You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The seed funding will help it build up to commercial production.
With the markets for electric vehicles and battery energy storage systems on the come-up, energy market analysts predict that the world is hurtling towards a global lithium shortage by the 2030’s. Lithios, a Massachusetts-based startup with a novel method of lithium extraction, is aiming to help by unlocking previously untapped lithium resources around the world.
The company just raised a $12 million seed round to help fund this mission, led by Clean Energy Ventures with support from Lowercarbon Capital, among others. The round included $10 million in venture funding and $2 million in venture debt loans from Silicon Valley Bank.
It’s not as if the world actually lacks for lithium, the energy dense mineral that is the primary component in lithium-ion batteries. It’s just that many current reserves are too low-grade to be economically exploited, and traditional extraction methods are land-intensive, inefficient, and often controversial with local communities. Chile, Australia, and China dominate the market, while the U.S. contributes less than 2% of the world’s annual supply.
Lithios aims to make it more economical and environmentally friendly to extract lithium from salty groundwater deposits, a.k.a. brines. The company’s CEO, Mo Alkhadra, told me that while about two-thirds of the world’s lithium is contained in brine rather than hard rock, only about 15% to 20% of these brines are currently worth mining. Lithios, he said, will get that number up to around 80% to 85%, in theory. “The vision with Lithios’ tech is to enable access to these lower-grade resources at a similar or maybe slightly higher cost structure relative to the highest grade deposits that are mined today,” Alkhadra explained.
The normal lithium brine extraction process involves pumping saline water from underground reservoirs to the surface, where it’s then moved through a series of large, wildly colored evaporation ponds, often located in the middle of vast salt deserts. Over a period of about 18 months, the sun slowly evaporates the brine, leaving behind increasingly high concentrations of lithium. But Lithios’ tech avoids these ponds altogether. Instead, the brine is pumped to the surface and delivered directly to the company’s refrigerator-sized electrochemical reactors, which contain stacks of electrodes that capture the lithium.
While the company wouldn't disclose the electrodes’ exact chemistry, Alkhadra told me they are made from “inorganic compounds which have geometries that fit basically only lithium and none of the other larger ions that you would find in these brine mixtures.” After lithium is extracted, the company produces a purified lithium concentrate and sends that off for refining into battery chemicals. The final batteries could end up in EVs, energy storage systems, or even just plain old portable consumer electronics.
Lithios’ tech comes at a good time, as the Inflation Reduction Act’s domestic content requirements for EVs incentivizes manufacturers to source critical minerals from the U.S. and countries that the U.S. has free trade agreements with. Alkhadra told me that Lithios could open up opportunities for brine mining in the Smackover formation, which spans a number of southern states including Texas and Arkansas, the Salton Sea area, which has been dubbed “Lithium Valley,” as well as deposits in Utah and Nevada. More areas in Canada and Europe could also be in play. (The company said it couldn’t talk yet about any specific partnership agreements.)
While there are a number of other companies such as Lilac Solutions and EnergyX that are also pursuing more efficient and less land-intensive brine-based extraction methods, they rely on a different, purely chemical process known as direct lithium extraction, which uses technology adapted from the water treatment industry. “The core thesis around what we're building at Lithios stems from that work,” Alkhadra told me, explaining that electrifying these chemical processes makes them “much more selective, energy efficient, and water efficient” — resulting in “modest to significant cost reduction.”
Lithios’ new funding will help the company scale its research and development efforts as well as build out a pilot facility in Medford, Massachusetts, with initial production to begin in the first quarter of next year. At first, output will be limited to just “several battery packs” per year, Alkhadra told me, scaling up to commercial production “in the coming years.”
Alkhadra is excited to see investors and the federal government alike beginning to express interest in the upstream, “dirtier” portions of the battery supply chain, which he told me have generally been overlooked in favor of downstream sectors such as battery manufacturing and cell production. “I think the U.S. departments of both energy and defense, and investors too, are coming to realize that the real bottlenecks in battery manufacturing and EV production are on the resource side.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
And it’s make a life-threatening situation even more dangerous.
The “Meteorologists” Facebook page has 51,000 followers, an iffy grasp of grammar rules, and outsized confidence in the United States’ weather engineering capabilities. “They are Aiming this KILLER Monster Hurricane Right at FLORIDA!” one user said of Hurricane Milton on Sunday morning, shortly before sharing purported photos of dinosaurs living on Mars.
