The insatiable demand for lithium and other “critical metals” is leaving the world reeling. Do you see the battery half empty or battery half full?
At the end of October, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has approved a massive new lithium mine in the Nevada desert – in what will herald a rapid increased extraction of so-called “critical minerals” in the coming years.
Although it is thought that the administration of Donald Trump can reverse many initiatives Regarding electricity, as pointed out by , the need for these metals – such as copper, nickel, aluminum, manganese, zinc, lithium – goes beyond politics.
Critical metals are at the heart of iPhones, Teslas and countless other high-tech products of utmost importance to the US. It is expected that, in the coming decades, the global demand for these metals increases rapidly by between 400 and 600%.
An increasingly global economy high-tech will require more of these critical elements than are currently being produced.
A single smartphonefor example, can contain up to two-thirds of all the elements in the periodic table. However, by comparison, a Tesla Model S electric vehicle requires as much lithium as about ten thousand iPhones.
Everything has a cost
All this new, rapid demand for metals and the products they power may be outpacing available supply.
This means that mining operations, which have a long history of environmental damage and community displacement, are about to become much more common. Not just in the USA, but all over the world.
Just this Thursday, the Portuguese Government gave the green light to private companies to prospect for lithium in Boticas.
However, governments and companies that rush to extract as many of these resources from the Earth as possible risk further pollute the planet.
Ironically, these metals are crucial to the construction of the wind turbines and solar panels that are being built to prevent a future climate catastrophe. This dilemma is one of the dilemmas posed by the journalist Vince Beiser in the book, Power Metal: The Race For the Resources That Will Shape The Future”, where he followed the many faces of mining fever.
Battery half empty?
Although a minority of new companies are experimenting with innovative chemical processes to extract lithium directly from rocks, the vast majority of lithium extraction currently uses traditional brine extraction techniques, which require large amounts of water and can affect local ecology.
As Popular Science exemplifies, in Argentinalithium extraction operations have already contaminated streams used to irrigate crops.
Already Chinain turn, a lithium mine will have polluted a nearby river to such an extent that killed the fish who lived in it and the yaks who drank its water.
Nos USAthe EPA estimates that 40% of all U.S. watersheds have been contaminated by various forms of hard rock extraction.
Mining, regardless of the resource targeted, generally leaves a lasting mark on its land source and the people responsible for extracting it.
That’s what Nevada activists are now fighting against.
Or half full battery?
Still, the extraction of critical minerals is more environmentally friendly than gas and coal.
Producing just one gigawatt-hour of electricity from coal, for example, requires 20 times more mining footprint than the same amount of electricity produced by solar or wind energy. The conclusion is a study at the beginning of this year, at Breakthrough Institute.
Continuing to see the glass half full, at a social level, US and European government leaders say that new national mining operations can create many jobs needed for struggling economies and help diversify global supply chains.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the world will need ten times more lithium by 2050 to satisfy the demand for renewable energy.
