mailing and otherwise vibrating for hours on end.
But soon there may not be enough available to go around.
As the demand for long-lasting batteries in cell-phones, laptops, and electric cars increases, so too does demand for Lithium, their key ingredient.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimated recently that conventional lithium reserves provide enough for production of 37,000 tons of the element per year for 365 years. That sounds like a lot, but with over a million electric cars expected in 2020, the development of battery clusters that power smart homes (like Tesla’s Powerwall), and increasing availability of lithium-powered consumer electronics, demand is sure to rise exponentially every year.
To battle the problem of Lithium shortage, researchers are looking to some unconventional sources. In Japan, for instance, scientists at the Atomic Energy Agency are working on a method to extract lithium from seawater through dialysis. According to a report from MIT Technology Review, “The system is based on a dialysis cell with a membrane consisting of a superconductor material,” a sentence which presumably means something to someone, somewhere.
Though the method is a long way away from being used commercially, one of the lead scientists on the project, Tsuyoshi Hoshino wrote that this particular method of extracting Lithium “shows good energy efficiency and is easily scalable.” Hoshino adds that his method could be commercialized in five years.
If Hoshino’s method makes it to commercialization, it could be a huge boom for the lithium battery industry, especially to powerhouse Tesla. Mineral assays of Nevada’s salt lakes have shown promising concentrations of lithium, which also happens to be where the battery pioneer plans to build its massive battery production plant, known as the “Gigafactory.”
For now, though, we’re stuck with a reliance on more conventional lithium sources.
Chart of the Day: Boosting Corporate Tax Revenues
The leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have all proposed increasing taxes on corporations, including raising income tax rates to levels ranging from 25% to 35%, up from the current 21% imposed by the Republican tax cuts in 2017. With Bernie Sanders leading the way at $3.9 trillion, here’s how much revenue the higher proposed corporate taxes, along with additional proposed surtaxes and reduced tax breaks, would generate over a decade, according to calculations by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, highlighted Wednesday by Bloomberg News.
Chart of the Day: Discretionary Spending Droops
The federal government’s total non-defense discretionary spending – which covers everything from education and national parks to veterans’ medical care and low-income housing assistance – equals 3.2% of GDP in 2020, near historic lows going back to 1962, according to an analysis this week from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Chart of the Week: Trump Adds $4.7 Trillion in Debt
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated this week that President Trump has now signed legislation that will add a total of $4.7 trillion to the national debt between 2017 and 2029. Tax cuts and spending increases account for similar portions of the projected increase, though if the individual tax cuts in the 2017 Republican overhaul are extended beyond their current expiration date at the end of 2025, they would add another $1 trillion in debt through 2029.
Chart of the Day: The Long Decline in Interest Rates
Are interest rates destined to move higher, increasing the cost of private and public debt? While many experts believe that higher rates are all but inevitable, historian Paul Schmelzing argues that today’s low-interest environment is consistent with a long-term trend stretching back 600 years.
The chart “shows a clear historical downtrend, with rates falling about 1% every 60 years to near zero today,” says Bloomberg’s Aaron Brown. “Rates do tend to revert to a mean, but that mean seems to be declining.”
Chart of the Day: Drug Price Plans Compared
Lawmakers are considering three separate bills that are intended to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Here’s an overview of the proposals, from a series of charts produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation this week. An interesting detail highlighted in another chart: 88% of voters – including 92% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans – want to give the government the power to negotiate prices with drug companies.
