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In April 2017, a viral marketing campaign created by Kent Moors (an allegedly well-resuméd individual who frequently offers expensive stock tips in ebook form and is sometimes used as an expert on television news segments) suggested that there is a new fuel called OBL that is 1,693 times more powerful than gasoline. The main thesis of his 44-minute video and accompanying article is that it would be wise to purchase cheap stock in an unnamed company that has exclusive access to OBL; however, the only way to find out the name of the company is to purchase a $99 ebook that the video advertises. This post does not seek to address the financial claims made in the ad. Instead, it aims to document the numerous and brazenly misleading scientific claims made about this new superfuel. What Moors refers to as OBL is lithium brine (found in salt lakes that have high concentrations of lithium) or their geologic deposits in the form of salts like lithium carbonate or lithium chloride. These raw materials are used to make lithium-ion batteries, common in cell phones and increasingly in demand for electric cars. A post at Stock Gumshoe makes a detailed case for concluding OBL is actually this resource, and the stated locations of the deposits (the Andes and Nevada) as well as Moors’ discussion of electric automobile industry further support that conclusion. The reason the ad uses the term OBL (allegedly an acronym for the Spanish translation of white gold, oro blanco), instead of the scientifically accurate term lithium carbonate, is likely due to the fact that saying lithium demand will rise in the future as electric cars become more popular is far from a hot take, as evidenced by a fairly similar take published in Forbes nearly a decade ago: The nearly hour-long, un-fast-forwardable video does not say what OBL is or identify the company with access to it (though it is likely a company called Lithium X), most likely in order to shield Moors’ myriad vague claims from any critical rebuke. These claims are featured prominently in early portions of the video: Before delving into the meat of the claim — the comparison to gasoline — it is worth noting that the image Moors asks us to look at is a stock photo of salt from a salt lake, not a groundbreaking image of blanco oro. The remarkably specific estimate of 1,693 times more power than gasoline comes from the specious argument that one gallon of OBL can drive your car for 42,325 miles, while a regular gallon of gasoline may last about 25 (42,325 / 25 = 1,693): This is a deeply fallacious argument even if there was some basis to the figure 42,325 miles on a gallon of OBL (though we cannot find one). The explanation Moors gives for OBL’s superior performance sounds nice and neat, but it stems from a comparison that makes apples and oranges look like identical twins: Gasoline powers a car through the energy created by combustion (which is, incidentally, why you wouldn’t want it to withstand extremely high temperatures), whereas a lithium-ion battery creates its power from the chemical energy generated by the movement of lithium ions. This renders the first argument irrelevant, even if you ignore the fact that you can't fill a car with the raw precursor component of a lithium-ion battery, and the fact that that a battery requires A) other chemicals and B) the regular input of energy to reset that chemical system (i.e. the part where you charge it every 100-300 miles). The second argument — that lithium batteries are more energy dense than gasoline — can more accurately be described as a bald-faced lie. The implication that a lithium-ion battery’s energy density, a quantifiable thermodynamic quality inherent to any substance, is greater than that of gasoline is not only false, it is the defining scientific hurdle to making electric cars a viable economic solution, as discussed in a post by the American Physical Society: These factual problems are masked by Moors’ frequent sidetracks into technically valid scientific statements that are both utterly irrelevant and diversionary, including this gem: Stellar nucleosynthesis, the process that powers stars through nuclear reactions, is responsible for the formation of pretty much all elements heavier than helium in our universe, making this statement broadly true for nearly everything in the universe — a concept made famous by Carl Sagan’s memorable quote, We are made of star stuff, in the original run of Cosmos. The statement makes you feel like you could power your car with the force of a stellar explosion, but it is, in reality, a meaningless letdown. This technique is a common one for Moors. In what can only be described as a brilliant use of semantics, he once tried to sell solar energy stock tips by branding solar power as Einstein’s little known theory of space energy. The invention of OBL fits neatly within Moors’ technique of offering opaque hints about stocks while generally abusing science and the English language. The final suggestion made by the video is that this one undisclosed company has exclusive access to American lithium deposits, and therefore has a significant stake in the world market. Excluding the fact that multiple companies have ownership of different regions of the general deposit to which Moors refers (and that five companies dominate this market globally), the Nevada deposits are speculative and not necessarily viable, as discussed in a feature about the future of the American lithium market in Fortune: To be clear, we are not arguing that lithium will not become a major player in the energy market, nor are we arguing that companies investing in American deposits are necessarily a bad bet, but merely highlighting another aspect of an impressively dishonest presentation. Ultimately, we rate this claim as false because it uses demonstrably misleading or false claims about the science behind the production and use of lithium batteries, invents terminology to hide the actual resource being discussed, and oversells the scarcity of access to deposits as well as the novelty of the resource, all with the motivation of selling an e-book for profit.
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