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Page added on April 20, 2016
Lithium: An increasingly precious metal
While the Australian mining boom is now receding in the rear view mirror, one mining sector that is still attracting enthusiastic investment is the lithium mining industry.
Western Australia currently produces about 30% of the world’s lithium supplies, and 20 new companies are scrambling about the state trying to take advantage of the boom in “white oil”. WA Business News has an article on the evolving market for the metal, looking at producers in Australia and South America – A Window opens for lithium hopefuls.
The investment frenzy may have already reached a peak locally however, with some investment columnists warning there aren’t any bargains left in the sector – Ten years on, lithium may as well be uranium and This ‘new gasoline’ could burn eager investors.
The Economist also has a look at the soaring demand for lithium, with some interesting tales from Chile as the jostling begins to supply the expanding battery market for electric vehicles and home energy storage – An increasingly precious metal.
SQM, Chile’s biggest lithium producer, is the kind of company you might find in an industrial-espionage thriller. Its headquarters in the military district of Santiago bears no name. The man who for years ran the business, Julio Ponce, is the former son-in-law of the late dictator, Augusto Pinochet. He quit as chairman in 2015, during an investigation into SQM for alleged tax evasion. (The company is co-operating with the inquiry.) Last month it emerged that CITIC, a Chinese state-controlled firm, may bid for part of Mr Ponce’s controlling stake in SQM, as part of China’s bid to secure supplies of a vital raw material.The focus of CITIC’s interest appears to lie on a lunar-like landscape of encrusted salt in Chile’s Atacama desert. It is a brine deposit washed off the Andes millions of years ago, containing about a fifth of the world’s known lithium resources. (Even more are in adjacent Bolivia but they are mostly untapped). Just weeks before, CITIC had bought a stake in a Hong Kong electric-vehicle maker that uses lithium-ion batteries, indicating its growing interest in clean-energy technologies.
The sleeping giant of lithium production is Bolivia, which by most estimates possesses the largest reserves of the metal. Evo Morales has announced a $1 billion investment push to kick start production, expanding links with Chinese companies to both extract the material and produce lithium ion batteries in the country – Bolivia’s lithium boom: dream or nightmare?.
Lithium production will clearly need to expand given the pre-sales for the Tesla 3 are now approaching 4000,000 vehicles and projected sales would consume all of world’s lithium production at current levels – Rising Lithium Prices Threaten to Short-Circuit EV Market. The Chevrolet Bolt is also due out on the market this year, putting further pressure on supplies.
One way to boost production is to improve the efficiency of extraction processes. CleanTechnica has an article on improvements on extracting lithium from brine – New Method Of Extracting Lithium From Natural Brine Yields 99.9% Purity.
12 Comments on "Lithium: An increasingly precious metal"
makati1 on Wed, 20th Apr 2016 6:24 pm
More techie dreams. Too many batteries to make and too little resources.
Go Speed Racer on Wed, 20th Apr 2016 6:57 pm
Uh oh, running out of lithium. Fortunately, there will be enough lithium, for the playthings of the rich.
makati1 on Wed, 20th Apr 2016 8:50 pm
Go, but economy of scale means they will never get them.
Go Speed Racer on Thu, 21st Apr 2016 4:03 am
We know the lithium batteries deteriorate, and after 500 charge-discharge cycles, the batteries are weaker. After 1000 cycles, the battery is unacceptable.
How effective will the recycling be, for all the deteriorated lithium batteries?
dooma on Thu, 21st Apr 2016 4:25 am
bi-polar batteries for a crazy world.
makati1 on Thu, 21st Apr 2016 5:29 am
Go Speed, how many batteries are being recycled now? Easier to just throw them in the trash and buy new, if you are an American. Oh, car batteries are mostly recycled, I guess, but not the trillions of AAA,AA,D, etc small batteries that add up to more than any car battery volumes. Then there are the cell phone batteries, hearing aid batteries, laptop batteries, etc. All Trashed because it is too “inconvenient” to take them to a collection point.
Maybe if they put a deposit/refund system in place that added 100% to the cost of the battery there would be an incentive to recycle. Or maybe not. We will never know.
PracticalMaina on Thu, 21st Apr 2016 8:01 am
Interesting they didn’t mention Afghanistan in this article. I heard a few years after the war began, that they were sitting on up to a trillion worth of copper, lithium and many many other minerals. Another added bonus for Haliburton and ExxonMobil? Eliminate a huge source of an element needed for electric cars by destabilizing a country.
http://www.mining.com/1-trillion-motherlode-of-lithium-and-gold-discovered-in-afghanistan/
PracticalMaina on Thu, 21st Apr 2016 8:25 am
Looky what I found, I forgot to mention that we lost them as an economic asset, China will now exploit that country. Which is probably why this article talks up Bolivia, nothing like a poor South American nation to get us our shit using cheap labor.
http://in.reuters.com/article/china-afghanistan-idINKCN0XI06G
peakyeast on Thu, 21st Apr 2016 9:08 am
@PracticalMaina:
http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/16/daily-show-who-will-exploit-afghanistans-newfound-ore-on-terror
Great video !
PracticalMaina on Thu, 21st Apr 2016 9:30 am
Peakyeast, thanks for the video, I am skeptical of the “newly found” statement. I figure there had to be more to gain for TPTB than just a pipeline route, otherwise you can just send in special forces to do terror raids and clean up Al-Qaeda and pay- threaten the government to allow the pipeline. I remember being hopeful some good would come out of the invasion because Afghanistan had the highest rate of lost limbs due to landmines, unfortunately I was mistaken.
peakyeast on Thu, 21st Apr 2016 9:35 am
Agreed! – I think you should replace “Newly found” with “Newly publicized”.
Kenz300 on Fri, 22nd Apr 2016 7:25 am
Electric cars, bikes and mass transit are the future…..fossil fuel ICE cars are the past…………..
Think teen agers vs your grand father…………………. cell phones vs land lines…….
NO EMISSIONS……..climate change is real………
Save money……no stopping at gas stations…..no oil changes……..less overall maintenance……