Lithium - White Gold

 The push for cleaner energy is causing demand for lithium to spiral – the International Energy Agency has projected that global demand will grow by over 40 times by 2040 if countries stick to their Paris agreement targets to reduce planet-heating emissions – and will likely spark several new mining operations. The bulk of production happens in Australia and Chile.

Across Nevada, there are more than 17,000 prospecting claims for lithium, a soft metal dubbed “white gold” by investors due to its scarcity and increasing value as clean energy components, with several new major projects now planned. Nevada can be to lithium “what Wall Street is to finance, or what Silicon Valley is to technology”, Steve Sisolak, the state’s governor, has envisioned.

Three-quarters of all known deposits of lithium in America are found near tribal land, igniting fears that a decline in destructive fossil-fuel mining could simply be replaced by a new form of harmful extraction.

Plans for a major new lithium mine in northern Nevada will “will turn what is left of my ancestral homelands into a sacrifice zone for electric car batteries”, Shelley Harjo, a member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, has warned. 

Lithium is produced by network of enormous ponds that hold briny liquid that has been pumped in from underground. The brine evaporates out vast expanses of salt as it bakes under the piercing Nevada sunshine, eventually separating the lithium within. The salt accretes to 10ft deep in places as the brine is cycled around through the ponds, becoming denser the further it goes. It can take up to two years for the brine to be “heavy” enough for processing. The brine is taken to an on-site plant, where lime and soda ash is added to further the transformation; it is then filtered, pressed and dried into lithium carbonate, a powdery substance that looks a little like flour.

Another method is rock extraction, where an ore called spodumene, that contains high levels of lithium, is dug up in open pits. Some farmers in Australia have complained of possible pollution of waterways from the runoff from this sort of mining.

5,000 tons of lithium is enough to make batteries for 80,000 electric cars. Even doubling this output will make a relatively small dent in the amount of lithium required – half of all cars sold in the US will be electric by 2030, according to some forecasts, with about 26m EVs on the road by this time.

If demand for electric cars takes off as expected – California and New York, for example, have both mandated no new diesel or gasoline cars can be sold after 2035 – then the likes of Ford, Tesla and General Motors will need around 900,000 tons of lithium from the US and Canada to if production is to be fulfilled domestically, according to Rystad Energy. Production in North America is only likely to reach 600,000 tons by 2030, the research firm estimates.

There’s lithium in them thar hills – but fears grow over US ‘white gold’ boom | Nevada | The Guardian