By Monday afternoon, Milton had strengthened into a Category 5 storm, and the internet conspiracies were intensifying, too. People shared videos of themselves asking their Alexas, “What kind of hurricane was Hurricane Milton?” and getting answers in the past tense — proof, surely, that the government orchestrated the whole storm. “Never ever seen a hurricane form in the western Gulf and head directly EAST… It is not right,” other users mused in the comment sections of their local weather channels. A search for “cloud seeding” on Facebook further turned up dozens of posts tracking flight paths for planes belonging to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and sharing photos of ominous-looking clouds as evidence that the “government is involved.”
Hoaxes and misinformation reliably follow extreme weather events. Pictures of Hurricane Shark have circulated on social media after pretty much every major flood since 2011, and a photoshopped image of a storm cell over the Statue of Liberty resurfaces anytime there is bad weather in New York. In the aftermath of a major disaster, it’s especially tempting for bad actors to exploit the desperation for news and images.
But Hurricane Helene — which devastated swaths of Florida up into the Appalachians just over a week ago — revealed how far this has spun out of control. For one thing, hoaxes are simpler than ever for the average person to disseminate, thanks to the availability of AI image-making tools and the degradation of content moderation on disaster-response platforms like Twitter. These conspiracies may also then be reinforced and amplified by people with an interest in making the government’s response look bad — such as the Republican candidate for president of the United States, a Georgia congressperson, and Elon Musk.
While some lies — like Deep State cloud seeding — are relatively easy to see through, many rumors are much more difficult to fact-check when power, cell service, and internet are limited. Nicole McNeill, the Asheville, North Carolina-based director of storytelling of Climate Power, told me she and many of her neighbors fell for a widespread rumor that a second storm was going to hit the western part of the state immediately after Helene. The panic the rumor sparked risked lives: She saw a fight break out in a gas line between two men who were frantically trying to get out of town, and a young couple who were renting a home nearby tried to flee and ended up on a road that was closed. “We heard later that people had to sleep in their cars,” McNeill told me. “Local police had to be diverted from emergency response to direct traffic to clear the roads so emergency vehicles could pass. Misinformation made a desperate situation worse.” McNeill herself suffered a panic attack while trying to fix the holes in her roof from trees that had fallen during Helene, all in preparation for the second storm that would never come.
While there was no merit to those manufactured claims, the truth is in some ways even more alarming: Milton is looking like a worst-case scenario storm as it bears down on Tampa Bay, and at this point, the only thing anyone can control is getting good information to the people whose lives will depend on hearing it. Forecasters are doing a great job of that already, like South Florida hurricane specialist John Morales, who let his emotions show on air and connected the storm’s intensification to climate science.
Milton isn’t due to make landfall until Wednesday, but the misinformation already circulating online will make it more challenging for early warnings from the government and local experts to be heard and trusted. That job doesn’t get any easier after a storm. To fellow hurricane survivors, McNeill warned, “If you have patchy internet and you’re at 30% battery and worried about your phone running out, you’re often making split-second decisions. That’s where misinformation gets people.”
With mosquito-like mini-battering rams, hot dog-shaped floaties, and not a lot of battery life.
Last week, I took a train and two buses to an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium on Staten Island, where I watched first responders pretend another Hurricane Sandy had just struck New York City.
For the sake of the drill, organizers kept many of the details of the fictional scenario the same as they’d been then: Emergency Management officials were told to respond as if a supercharged storm was causing devastating floods and stranding people in life-threatening situations. But the dry run also featured a major difference from the disaster that hit 12 years ago this month and left more than 43 New Yorkers dead.
This time, the city has drones.
It has drones with cameras that can read the logo on your jacket from 400 feet in the air and drones with sophisticated mapping software that can estimate how deep a flooded intersection is. It has drones that come on little leashes tethered to NYPD cruisers for continuous power and drones that are so small they can fly under beds and into closets and sound like dentist drills when they’re operating. It has drones that can transmit messages in 80 languages, drones with thermal sensors, and drones that can drop flotation devices into the ocean. It even has a drone that can break a window — the highlight of the morning for the members of the local press and the top brass of the New York Police Department, Fire Department, and NYCEM (New York City Emergency Management, pronounced “Nee-chim,” newly rebranded from the more generic Office of Emergency Management) who’d gathered to observe the exercise, which was touted as the largest-known municipal unmanned aerial system drill in history.
