The article raises a few interesting points I didn't know:
- In SoCal there are several areas which have geothermal activity and correspondingly several electric plants based on that
- This geothermal activity raises both hot water and a fair concentration of a brine solution containing many metals
- The lithium isn't mined, they were getting it by processing this brine solution
Based on that, and reading many comments that modern batteries also needs lots of Co, Mn, etc... I wonder if the brine water coming up from this area is basically 'battery soup'? Seems like a lot of potential value that is already being pumped out of the ground by someone else - who considers it a waste product!
You can get 'geothermal' waters pretty much anywhere in the world, it only depends on how deep you dig (in some cases this is completely unviable from an economic point of view)
You can then use the water for heating, extracting minerals, spas, swimming pools etc.
The Great Basin is composed of Horst and Graben [1] (i.e. Mountain ridges separating basins) geology. H&G happens when the Earth's crust is stretched. The stretching also makes the crust much thinner than normal -- that's why there are tons of cider cones and old lava flows in the Great Basin region.
I know (expect?) you are being funny - but one of the things that the eco-people always miss in their end-to-end cost calculation (that they do not do) is the cost of "boiling it for a while". It's like free energy! :-)
I do geothermal projects using depleted oil wells in that part of the country -- so I know exactly what you are talking about. The question ends up being economics for recovery, isolation transport and sale.
EDIT: Just because you can see crunky white stuff from the sky doesn't mean you have a lithium mine on your hands! :-)
I am rather low on the eco scale. Pollution including CO2 IMO should be heavily taxed as a negative externality. But, things like land preservation is really just about land use with leaving it alone as one option. Extinction is another meh issue. Make an effort to preserve DNA, but trying to save animals that compete with humans is rarely going to work well.
So, recycling for example needs to be a net gain when adjusting for externality's not just a pointless feel good measure. Eco homes are another pointless waste. Want to save the environment live in a condo.
Basically, you can do what you want with your land, but don't hurt other peoples air, water, etc.
PS: Needless to say, rarely do I find people with similar viewpoints.
Please, realise there is no "your land" island on which people live apart from the ecosytem.
Personally, I feel that living on "your" land is fine, it's that market mechanism forcing the extraction of value from it that scares the shit out of me.
I am all for curbing polution and even city's have ecosystems, but they look nothing like untamed land. Saying, you can't turn your property into a parking lot because reasons is rarely well thought out.
Compared to overall lifecycle energy costs of something like a car, the one-time cost to boil one of the manufacturing components up front isn't very much. Better to boil a lithium soup once than to burn gasoline to power your car for fifteen years. Plus renewable energy is easier to use in manufacturing processes than it is in mobile applications (like vehicles). Check out the history of aluminum manufacturing, for example -- it's been heavily dependent on renewable energy in the form of hydroelectric power for almost a century.
You might think that but you need information to back up your intuitions (which are wrong)
A significant amount of the total lifetime energy usage of a car is made up by it's manufacture. It is not trivial to say you should always buy something new and more efficient.
You're making arguments against something that I didn't say.
All cars have significant manufacturing costs. So saying that making batteries has energy expensive processes isn't an argument that disqualifies EVs. An EV will have much less impact on the environment over its lifetime than a gas-powered car manufactured in the same year.
This is the right next ~100 year answer. I'm not sure what happened with this. It looks like the protest-vietnam machine didn't want to shut down when vietnam shut down and decided that nuclear was a cool thing to protest next. I haven't had time to verify that this is true.
All in stock of a not-yet-profitable company who's stock price has been highly volatile in the past.
I don't mean to disparage Tesla, but rather to emphasize that there's a difference between receiving $325 million in cash, $325 million in blue-chip stock, and these $325 million.
THIS! it seems like everyone simply assumes that current stock value = cash value. if it was true, than the offer would be $325m in stock OR in cash. but not even Elon think that offered stocks are worth $325m
That's not true. I think Elon thinks that $325m cash is worth less because he thinks the stock is going to go up, however he needs any cash he can get to grow the company. As a growing company you need cash to grow and must give up stock to do so
If they wanted to guarantee cash, they could've bought a collar by selling calls and buying puts. It would have a very small cost, and the deal's investment bankers could set it up, no problem.
tl;dr: you're both extremely confident, ignorant, and wrong.
