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This summer, 12 turbines started spinning at Greenway Self-Park, which bills itself, somewhat oxymoronically, as Chicago's first Earth-friendly parking garage.

Open-screen walls on the 11-story garage provide ventilation and reveal the cars inside, but also let passersby marvel at the turbines. The garage also has a cistern rain-collection system, sustainable building materials, a recycling program and an electric car charging station.

Lobbies on each floor include information about how to live more sustainably, and the garage has energy-efficient lighting. The garage is pursuing pursuing LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. It even has a reversible meter that can measure and return power to Chicago's grid throughout the year.

Architect Todd Halamka, director of design at the Chicago office of HOK, tells Fast Company he wanted to celebrate the building's function, not hide it.

One wonders how green a parking garage can really be, but it's not like cars are going away anytime soon, so garages might as well aim to ameliorate their impact.

And at the very least, it adds to the architecturally interesting experience of parking in downtown Chicago -- you can go underneath trains, curl up through Marina City, and now this.

[Fast Company]

The project goes beyond the highway itself to include local economies along the route. The plan calls for increased local ethanol production from waste and other resources found along the way, as well as clean electricity to power both the cars and infrastructure along the way. The plan also is toying with the idea of installing geothermal heat pumps, providing information to cars on their emission levels, and installing smart lighting systems along the way that adjust illumination levels depending on the weather and other factors.

The plan isn't concrete yet, but the Loviisa municipality is spearheading a study and other efforts to determine its feasibility. The green highway would complete a stretch of exiting highway and would link Turku on the country's southwestern coast with Vaalimaa near the border with Russia. If the project doesn't hit too many speedbumps, it could begin construction as early as the second half of next year, completing construction by 2016 at a cost of $900 million.

All this sounds good, but if Finland gets the EU financial support it's hoping for, we'd like to see them spring for solar and vibration harvesting road surfaces that generate electricity for the grid. And what about self-sufficient solar-powered roadway lighting? Those technologies haven't all been perfected just yet, but with an 81-mile project to work on over the next six years researchers and private industry could probably learn -- and accomplish -- a lot.

[PhysOrg]

Lithium is cheap and widely available, so why do we care about a new resource in a war zone? Because it’s another counter to the irrational fear that the automobile’s lithium-powered electric future is doomed before it begins

Drowned in the noise, however, was a fascinating bit of news: that just this month a Pentagon team was hunting for minerals in Afghanistan’s dry lakes, and that early findings suggested that one site alone might contain more lithium than Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, which is believed to hold up to half the world’s known supply.

Why is this significant? Because even if Afghanistan’s lithium never leaves the ground, the sudden, black-swan appearance of a new and potentially massive resource helps further debunk the myth that the world is running out of lithium and that, as a result, an electric-car revival that relies on lithium-based batteries is doomed before it begins.

Too much of the coverage of lithium seems to be driven by the idea that it is slightly more rare than unicorn hide. It’s not. Extremely conservative estimates from the USGS peg world lithium reserves at 9.9 million metric tons, and the number is almost certainly much higher. By contrast, in 2008 (because of the recession, 2009 was an unrepresentative year) the world’s lithium mines produced 25,400 metric tons. Those mines will need to produce more in the coming years as lithium-ion batteries start going into cars, but that shouldn’t be a problem: more than 100 companies worldwide are moving into the market.

If lithium isn’t rare, however, it is unfamiliar and misunderstood. It is an exotic, intriguing element—the lightest metal in the periodic table, and therefore the ideal carrier ion for a battery. It has been called “the yeast in the dough” of the most advanced batteries we have today, the power packs that will drive the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf, both of which arrive later this year. Most of the blue-sky battery technologies in the lab now are designed to surpass lithium-ion batteries by jamming far more lithium atoms into their electrodes per unit volume and mass, thereby storing more usable electrons, so lithium will be an essential element in the construction of a clean-energy future. That’s a very good reason to pay close attention to the countries and the companies that produce it. But that doesn’t mean there’s not enough of the stuff to go around.

Here’s the backstory on the Afghanistan mineral findings. In 2007 the USGS published an estimate of Afghan mineral resources that showed that the country contained vast untouched deposits of iron, copper, rare-earth elements and other high-demand minerals. The report barely touched on lithium, simply mentioning that deposits of a rock known as pegmatite could yield “a variety of commodities,” including lithium.