“Breach drones,” as I’ve since learned, look a little like crudely drawn mosquitos. Held aloft by four rotary wings, the $87,750 contraptions are affixed with rods on their fronts that resemble an insect’s proboscis but function essentially like a battering ram. Given the drone’s unsteady, bobbing flight and the way it repeatedly banged itself against the window to chip a hole in the pane big enough to fly through, I found the whole demonstration to be surprisingly entomological for what New York City’s first responders claim is the bleeding edge of its extreme weather response.
“We’re really just scraping the first layer” of what is possible, Louis Font, a citywide interagency coordinator, told me during the drill. As he put it, drones are “the Swiss army knife of the public safety world.”
There is a small problem, though: New Yorkers really, really hate drones. Actually, they hate all autonomous gadgets that give off a whiff of Big Brother. A security robot deployed in the Times Square subway station over the winter had to be guarded by two human officers around the clock to prevent it from being vandalized, and the cheeky New York City news blog Hell Gate proposed that bots like the NYPD’s crime-fighting “Digidog” are “the city’s most expensive punching bags” and teased, “we’re excited to watch as the situation unfolds.” Even the local wildlife seems willing to take matters into its own talons, with birds attacking drones deployed to Rockaway Beach over the summer.
The city acquired its first set of drones in 2018 and is now one of about 900 U.S. municipalities that have begun using unmanned aerial systems in its crime- and emergency-related responses. But with a police budget bigger than many nations’ entire military outlay and a techno-optimist mayor, New York quickly became one of the premier drone-wielding cities in the world.
It hasn’t been an entirely smooth journey, though. Plans to use drones to monitor private backyard Labor Day parties last year spurred privacy concerns rooted in a history of the NYPD abusing surveillance technologies and prompted pushback from local civil liberties groups. “We’ve got so many discredited examples of this mayor searching for high-tech gimmicks to solve real-world problems and leaving New Yorkers out to dry,” Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a.k.a. STOP, told me. “We end up spending a huge amount of money on largely unvetted vendors to buy products that simply just don’t fit the needs of our city.”
The question I wanted to answer on Staten Island was whether drones might be able tomeet the needs of a city after a storm like Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Sandy. The overwhelming impression I left with, though, was of agencies that are in the awkward stage of a growth spurt — eager to use technology that will one day be indispensable but, for the time being, presents the risk of overcomplicating situations that would otherwise benefit from a more old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground approach, with potentially both comic and tragic results.
Much of this is simply because of the physical limitations of drones. For one thing, they can’t fly in winds of more than about 20 to 30 miles per hour, making them pretty much useless during an actual storm (or in a Manhattan wind tunnel, for that matter). That narrows their use to two main categories: before a storm, as early warning systems, and after, in search-and-rescue operations.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of the former use. Scientists expect New York will get about 25% more annual rainfall by 2100 due to climate change, and the city has over 500 miles of coastline vulnerable to storm surge, with over half of its environmental justice communities living within its 100-year floodplains. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, 11 people drowned in flooded basement apartments, which are illegal under the city housing code and often used as housing by low-income immigrant families. Making matters worse, New York’s emergency alert system requires a voluntary opt-in and currently has just 1,281,938 subscribers — roughly 15% of a city of 8.3 million. Last year, the city comptroller further claimed that the notification list for people living in basement apartments reached less than 1% of its target population. (A spokesperson for NYCEM told me there has been a 35% increase in their basement subscriber numbers since the comptroller’s comments.)
The drones come in handy, then, because “not every New Yorker is on Twitter, not every New Yorker is on Instagram or Facebook, not every New Yorker reads The New York Times, the Post, or the Daily News, not all of them are tuned into our press conferences,” NYCEM Commissioner Zachary Iscol told me. “And so especially for vulnerable populations and immigrant communities, you’ve got to reach them where they are.”
This summer, NYCEM piloted a program using drones to broadcast bilingual flood warnings in low-lying neighborhoods ahead of storms — an idea Mayor Eric Adams had after seeing hurricane sirens on telephone poles during a visit to Puerto Rico, Iscol told me. The drones’ machine-generated Spanish translations, however, were slammed as “incomprehensible” by native speakers. (Font, the interagency coordinator, admitted the translations are still crude since “they’re robots” and told me the agencies are working to improve the messages.)
