Imagine being Ukraine and realizing that getting destroyed was in the end for nothing, as the lithium deposits in the east the EU wanted to secure for itself were finally not the key to the energy transition after all...

But you can tell that this is a site that knows all there is to know about engineering, but fck all about politics. I was looking through the article trying to find the three actually important points: What material do you need; where is it; what's the process of mining/obtaining it?

Lithium is common as dirt, can be found pretty much anywhere, but the process of extracting it is so dirty that no rich nation allows it on their soil. Thus we get the global south lithium mines, with enormous environmental destruction, plus a long logistics line to transport it back to the rich part of the world (which incidentally eats up any environmental benefits you might get from abolishing combustion engines, BUT it's destruction in a poor part of the world, so 🤷‍♂️). With that you get dependency and toil slavery of these countries, you get political conflicts over extraction and payment, all the rat's tail of exploitation.

The article is super general on WHICH materials create the "two chemical solutions containing ions, one acting as the anolyte (adjacent to the anode), the other as the catholyte (near the cathode)".

Way, way down, they say it "could be made from readily available, inexpensive minerals, such as ferric oxide and gamma manganese dioxide". Could. What's the cost? what's the sourcing basis? Ferric oxide is super common and easy. Manganese dioxide, apparently, is also clean to make. Meaning, it would be likely that this would be produced without outsourcing it to conflict zones (which become conflict zones exactly because we outsource the dirt to it, and people are fed up with that there, and then burn things down).