Particularly in Australia companies do mine pegmatite for lithium, but digging and blasting that hard rock out of the ground and breaking it down into usable lithium is expensive, at least compared with lithium production from brines. In certain geologically anomalous spots around the world, there are large salt flats that are saturated with water rich in lithium and other minerals. Extracting lithium from the right kind of salt flat is a cheap and low-impact matter of pumping lithium-rich water from the flat into a series of evaporation ponds, where it bakes in the sun until it is concentrated into an oily yellow solution of 6 percent lithium. Currently, two of the three largest lithium producers in the world get their supply from a single salt flat in northern Chile, the Salar de Atacama. Across the border in Bolivia is the much larger Salar de Uyuni, which is loaded with lithium but which, for political and technical reasons, is still at least a few years from sending lithium to the market.

The penultimate paragraph of the Times story suggested that Afghanistan might have one dry salt lake richer than either of these. And that’s a major point that never appeared in a public USGS report.

Neither the Pentagon nor the USGS will elaborate on the mention in the Times story of a salt-lake lithium source. In an otherwise candid conversation, Jack Medlin of the USGS declined to provide any more details on the subject. Major Shawn Turner, a Pentagon spokesperson, said he had nothing to add.

According to Jack Shroder, a geologist at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies, a high-altitude plain that’s about a 70-mile drive northwest of the city of Ghazni known as the Dasht-i-Nawar is the obvious candidate for the mysterious Afghan mother lode. Shroder said he didn’t know for certain that this was the spot, but “if the lithium source is in a dry lake and it is near Ghazni, then it is probably the place.” (An alternative, he said, is another dry lake farther to the south called Ab-i-Istada.)

The salt flats of the “Lithium Triangle”—the high desert region where Chile, Argentina and Bolivia intersect which is currently home to the most productive lithium sources in the world—and the Dasht-i-Nawar have several uncanny similarities. They are all arid to semi-arid high-altitude salt flats where flamingos like to breed; that’s the superficial part. They all sit in high-altitude contact zones between tectonic plates, zones where ancient volcanism left behind mineral-rich igneous rocks. Most important, all three are basins surrounded by old volcanoes. (Shroder says that the Dasht-i-Nawar is what remains of the crater of a stratovolcano that erupted 2.2 million years ago.) Over the millennia, as the ice and snow melts off the surrounding mountains and volcanoes every year and seeps down to the basin below, that water leaches minerals from the volcanic rock it encounters along the way and deposits them at the bottom of the basin. In time, the water in the center of the basin grows richer in minerals like potassium, magnesium, boron and lithium.

At the second annual Lithium Supply and Markets conference in January, Afghanistan didn’t come up once in two days of presentations by mining-company executives, geologists and industry analysts. At the next such conference, it will probably be mentioned frequently as a curiosity, because it’s unlikely that Afghan lithium will have any effect on the market for decades. Mining companies aren’t necessarily scared of sketchy countries—I’ve seen North Korea mentioned as a new frontier in minerals exploration in mining trade publications—but at the moment, lithium is cheap (the market leader, SQM, cut its lithium carbonate prices by 20 percent last year) and widely available (at the moment, SQM is actually pumping excess lithium back into the Salar de Atacama because the company harvests more lithium as a by-product of potassium production than it can find a market for). There’s no reason to go lithium prospecting in a war zone.

“As far as Afghanistan is concerned, who cares?” Jon Hykawy, a mining analyst with Byron Capital Markets in Toronto, wrote in an e-mail. “I am not going to be the one leading a team into Taliban territory to try and process lithium.” He drew an analogy between Afghanistan and Colombia. Colombia has potentially excellent oil reserves, just like neighboring Venezuela, but “there has been a low-grade civil war going on in Colombia for the last couple of decades. No one is crazy enough to try and get oil out of the ground in Colombia, and no one is going to go try and get lithium out of the ground in Afghanistan until the thugs are out of the government and the Taliban stop killing anything that moves that is not allied with them.”

Companies don’t like risk and lack of security, and Afghanistan, well—“it will be probably the worst place to go to,” says Gal Luft, the executive director of the energy-focused D.C. think tank the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.” Security concerns aside, Luft points out that it took years for Chile to build the rail and road infrastructure that gets its huge copper mines running, and before Afghanistan can become a serious mining country, it will need the same infrastructure.

