The Story of the Mining of Lithium below the Lakebed: How Many Metric Tons Will it Take to Reopen a Mine?
There is a volcano below the lakebed. The workers drill down below the playa, then pump up brine that has been soaking up the brine and spread it under the hot sun. As water and salt evaporate out, the liquid that’s left has a higher and higher concentration of lithium.
A single smallmine is not going to satisfy the demand for lithium in the world. But the fact that it’s even being considered is telling.
The world will rely on existing mines to scale up as fast as they can for the next three to five years, says an energy metals analyst.
She says that they have been surprised by how quickly the existing projects have responded to the price hikes.
Lithium can do a number of nifty tricks. When it touches water, it explodes into flames. In its salt form, it treats mood disorders. (It was an ingredient in the original recipe for 7 Up).
It is most important for the global economy for a single particle of lithium to shed an electron and then zip back and forth between the positive and negative ends of the battery, storing and discharging power as it goes.
“We’ll hit the first millionmetric tons of demand within the next few years,” says a lithium expert, according to Benchmark Minerals Intelligence. “And thereafter every few years adding another millionmetric tons, which is staggering.”
Silver Peak had quietly supplied 5000 metric tons per year, with no expectation of growth in the future. Now it’s invested some $60 million in an expansion, and is on track to make 10,000 metric tons a year by 2024.
After at least 18 months of journeys through 23 separate ponds, brine is pumped out and treated to create a white powder that’s loaded into sacks and then shipped off.
It’s not a sense of duty to help with the fight against Climate change because there is a very simple reason to do it. Lithium prices have tripled. In the last quarter, the company recorded profits due to soaring price and rising production.
The closed mine in North Carolina that was once used to extract brine from rocks is just one of the mines that will be reopened. Reopening a closed mine, for a multitude of reasons, is an easier lift than launching one from scratch, and soaring prices make projects that were shuttered for economic reasons suddenly more profitable.
Recycling is another source of lithium, and Albemarle also intends to open a facility for recycling electric vehicle batteries. The problem is that this won’t be a source of a meaningful source of the substance for a long time. A massive amount of batteries to recycle don’t currently exist, and that’s because you can’t recycle batteries that do not exist.
“New companies coming in with new technologies may help to lower the cost of lithium extraction and unlock deposits which we never thought previously possible to unlock,” Perks says.
If you put on your lithium-spotting goggles, there’s all kinds of potential. At Silver Peak, there’s a giant hill of sand looking out over the evaporation ponds. It was dredged up from the ponds and piled up here to keep it out of the way.
“There’s a theory that the salt that comes out of these ponds can be re-harvested,” says Karen Narwold, from a perch atop the hill.
The Stellantis Project: Powering the Auto Industry to Electrify in the Era of e-Vectrification
The factory that builds Jeep Cherokees in Illinois is the subject of the news as an auto manufacturer prepares for labor talks. While United Auto Workers argues that “the transition to electrification also creates opportunities” at the plant, an unnamed Stellantis spokesperson told CNBC and The Wall Street Journal that it was instead the reason for the halt. “The most impactful challenge is the increasing cost related to the electrification of the automotive market,” the company claims, adding that it’s exploring other uses for the plant, and that it’s trying to find jobs for the workers it’s laying off.
If you follow the auto industry it’s hard to keep up with all the Billion-dollar plants to make massive batteries for electric vehicles that are announced so often.
Ford has also gone through a recent round of layoffs, cutting around 3000 jobs. Jim Farley and Bill Ford wrote a memo to employees that said they have an opportunity to lead this exciting new era of connected and electric vehicles. “Building this future requires changing and reshaping virtually all aspects of the way we have operated for more than a century.” That, of course, meant cutting jobs.
Did you hear about KORE Power in Arizona? Samsung and Stellantis in Indiana? The Norwegian one is located in Georgia, and the Japanese one is located in South Carolina.
The electric vehicle and battery project in Georgia is a $5 billion project, so if you don’t like it anymore, how about that? No, not that one — the other one.
To conquer a huge share of the market in just a few years, automakers are prepared for electric vehicles, which currently account for around 6% of new vehicle sales. That means companies will need a tremendous number of batteries.
Political pressure is building on companies involved with battery production to reduce reliance on China and create American jobs. China hosts most of the production of some key components for batteries.
“It helps us with logistics cost, it helps us with material costs,” Volkswagen of America’s then-president Scott Keogh told NPR last January about moving production to the United States. Having the supply chain locally, having the car here, and having enough production slots will be dramatic and dramatic help.
In the last year, the company has opened a new electric assembly line at its Chattanooga plant (cost of conversion: $800 million), with batteries sourced from a new SKI plant located a few hours away in Georgia (price tag: $2.6 billion).
Many of the new U.S. projects are going up in the Southeast, earning the region the nickname the “battery belt.” But Tom Taylor, an analyst with Atlas, says the trend is geographically wider than that.
“We’ve seen announcements… all over the country, and not just announcements, but really big announcements,” he says. Some of the largest, if not the largest, economic development projects in the state’s history exist in some states.
It’s much easier to announce a new battery plant than to actually open one. At its new Berlin Gigafactory, it is facing a lot of challenges.
Mary Barra had to defend the slow pace of production there on the recent call with investors, after GM opened a new battery plant in Ohio.
“Let’s step back and recognize that the Ohio plant is the size of 30 football fields, and it will employ over 1,000 people,” she said. “Making sure we had all our people there and trained has taken a little longer than expected.”
The United Auto Workers’ Union (EVS) Project: Electric Vehicle Production in U.S. Automakers and Battery Factories under State and Local Subsidies
And that’s particularly concerning to some critics, because not all of those billions of dollars are coming from companies — a big chunk of it is footed by taxpayers.
Nearly $14 billion in state and local subsidies went to electric vehicle plants and battery factories this year, according to the subsidy watchdog group The lack of transparency and the large amount of subsidies have been criticized by Good Jobs First.
The national climate bill, passed this summer, included big incentives for U.S.-based electric vehicle manufacturing.
The largest US automaker also said Tuesday it is buying a $650 million equity stake in Lithium Americas, which will give it access to the raw material needed to build batteries to power 1 million electric vehicles a year in the first phase of production.
GM earned adjusted earnings of $3 billion, or $2.12 a share for the quarter, more than quadrupling from the year-ago quarter and beating analysts’ expectations by a factor of three. Full-year adjusted income was $11 billion, up from $10.4 billion it earned in 2001, which was its previous record.
The company opened its first battery plant last year and will be adding at least two more by the end of the year. GM aims to build 400,000 EVs by the middle of 2024 and 1 million each year after that.
GM wants to cut $2 billion in costs over the course of the next two years and it will reduce its staff. Although a number of major companies have recently announced layoffs, company officials emphasized that GM wouldn’t be changing through layoffs. Instead the reduction would be handled through attrition.
GM has a total of 167,000 employees worldwide, 124,000 in North America. More than 42,000 people are members of the United Auto Workers union. Those workers will get profit sharing bonuses of an average of $12,750 for the year, up nearly 25% from the $10,250 they received a year earlier.