Carolina Salguero, the founder and executive director of PortSide NewYork, which works with the waterfront community in Red Hook, told me she fears drone-delivered storm warnings could potentially alienate their intended audiences. “Why would you believe the government if it’s dissed the community for this long?” she said, recalling how some Red Hook residents unwisely ignored warnings ahead of Sandy. (One can only imagine the added element of distrust that would come from a drone shouting those same warnings at you.). Cahn, of STOP, was also skeptical of the message’s delivery system: “The idea that you’re going to warn people with a fleet of drones is ludicrous. It’d take hundreds of thousands of drones operating throughout the day to reach the number of people that [NYCEM] can reach through a single text message,” he told me.
That problem of scale is also true after a storm. While I was impressed by the drones’ heat-seeking capabilities — operators could quickly find human actors and mannequins heated to lifelike temperatures during the Staten Island drill — the NYPD only had 85 drones in its arsenal as of this spring. Because connectivity issues are common after major weather disasters, drones cannot travel terribly far from human-toted hotspots, meaning the actual ground drones can cover to look for stranded, trapped, hurt, or drowning New Yorkers is relatively small. Drones also have a limited battery life of about half an hour and must repeatedly return to handlers to have their batteries swapped out as they conduct searches.
Sometimes it seems almost as if the city government is creating problems for drones to solve. A scenario where a window-breaching drone would be more beneficial than having a firefighter simply walk into a building feels like an edge case, and while a drone can inform someone in Mandarin that help is on the way, that “help” still ultimately takes the form of human paramedics, police, or firefighters. Font told me that drones helped supplement the rescue of “multiple drowning victims” in the Rockaways this summer by providing an extra vantage, but the systems were only deployed in the first place because of an unresolved lifeguard shortage. (Though there was excited chatter at the Staten Island drill about drones one day being able to tow distressed swimmers to shore, currently they can only bonk you with a hotdog-sized floatation device that inflates to three feet long to buy first responders some extra time — and that’s if you manage to grab ahold of it while flailing about in rough waters.)
Perhaps the biggest problem the drone exercise appeared poised to address was concerns about whether the city government could continue to function adequately under Adams’ leadership. Though the drill had reportedly been in the works for six months, mounting scandals and resignations in the administration made the large-scale demonstration of interagency cooperation conveniently timed. On Monday, less than a week after the drill, Phil Banks — the deputy mayor for public safety whose phone was seized last month as part of a federal bribery investigation — resigned. His departure leaves a gaping hole in the office that is tasked with coordinating the agencies involved in an extreme weather response, including directly overseeing NYCEM and the FDNY. (Banks reportedly was also at the forefront of promoting the city’s use of “high-tech devices, including drones.)
When I asked Iscol — who has publicly admitted to having had his own conversations about leaving the administration due to the ongoing turmoil — during the drill (i.e. before Banks resigned) whether he was confident that there could still be smooth operations between City Hall and its agencies in the event of a near-term disaster, he told me firmly that he was. “There are 300,000 people that work for the city of New York, and they’re showing up every day,” he told me. “It’s our job to show up and make sure they have the resources and support and the guidance and direction they need to be successful to deliver for New Yorkers.” He emphasized that “it’s business as usual for the agencies,” despite how things look in the headlines.
As for the drones, the commissioner seemed clear-eyed in assessing their usefulness. “As you do things that are new and for the first time, it’s an evolution — you’re always improving,” he told me. Drone advancements are “iterative, kind of like an iPhone,” and he’s aware they’re not all the way there yet. But “it’s not like we’re only using drones,” he stressed. “We’re still taking a multi-channel approach.”
Concerned onlookers will often approach Font, the interagency coordinator, to ask if he’s spying on them when they notice him flying a drone. He told me that he is always eager to show regular New Yorkers how the city is using the technology: “We’re a bunch of tech guys, so we really love getting into the nuts and bolts of it,” he said.
He expects, though, that eventually the questions and suspicious looks will start to taper off. The NYPD and FDNY already use drones in their everyday operations throughout the city; companies like Amazon have also started exploring the use of drones to deliver packages. Drones will become increasingly commonplace as the years wear on. Boring, even! So of course they’ll be used during extreme weather events, too.
