This is lithium.
Pretty soon, we’re going to need a lot of it.
Lithium is a useful metal.
It spends its entire existence trying to get rid of its one outer electron but, crucially,
this reaction can be both controlled and reversed.
That means, properly configured, the metal can discharge energy when needed, take in
more energy, and then discharge that energy.
Essentially, it can act as a battery.
It’s only been a few decades since lithium-ion batteries reached commercial feasibility but,
in that time, they have become the power source of choice for portable electronics thanks
to their perfect blend of safety and lightness.
However, the latest major tech boom, the latest infatuation of Silicon Valley and Wall Street
alike, is centered around the largest consumer electronics product to date: electric vehicles.
And pretty soon, we’re going to need a lot of them.
The UK, for example, has committed to banning internal combustion car sales by 2030.
To replace its 31.5 million vehicles, about 236,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate are
needed.
To produce 236,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate, every lithium mine in the world
would have to devote its output to this one use for nine months, and there are a whole
lot more countries, a whole lot more lithium applications, and a whole lot more growth
in the forecast.
While the industry and its issues may be complex, the way in which battery-grade lithium is
produced is not.
Four countries dominate the industry—Argentina, Chile, Australia, and China combined account
for 92% of the globe’s production.
The metal is extracted from the ground at massive sites like the Greenbushes mine in
Western Australia, which is the world’s largest hard-rock lithium mine.
The site was selected due to the abundance of spodumene in the area, which is a mineral
that contains large concentrations of lithium.
Once the raw material is extracted from the ground, it’s transported two and a half
hours north to the Kwinana Lithium Plant near Perth—a facility majority owned and operated
by a Chinese company, Tianqi Lithium, which is responsible for almost half of the world’s
production of the metal.
Once refined, lithium hydroxide and other compounds are sold to battery manufacturers,
which in about three quarters of cases means one of three companies—LG Chem, CATL, or
Panasonic.
The problem, however, is the world’s solution.
In addition to the UK, Iceland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden,
Israel, Singapore, and South Korea have each committed to banning the sale of internal
combustion passenger vehicles within the next decade.
Adding up their annual passenger vehicle sales numbers from 2019, that means the absolute
base-case demand for EVs a decade from now will be 9.5 million per year.
Just to reach that, EV production would have to quintuple, but even the most conservative
forecasters don’t dare tread anywhere close to a number as low as 9.5 million in 2032.
The market is waking up to what this means for lithium demand.
Across 2021, Seaborne lithium prices rose from around $8,000 per metric ton to over
$30,000—a 400% rise in a mere twelve months—and lithium is hardly the only crucial metal for
lithium-ion battery production—it’s just the one in the name.
Cobalt and nickel are also critical to most commercially-available versions of these batteries,
and the situation is hardly different with them.
Cobalt prices doubled across 2021, while nickel rose to its highest price in a decade.
So, the world needs a lot more metals, but right now, it’s hard to believe the world’s
going to get them.
The biggest hurdle the industry faces is best exemplified here: Thacker Pass, Nevada.
Thacker Pass is located in one of the most sparsely populated areas of the country.
It’s an half hour’s drive to the nearest store, an hour to the nearest supermarket,
and three to the nearest Starbucks.
The few roads that exist in the area are lucky to see a few cars an hour, travelling to and
from the various remote farms, ranches, and communities dotting northern Nevada.
That could soon change, though.
250 miles or 400 kilometers to the south is the Silver Peak Lithium Mine.
This is the nation’s only currently operating major lithium mine, despite the fact that
the US is one of the largest EV markets and home to the world’s largest EV manufacturer.
China, also a major EV market home to major EV manufacturers, has made significant headway
in building up its domestic lithium production capacity and the country’s companies also
have significant presences at the world’s other major lithium production sites.
This has come to concern those in charge in the US.
Therefore, sights are set on Thacker Pass—home to the US’ largest lithium deposit.
This site could singlehandedly propel the US into the ranks of major lithium producers,
but getting a mine up and running there has proved… difficult.
The way in which major lithium deposits are distributed across the world is rather cruel.
Overwhelmingly, they’re located in arid regions with little water availability, like
Nevada.
Thacker Pass receives less than 10 inches or 25 centimeters of rain a year.
However, the extraction and processing of lithium requires enormous quantities of water.
It’s expected that operations at the proposed Thacker Pass lithium mine would require 3,224
gallons or 12,204 liters of water per minute—roughly equivalent to the contents of a backyard,
above-ground pool.
That water would be used to pump into the ground as part of the extraction process,
during refinement, and to conduct necessary dust control at the site.