The most likely candidate to build that infrastructure is probably the country that seems most interested in securing Afghan mineral rights, despite the war: China. Last year, using a comprehensive package of humanitarian aid and (allegedly) bribes, a state-run mining company won the rights to the Aynak copper mine south of Kabul. Today the Chinese (the distinction between industry and the government is blurry) are fighting for rights to mine the Hajiguk Pass north of Kabul, home to 1.8 billion metric tons of iron ore—the largest iron deposit in Asia. Shroder says it’s likely that a Chinese firm could win the rights to Hajiguk, build the roads and railway necessary to ship iron ore south to the the Pakistani port of Gwadar (which Chinese concerns also built), and years from now use that existing, paid-for infrastructure to start extracting the lithium from a source like the Dasht-i-Nawar, which is about 100 miles to the south of Hajiguk.

Say this scenario actually happens. Would it have any practical effect on the price or availability of lithium? Not anytime soon. “I don’t think it has a lot of implication for the market in the first half of the 21st century,” Luft says. “This is a story for the 22nd century.”

What the story does now is help show that it is absurd to start talking about an impending shortage of a mineral that the mining industry really only started taking seriously after the spread of lithium-ion batteries in laptops and cell phones in the 1990s. When the Afghanistan news broke, a friend at a mining-industry publication confessed to never having heard of Afghanistan as a potential lithium source. But he also said he wasn’t surprised, because lithium is not rare. What other countries have high-altitude salt lakes that we’ve never paid attention to? As Luft says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if half a dozen other places get thrown around as the 'Saudi Arabia of lithium’” in the years ahead.

With huge quantities of rare-earth elements valuable to high-tech industries like lithium-ion battery production, will Afghanistan become the "Saudi Arabia" of the future?

Yesterday, the Pentagon announced that American geologists have discovered an estimated $1 trillion worth of untapped geological resources there, including vast reserves of rare earth metals and lithium, which are becoming increasingly sought-after for high-tech manufacturing. The cache is large enough to have profound geopolitical implications. But judging by the state of play at another remote, developing-world mineral stash—the lithium deposits of Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, which I recently visited—it’s not easy to go from desolation to natural-resource riches. Updated.

It's truly a bonanza: Those rare earth metals essential for building motors for hybrid and electric cars that China thought they had cornered? Afghanistan may be sitting on $7.4 billion worth. That’s not counting niobium, another rare and essential metal--the war-torn, deeply impoverished country may have $81.2 billion of the stuff. As for lithium, the essential battery-building mineral that has led so many to suggest that lithium-rich Bolivia may be the center of the world in an age of electric cars—there’s a chance that Afghanistan may have even more. (We have yet to find much detail about what kind of lithium resources we’re looking at—the geologists we’ve contacted haven’t yet responded—but according to the New York Times, an internal Pentagon document said that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of Lithium,” a nickname that’s also been applied to Bolivia and Chile in the past couple of years.) Then there’s the big money, the meat-and-potatoes. $420.9 billion worth of iron. $274 billion in copper. $50.8 billion in cobalt.

According to the New York Times, the Afghan treasure hunt began in 2004, when American geologists working on the reconstruction effort found geological charts that the Soviets had assembled in the 1980s, when they occupied the country. Soon they began conducting flyover surveys of 70 percent of the country, using “advanced gravity and measuring equipment” to collect preliminary data. In 2007 they conducted even more detailed aerial measurements, and the numbers were “astonishing.” In October 2007 the USGS published a preliminary assessment of the country’s mineral resources that claimed there were “abundant” resources present. Two and a half years later, those preliminary measures became today’s bombshell news. “There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus , commander of the United States Central Command, told the Times. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.“

Afghanistan is a massive, geologically diverse country whose soil has historically been used for little other than growing opium poppies, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that it is home to vast mineral riches. But the numbers in this recent report are still pretty astounding*. One trillion dollars is the kind of number that people use when they pitch blue-sky themes for mining asteroids, or the dark side of the moon, and the new Pentagon report claims that the total estimated reserves could be worth close to that, $908 billion. Afghanistan’s current GDP, by contrast, is $12 billion. This is enough to make Afghanistan one of the world's most important mining centers.

Yet these resources probably won’t to be easy to get out of the ground. It’s not a perfect analogy, but Bolivia, home to what until yesterday was widely acknowledged as the world’s largest stash of lithium, offers some perspective. The Bolivian government has had tremendous difficulty getting its lithium-mining initiative up and running. The country has decided to go it alone, to develop the massive lithium deposits of the Salar de Uyuni without the involvement of multinational mining companies. But because of the Bolivian government’s lack of experience with lithium mining, and because of the remoteness of the resource and the lack of infrastructure in the area, the project is now seriously behind schedule. Even the scope of the project is miniscule compared to the massive lithium operations of companies like SQM and Chemetall just across the border in Chile. Bolivia, keep in mind, has a centuries-long history as a minerals producer. (Much of that production was done in an incredibly exploitative manner, but that’s another discussion.)