“This is the world we live in now,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the resignation of New York Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks.
On dangerous storms, Big Oil’s plea, and world water levels
Current conditions: Rescue teams have arrived in Bosnia after intense rain triggered flooding and landslides that killed at least 18 people • Phoenix marked its 13th straight day of record heat Sunday • There are three storms churning in the Atlantic simultaneously, which has never happened before this far into hurricane season.
Hurricane Milton is intensifying rapidly in the Atlantic and is expected to become a major hurricane later today. Forecasters believe it will make landfall near Tampa Bay in Florida by Wednesday, less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the area. It could bring a foot of rain, possible more, and 10-15 feet of storm surge. “We expect the storm surge to be worse than what many people experienced during Helene,” said AccuWeather’s lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This storm has the potential to create a catastrophic storm surge that no one in Tampa has seen in their lifetime.”
AccuWeather
More than 15 million people across southern and central Florida are under flood watches, and a state of emergency has been declared in 51 of the state’s counties. Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said the state was preparing for “the largest evacuation that we have seen, most likely since 2017, Hurricane Irma.” In a bleak warning, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said those who choose not to evacuate should “write your name in permanent marker on your arm, so that people know who you are when they get to you afterwards.”
Some large fossil fuel companies have urged Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump not to gut the Inflation Reduction Act if he comes into power again in November, The Wall Street Journalreported. The IRA, President Biden’s landmark climate law, provides tax credits for renewable energy and carbon capture projects, including many that these oil giants have heavily invested in. According to the Journal, executives from Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66, and Occidental Petroleum have been in discussions with the Trump campaign and congressional allies to make the case for the law, which Trump has called the “Green New Scam” and vowed to roll back. Political strategists told the Journal that Trump may try to “rebrand” the IRA given its popularity among Republican states. A recent report found that nearly 60% of the projects supported by the IRA are based in Republican congressional districts.
BP has dropped its ambitious 2030 plan to reduce its oil and gas production by 40% and shift to renewables, three sources toldReuters. The company made the commitment in 2020, and had already watered it down last year. Now it has reportedly abandoned the plan entirely and will focus on new investments to increase oil and gas output. Other oil giants including Shell have also walked back their energy transition goals.
Tangentially related: Fossil fuel company Equinor announced this morning it had acquired a 9.8% stake in wind energy giant Orsted. That makes Equinor the firm’s second largest shareholder, behind the Danish government.
In case you missed it: Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, pledged last week to “boost renewable energies” to a 45% share of the country’s total energy mix by 2030. Sheinbaum, who was inaugurated on Tuesday, is a climate scientist, and her ascension has raised hopes among environmentalists that Mexico could ramp up climate action. Sheinbaum made many promises during her campaign but analysts have been skeptical of their staying power because she also promised to carry on the legacy of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who doubled down on fossil fuels. But the strong words during Sheinbaum’s first speech as president “marks a sharp departure” from López Obrador, noted The Associated Press. “The terms ‘sustainability’ or ‘renewable energy’ really never appeared” in his policies, one expert commented. “He didn’t use the term in any speech, in any document. And she has been using it all the time.” Sheinbaum promised to soon unveil her energy transition program focused on “the reduction of greenhouse gases that cause climate change.” Mexico is the only G20 nation that does not have a net zero target.
The World Meteorological Organization published its 2023 State of Global Water Resources report today. It found that more than half of the world’s “river catchments” – watersheds or drainage basins – saw unusual levels of water flow last year. Mostly, there was less water than normal, with “large territories” of North, Central, and South America especially dry and many river flows falling to all-time lows. But in some places, like the Horn of Africa, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom, there was much more water than normal. These extremes – drought in some places and extreme flooding in others – were reflected in the regional soil moisture and terrestrial water levels. Glaciers lost more than 600 gigatons of water last year, the largest loss registered in the last 50 years. “Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change,” WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo, toldThe Guardian. “As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions.”
“In the U.S., there is a decision being made now – and I’m not a part of it – as to whether to stop making pure ICE for the U.S. market. Just the fact that we’re thinking of that means that, OK, it must be close.” –Gill Pratt, Toyota’s chief scientist, speaking to Bloomberg about the future of the internal combustion engine.