If it were that easy, Tesla could do the same. It is not that easy. While you or any other spiv can buy a collar on $10k or even $1m worth of stock for a super short period (1 month, 3 month), it is an entirely different thing to:
- But options for multi-year expiries (because that is how long the disposal will take, after the obligatory lockup)...
- ... in a stock that is 1000x less liquid that your usual AAPL or GOOG...
- ...on a short notice on $325 million worth of stock, i.e. a huge percentage of the free float of the stock, making it impossible to hedge for any bank that offers the collar.
tldr: You are a bit too cocky given your lack of knowledge.
FWIW, Tesla is a high volume stock and over a billion dollars worth of TSLA shares are traded daily. It's comparably liquid to GOOGL.
The full $325m would be about 1.5M shares which would be 15,000 options contracts. Quite a bit, but not too far from the current action in some December strikes (the 50 put has 11,883 open contracts).
tl;dr You could quite easily either divest of the stake outright or protect a large portion of it through options.
The average trade volume is as you say 4.45M shares. Selling an additional 1.4M raises the daily trade volume by 31.4%.
Economics is supply and demand. If you increase supply by a massive amount when not changing demand. The price tanks. Effectively you are killing your own price point and this sales strategy isn't in your favor.
Finding this piece really interesting though for other reasons. Had a similar idea for a project based in that area a couple years back. Imperial Valley (in general) strikes me as a HUGELY under-capitalized opportunity at the moment.
As a San Diego native, grew up familiar with it as the cesspool and stink-puddle that it is... but, if you look into the history of Imperial Valley and Salton Sea (and the abundance of mineral-rich 'dust' and other waste) it's actually an extremely fascinating tale.
Anyone want to put a few million into helping establish a similar project? Seems like there's way more than just Lithium to be monetized out there.
- company has promising but not proven scalable means to extract lithium from drilling waste water.
- company gets all stock offer from Tesla which to all intents and purposes is "if tesla succeeds you get rich, if not you fail as well." Not clear what voting rights there were.
- company seems to have not responded one way or another.
And who can blame them - they work for the dream, and the best offer is to take a part of someone else's lottery ticket. Turns out it was a good bet but who knew.
It looks the investor wanted the company to go to BK. Maybe they were also the senior debt holder which means they could potentially get the company cheaper since senior debt holder have highest priority in getting paid back.
Remember this isnt a proven technology yet (lithium brine mining). There are tons of promising projects in the sheltered environment of chemistry labs that dont scale up in the real world due to unforseen complications. I'd say 9 out 10 promising battery announcements fall into this category.
Tesla should buy the Jadar mine in Serbia, huge deposits of Lithium, Rio Tinto seem to have done nothing with it!
Serbia could do with some positive investment, economy is still dire, lovely people who deserve a break.
The cumulative price of Li may be small, but since once used its recycling cost is higher than its extraction cost, then as a result, the price can only grow up (except when like with oil there is strong manipulation of the market by the banks).
The beauty of a world which resources are finite is that cheap resources always finish to disappear.
Yes but you use more manganese or cobalt or w/e based on the chemistry of your battery than Lithium.
Oddly enough if Tesla is going to buy mines for batteries Lithium most likely is not going to be their first buy.
I don't know exactly what chemistry Tesla is going to end up using but if it's LCO/NMC which is 60%/20% cobalt they probably want to find a source of cobalt before lithium.
If they are going to sploosh on super fancy NCA batteries (unlikely since they only do about 500 cycles, LCO and NMC are the most likely chem for EV's) which are only 9% cobalt that still probably makes sense since the world production of cobalt is about 10 times smaller than the production of Lithium.
As someone who grew up in Palm Springs I can't believe there was a startup there. There is absolutely nothing going on there. Maybe it's changed in the last 10 years.
The HN title is quite a misleading alteration of the actual title.
There's no mention that the startup "refused" the buyout, and it was unclear why the negotiations fell apart.
The actual article is simply titled "Tesla offered $325 million for Salton Sea startup".