On the other hand, Afghanistan has “no mining culture,” a USGS geologist told the Times. Afghanistan will almost certainly use multinational mining companies, who have the expertise and the money to get it done, to tap their mineral resources, but Afghanistan is also a war zone, and now, a staggeringly valuable prize for the victor. This is a story we’ll be watching closely, and updating as we hear back from geologists who are familiar with the terrain.

* UPDATE: After talking to Jack Medlin, an Afghanistan expert at the USGS, a clarification is in order. There actually is no single “recent report” that triggered the Times story. This report from 2007 is the USGS’s most recent official statement on the matter, and Medlin says that the next phase of the report probably won’t be completed until late 2011. He also points out that in 2007, the USGS released a brief report on Afghanistan’s mineral reserves and held a press conference to generate interest, but that it was nothing more than a “one-day news cycle.” So what occasioned this Times piece, which the blogosphere is absolutely devouring? Medlin doesn’t claim to know. “We’ve know about [Afghani mineral deposits] for a couple of years,” he said. However, “We’re glad” about the huge audience this latest story is receiving, he told me, “because it should focus interest from international investors.” We’ll stay out of the politics and stick to the scientific and technological issues involved, but if you want to read the political theories, Andrew Sullivan has a good compendium here.

Still, there is news in the Times story, most notably the bit about Afghanistan containing vast reserves of lithium. The 2007 report mentions lithium only briefly: “Pegmatite fields, principally in northeastern Afghanistan, contain a variety of commodities, such as lithium, beryllium, quartz, feldspars, mica, gemstones, tantalum, niobium, and cesium. Exploitation of these pegmatite deposits could support local glass, chemical, or artisanal industries.” That’s very different than talking about dry salt lakes where, according to the Times story, preliminary research conducted “just this month” indicated “the potential for lithium deposits as large as those of Bolivia ... .” Medlin confirmed to me that the USGS has found lithium in the brines of dry salt lakes—the same sweet, relatively easy-to-extract source material found in Bolivia and Chile—but wouldn’t say more about lithium.

We’re waiting to get video of a press conference that the Department of Defense just held on this matter, but the public affairs office says they’re having technical problems. More soon.

[NYTimes]

The NAS research panel will look into how electromagnetic interference, computer error, hardware and software design, human error, and a host of other factors can influence sudden acceleration and deceleration in cars controlled by computer. The NASA side will concentrate solely on how electromagnetic interference, not floor mats, human error, or faulty gas pedals, may have led to the sudden acceleration that instigated the recall.

Overall, the investigation will cost around $3 million, and ensure that Jay Leno has monologue fodder for the duration of the study.

[The Wall Street Journal]

On the sunnier side, rare earths could power a future generation of clean tech

China has supplied 91 percent of U.S. consumption of rare earths between 2005 and 2008, and continues to represent the world's largest rare earth exporter. But the Chinese have warned that their own domestic industry appetite for rare earths may eventually force them to stop exporting -- an action that would leave the U.S. high-tech industries crippled without other readily available supplies.

"The United States, not so long ago, was the world leader in producing and exporting rare earths," said Brad Miller, the Democratic Representative from North Carolina and chairman of the subcommittee. "Today, China is the world's leader."

Experts testified that China's state-owned mines had set artificially low prices for the rare earth market, and that Chinese manufacturers had also forced most U.S. rare earth and permanent magnet manufacturers out of business. Rare earth magnets represent a major component in Toyota's Prius hybrid and other clean tech.

Companies such as IBM have also begun investing in new solar cells and other technologies that don't require rare earths, partly because of the dangers of relying too much upon foreign suppliers.

But there's also opportunity from investing in rare earths, besides avoiding a supply chain problem. Karl Gschneidner Jr., a senior metallurgist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory in Iowa, called for the creation of a National Research Center on Rare Earths and Energy as well as a National Research Center for Magnetic Cooling.

Magnetic refrigeration is a hot new area for energy-efficient, green technology that can handle cooling and climate control. Cooling below room temperature currently takes up 15 percent of all the energy consumed in the U.S., but the rise of magnetic refrigeration could slash that by 5 percent.

Given all the energy problems with keeping massive data centers cool in the Information Age, we also imagine that Google and other companies might welcome magnetic refrigeration with open arms. That is, as long as the U.S. can secure its own domestic rare earth supply or find new overseas suppliers.