To get this water the mine would have to pump it out of the ground using wells, but every
acre-foot of water in the area is strictly allocated, given the degree of scarcity.
So the mine has to buy up water rights from others in order to gain the legal right to
use it.
What that means, however, is that there’s a direct trade off between one use and another,
and in this case, the other use is predominantly ranching and farming—two key tenants to
the local economy.
In addition, there’s a chance the project could do far more to further the inaccessibility
of water in northern Nevada.
The US Bureau of Land Management’s Environmental Impact Study for the project found that it
presented the distinct possibility of leaking unacceptable levels of arsenic into the area’s
groundwater table which could take the entire region’s water supply offline for hundreds
of years.
In an area where the availability of water undergirds almost all economic activity, that
has people seriously concerned.
The issues only compound on top of that.
As Thacker Pass is, of course, a mountain pass, it acts as a wildlife corridor between
the Double-H and Montana mountains—two biodiversity hotspots.
Therefore, the environmental impact study found the project likely to destroy or deteriorate
thousands of acres of habitat used by the pronghorn antelope, sage grouse, golden eagle,
and other unique species.
For interrelated reasons, the project also has a number of local indigenous tribes concerned—the
most vocal of which is the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe.
They say that during the era of American soldiers rounding up and shipping indigenous people
off to reservations, two of the tribe’s families hid out in the shelter Thacker Pass
provided—so they directly attribute the continued existence of their tribe to the
area.
In addition, they consider the pass a sacred site, in part because of a historic massacre
they say occurred there.
This assertion, however, was directly challenged in a court case related to the mine project,
and the judge rejected the claim citing a lack of evidence.
To add to their opposition, the tribe put forward evidence linking the development of
similar resource-extraction projects, which are predominately staffed by men, to increases
in the rape and murder of indigenous women in nearby areas.
Even just looking at these few headline issues, it becomes clear that the Thacker Pass lithium
mine project is mired in a nearly insurmountable web of controversy and conflict, and it’s
hardly alone in that status.
Much of the evidence opponents to the Thacker Pass mine have put forward is based on real-world
experiences in the lithium triangle—the nexus between Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia
that hosts some of the world’s most productive lithium production facilities.
An area in a similar situation—a remote, arid landscape punctuated by small communities
home to a historically oppressed indigenous population—the lithium triangle has seen
an economic boon, but it’s come at the cost of environmental and cultural devastation.
Just as the issues are not confined to one geography, they’re not even confined to
lithium alone.
Some 70% of the world’s cobalt, a crucial component to current battery tech, comes from
the Democratic Republic of the Congo—the 8th poorest country in the world, according
to World Bank figures.
While a majority of the cobalt mining is conducted by large mining companies with often shaky
safety and human rights records, a concerningly large minority is accomplished through what’s
referred to as “artisanal” mining—a term defining the illegal, informal practice
of individuals mining cobalt by themselves and selling it on to shady middlemen.
The complete lack of safety standards or regulations in the sector means child labor and deadly
mine collapses are rampant.
For those that aren’t directly injured or killed on the job, long-term exposure to cobalt
mines has been linked to significant health effects later in life, and fatal birth defects
for children in the region.
Altogether, there’s almost no such thing as ethical cobalt.
There’s also almost no such thing as green lithium.
There’s little appetite anywhere to increasing lithium mining in the places where it’s
accessible, and little progress has been made in the DRC in making cobalt mining less socially
disastrous.
As demand for EVs and their batteries increases, getting more cobalt and lithium will be incredibly
difficult.
However, on top of that, getting more cobalt and lithium that’s more ethical and green,
or even as ethical and green, will be next to impossible.
But to decarbonize driving, solutions must be found.
One option, rather than finding more raw materials, is to need less of them.
Of course, the way to do that is by making batteries better.
The most promising short-term innovation that could fulfill that mission is solid state
batteries.
Whereas traditional EV batteries have a liquidy, viscous lithium-based electrolyte, solid state
batteries rather use a solid, metal composition as their ion transport mechanism.
This switch has a number of benefits including a higher safety profile that reduces the risk
of fire, and therefore reduces the need for expensive safety features.
Solid state batteries can also be made without cobalt or nickel, which eliminates two problematic
and costly necessities in current battery tech.
Most significant, however, is solid state batteries’ higher energy density.
Traditional lithium ion compositions used in EV battery packs store about 114 watt-hours
of energy per pound, or 250 per kilogram.
That means one pound of battery could move a Tesla Model 3, for example, 0.4 miles, or
1 kilogram 1.3 kilometers.