And here's a quote from the article giving a different picture : "The person with knowledge of the negotiations told a slightly different story, saying Musk shut down all discussions after seeing the $2.5 billion valuation from Jefferies. According to that source, Musk abruptly ended all negotiations after reviewing the valuation, never giving Simbol the chance to present a counteroffer to his proposed $325 million purchase price."
Definitely seems like there was some creative liberty in the submission title.
I suppose a "refusal" could be inferred by the lack of their acceptance on the initial buyout offer and their (apparent) rebuttal of a $2.5bil valuation.
For instance, if I offered you a million dollars cash for your house and you came back to me with an appraisal saying it was valued at $20mil... I think it would be clear (or at least strongly insinuated) that you refused my offer of a million dollars.
Thinking that's kinda what happened here? Seems like Elon didn't take to their method of countering and called the whole thing off.
Just my $0.02 and I'm not privy to all the inside-details. Could've gone down entirely different than any of us know.
Plus, it seems like there's a LOT of infighting among the co-founders and previous team. Will be curious to see if more information emerges.
In the UK at least, under case law (Hyde v Wrench, 1840), if you give a counter offer it legally voids the original offer. So if you offer to buy something for £1m and the seller responds that they will sell it to you for £2m, the original £1m offer is legally terminated - so in the UK, legally speaking, this would count as a refusal.
Unfortunately I'm not familiar with how this translates over to US law, but I'd be interested to find out.
That's an interesting question about US case law, but my guess is that the negotiations had lots of clauses like "this supercedes any prior offer" and in this case things are a bit cut and dry, legally speaking. That's why we have lawyers, after all.
I'm not sure I understand this comment. If they wanted $2 billion for the company, doesn't it mean that they refused the $300 million offer? Sounds to me like they wanted at least a billion dollars for what was essentially an IP acquisition.
I think whoever did their valuation, highly overvalued them. There's no way it would be worth that much unless they already had their own lithium mine or something. It's almost like those Shark Tank entrepreneurs that come and say "but our startup could be worth 20x as much in 10 years..so that's that's our valuation".
They just had the company valued; they didn't ask for that sum. Musk saw the valuation and ended negotiations. So no $2B offer was tendered; no refusal occurred.
3. Have mine taken off you by Putin one day when he's pissed off at the US State Department and wants to strut to the Russian electorate
4. Cry
Seriously, you would be utterly insane to invest in Russia at the moment with money from US, UK or EU. The reason Rio Tinto are so reluctant to invest might well be because they know it could be taken off them tomorrow.
Not sure if you're trolling, but Serbia is not Russia. Serbia was part of Yugoslavia before the breakup, and it was vaguely heading in the direction of EU membership until recently.
However I think that effort has stalled in recent past and relations with Russia got a tiny bit cosier, so you might not actually be so wrong after all :)
I actually had no idea anyone had trouble with those countries until I visited Vienna and the tourist shops had a bunch of ironic t-shirts with Kangaroos and boomerangs on them and stuff.
Crimea is not Russia either. Oh wait yes it is now. All bets are off in that part of the world right now. And prospective EU membership just makes things worse; it was Ukraine snuggling up to the EU that provoked Russia into intervening...
To get from Russia to Serbia you'd have to go through Hungary or Romania both of which are EU member states.
I know the EU doesn't have a history of coordinated military action. But if tanks crossed EU borders France, Germany, Britain and Italy couldn't ignore that.
Yugoslavia wasn't part of the EU at the time though?
You can't really judge how an alliance will respond to conflict crossing their borders on the basis of how they've responded to conflict outside their borders. Governments and militaries think borders are a pretty big deal!
More generally, there are some people in "the European project" who would like to see a United States of Europe with its own foreign policy and military. But this is pretty unpopular with voters in most member states, so everyone involved is happy to keep that level of integration on the back burner, leaving member states to respond how they like to foreign military conflicts while the EU maintains "We're a pacifist trading union, not a belligerent military alliance or a superstate, shucks we don't even have a military"
Politicians are happy to keep kicking the can down the road on EU military coordination for as long as it's politically convenient. But if an EU member state was invaded, they couldn't do that any more; they would have no chance but to make a decision.
And public opinion is far more likely to support (and may even demand) a tough, belligerent stance if Russian tanks have are invading our allies.
Crimea was part of Russia longer than the US has existed. While its previous host, Ukraine, has only existed as a country for 20-some odd years.
Once the government of Ukraine was overthrown, the people of Crimea had every right to decide to stay or leave. And you will not find a single poll before-or-after not showing an overwhelming support for the latter.
> it was Ukraine snuggling up to the EU that provoked Russia into intervening...
A foreign-lead coup of a twice elected democratic government that put in a puppet regime for the sole purpose of creating problems for Russia is what lead things to the way they went.
Right now, what is happening in the eastern parts of Ukraine is a civil war - resulting from ethnic cleansing, neocon agenda, etc. And what is happening in the west of Ukraine is a total economic collapse from the so called free-trade deals with the EU.
Ukraine is separate country, and Moldova is separate country, and Belarus is separate country, and Afghanistan is separate country, and Caucasus is separate country, and so on...
Not sure what point you're trying to make. Plus, Caucasus is not a country. Yes, Russia has a lot of international influence outside their borders, but that doesn't mean the ill-informed observation by the GP was meaningful in any way.
Sorry, Georgia and Azerbaijan.
So they have influence, including direct military operations, but their influence is not strong enough to make something to single mine?
Let me remember that whole military operation in Ukraine is done by Russia to stop Shell from mining of natural gas in Eastern Ukraine.
It has never been politically close to Russia, even in the Soviet era, when it was a part of Yugoslavia. (Especially when it was Yugoslavia - Stalin tried to have Tito killed several times. They were both communist countries but that's the only thing common between them.)
Had they not been so warhungry in the 90s, they could be a part of EU and NATO now, like Croatia.
Russia already captured Crimea and eastern Moldova. They need to capture south Ukraine and part of Romania/Bulgaria.
As I see, Russians already making steps in that direction. For example, they creating fake national groups for smaller ethnic groups, e.g. for my ethnic group (I am Lemko, small Ukrainian subethnic group at west of Ukraine, east of Poland and Slovakia). To control us, they are inventing new language, new alphabet, created "World Congress of Lemko people", and so on, trying to separate us from Ukrainians.
Russia captured eastern Moldova? When did they lose it in the first place? I thought the region was locked between Moldova and Russia since the former declared independence.
Russia has military bases and pro-russian forces in eastern Moldova. Russia has plans to attack south of Ukraine (Odessa) from these bases.
Please tell me difference between that and "captured".
Well, the difference is that the current situation is like "had it, didn't let go, and still control it" but "captured" means "didn't have it, and took it".
Serbia is an independent country currently negotiating an EU-memebership. In order to get to Serbia, Russia would have to go through at least one EU-contry or Turkey.
Why do you say that? The negotiations seem to have been progressing since 2011, and Slovenia ratified Serbia's Stabilisation and Association Agreement without delay; they only seemed to have faced opposition from Lithuania.
Historically, Transnistria in USSR was used as military foothold, to capture Moldova, pretending that this is just a conflict or a civil war. Russian Empire/USSR/Russia used that trick many many times. For example, Ukraine was captured by USSR using "Kharkiv People Republic" controlled by Moscow. Today, Russia tries to capture Ukraine again using "Lugansk People Republic" and "Donetsk People Republic".
Transistria is at border of Ukraine and Moldova, owned by both, with roughly equal populations, but both Moldovans and large part of Ukrainians were at same side. For example, leader of separatists was captured by Moldovan police in Ukraine capital city. Why "conflict" happen if both native nations were at same side?
Man, I read this comment and thought "wow, I didn't realize Serbia had such close ties to Russia still, that Putin could just do something like this". Glad to see I wasn't that wrong.
- In SoCal there are several areas which have geothermal activity and correspondingly several electric plants based on that
- This geothermal activity raises both hot water and a fair concentration of a brine solution containing many metals
- The lithium isn't mined, they were getting it by processing this brine solution
Based on that, and reading many comments that modern batteries also needs lots of Co, Mn, etc... I wonder if the brine water coming up from this area is basically 'battery soup'? Seems like a lot of potential value that is already being pumped out of the ground by someone else - who considers it a waste product!