Meanwhile, it’s expected that solid state batteries will be able to store between 175
and 225 watt-hours per pound or 400 to 500 per kilogram—essentially doubling battery
density.
That means Tesla could halve the weight of their half-ton battery pack and not only keep
range the same, but increase it as the car would no longer need to carry the rest of
the weight of the battery pack.
On top of all those benefits, expert believe that, at scale, production costs of solid
state batteries could be even less than the cheapest current lithium-ion batteries.
However, the issue is getting to that scale.
Battery production needs to occur at absolutely massive quantities to reach cost competitiveness—an
assertion backed up by the industry’s current effective triopoly.
The process of working down this cost curve is long as there are few applications where
battery weight matters as much as with EVs, and EVs won’t switch to solid state batteries
until their cost is competitive, but their cost will only become competitive when the
industry reaches a production capacity that only EVs can provide.
So, the industry has to wait for some level of scale to occur through niche solid state
battery applications in medical devices, race cars, and fighter jets; then wait for consumer
electronics to realize the weight savings or battery life benefits the innovation could
provide; then wait for the highest-end EVs to incorporate the technology in order to
offer super-long ranges as a luxury; before solid-state batteries can finally reach a
cost that would allow them to permeate into what will by then be the large segment of
everyday EVs.
Most estimates place that enticing end-goal more than a decade away.
Even if the solid-state battery transition reaches fruition earlier, the world will still
need a whole lot more lithium.
Far from the potential environmental disaster at Thacker Pass is an existing environmental
disaster—the Salton Sea.
A century ago, Colorado River floodwaters breached through an irrigation canal and accumulated,
over years, in the Imperial Valley’s geographic low-point 236 feet or 72 meters below sea
level.
That massive puddle still exists today, but some of the water has slowly evaporated through
time, leaving an ever saltier, dirtier accumulation of water.
Thousands more feet below, however, are a number of underground volcanoes that superheat
water to hundreds of degrees.
If one brings that water to the surface, the pressure change leads to it transforming into
steam and steam, of course, is what most power plants use to drive turbines.
Traditional power plants use coal or natural gas to heat water up into steam, but this
steam is created by the earth—meaning its carbon-free.
That’s why Berkshire Hathaway Energy has built 10 geothermal energy plants in the area,
but, crucially, this superheated water is filled with something else: lithium.
Therefore, these geothermal plants are planning on adding an extra step in their process to
extract lithium from the briny steam they use.
Now, there are certainly significant technological hurdles that stand between now and a future
of commercially-competitive lithium production at the Salton Sea, especially as the metal
only represents a tiny portion of the slurry of materials found in the water, but the lithium
is there.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy, as the largest existing energy company working around the
Salton Sea, is leading the charge thanks in part to a sizable federal grant, and expects
to have its demonstration facility up and running later in 2022.
A number of other competitors have already started developing their lithium-extraction
plays around the Salton Sea, meaning America’s first lithium boom-town might already be a
foregone conclusion.
These are the kind of solutions needed as the world transitions to electric mobility.
Electric vehicles, due to their reliance on batteries, are just dirtier than internal
combustion vehicles to produce.
That being said, the vast majority of emissions from cars, including from EVs themselves,
come not from the production of vehicles but from driving them.
The science on the issue is sound—electric vehicles, from production to use to scrapping,
are responsible for about 75% less emissions than their internal combustion counterparts,
even on current, fossil-fuel based electric grids.
Anyone who argues the opposite is either misinformed or attempting to disinform, and that gap will
only widen as grids continue to decarbonize.
However, there can be better alternatives to better alternatives.
In the coming lithium gold-rush, corners can and likely will be cut.
The question the world will have to grapple with is whether it’s worth destroying pristine
environments like Thacker Pass in the name of environmentalism—whether slowing the
issue on a global level is worth accelerating it on a local level.
Then, when the answer inevitably gravitates towards yes, the world will have to grapple
with who must confront that local devastation.
If the answer continues to be to place the burden on the world’s most vulnerable, then
even if the steady march of climate change is curbed, will the world have truly succeeded
in stopping its effects?
Is it worth sending teenagers to die in a war to prevent the propagation of terrorist
organizations?
Is it worth depressing an economy to slow the spread of a pandemic?
It it worth allowing individuals to own guns for self-protection even if it allows easier
access for bad actors?
Determining what is an acceptable sacrifice has historically led to some of the most contentious,
perennial political issues in history.
Here, it’s happening again: the public needs to decide, with the fate of the world on top
of them, how much bad should be allowed for the greater good.
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