Currently, Nova Scotia has eight lithium exploration projects underway, which are part of the province’s strategy for increasing economic and energy security.

Along with developing critical minerals for domestic use, Nova Scotia is seeking export markets “as more companies look for reliable supplies in stable regulatory environments,” a representative of the Department of Natural Resources writes in an email.

Because of its essential role for energy grid storage and electric vehicles, lithium could see global demand skyrocket 1,500% from 2022 under a net-zero 2050 scenario and has strong potential for extraction in Nova Scotia’s southwest and east, according to a 2023 strategy document released by the department.

Natural Resources Canada estimates that battery applications such as EVs and grid storage account for 87% of global lithium demand. According to the Mining Association of Nova Scotia (MANS), lithium mining is important not just for EV batteries and energy storage but also wind turbines and solar panels, and promises more jobs and government revenues to offset health and education costs.

The International Energy Agency projects that the world will need six times more lithium by 2040 than it produced in 2024. That would mean more than 750 kilatonnes. China, Australia and Chile mine about three-quarters globally, with China refining nearly two-thirds.

Nova Scotia has long wanted to join the international market for lithium. Pegmatite, a primary geological source of lithium, was discovered at Yarmouth County’s Brazil Lake in 1960, along with lithium ore spodumene and other critical minerals such as tantalum and rubidium. For decades, Champlain Mineral Ventures Ltd., a private drilling and prospecting company based in Bridgetown, N.S., has explored the site.

John Wightman, a Champlain Mineral Ventures engineer leading the Brazil Lake Lithium Project, selected Australia’s Lithium Springs Limited to drill the site. With $8 million already spent and only a fraction of drilling done, a long road lies ahead to get a mine running, but with the eventual promise of supplying lithium to markets around the world.

Lithium-bearing spodumene concentrate extracted from the Brazil Lake mine would be shipped abroad, to supply lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide, and used by companies such as South Korea’s LG Electronics to produce batteries, Wightman says.

But to first open a lithium mine, “it takes about two-and-a-half years to get the permitting done, and then a year to two years to build out the facilities at the mine to process the ore,” Wightman says. “We’d be very optimistic to say that we could be in operation by 2030, but if the market turns around sufficiently over the next 12 months, we might be close to that.”

Despite the need for lithium to help slash global emissions over the next 25 years, this critical mineral has struggled on the market. In 2023, the price plummeted 32% due to oversupply and weak sales and hasn’t significantly recovered since, though Wightman estimated in September that lithium had rebounded 10 to 15% off August lows.

Minerals are a finite resource, and we should reduce, reuse and recycle them as much as possible.

– Sean Kirby, executive director, Mining Association of Nova Scotia

Wightman anticipates lithium’s value doubling over the next year, bringing more mineral deposits and companies back into the game. Business consulting firm Grand View Research further projects that the global lithium market will see a compound annual growth rate of 18% between 2025 and 2030, reaching US$74.8 billion.

This year saw a “major turnaround” for lithium prospects in Nova Scotia, Wightman says, thanks largely to Premier Tim Houston’s outspoken support for the sector, including at an international mining conference in Toronto in March. Houston has helped put Nova Scotia on the map for the lithium market, Wightman says, and has made it easier for companies to obtain granting approvals from the province.

Still, Champlain Mineral Ventures must raise $25 million more to “move the project to the next level,” which includes conducting mining feasibility studies, analyzing mineral content and cutting into the lithium bed using diamond. He says the Brazil Lake mine, if approved, would create 100 to 200 local jobs.

Mining’s environmental footprint

Many lithium deposits in Nova Scotia lie on farmland, including around Annapolis Royal, and “raise a bit of a red flag,” says Abbygail Lefebvre, energy coordinator for the Ecology Action Centre (EAC). Following a drought spell, record temperatures and strict water limits in the province this summer, “it’s just scary to think that now you’re going to start mining, which does require a lot of water,” she adds.

If mining moves forward at Brazil Lake and other sites, Lefebvre would want to see strict water use and discharge limits, prevention of watershed contamination, land and biodiversity protections, and climate accountability plans.

But the industry is confident that bringing lithium mining to Nova Scotia would be both environmentally and ethically sound. Wightman explains that the pegmatites of lithium “are completely environmentally benign, so there’s no chance of acid rock drainage or other threats to the environment from this type of mining.”

Mining domestically also ensures an ethical supply, MANS executive director Sean Kirby says in an email statement to Corporate Knights. “If we do not extract minerals in places like Canada, more mining will be done in countries that do not share our values, or take proper care of the environment and worker safety,” Kirby says, criticizing Chinese export markets for poor environmental and safety records. “Blocking a mining project in Canada does nothing to protect the environment – it just offshores impacts to a jurisdiction where they will likely be worse.”

But while “modern mining takes excellent care of the environment,” Kirby adds, the industry must keep doing all it can to slash emissions and consumption of energy and water. “All mining operations, for any mineral, need to meet the highest environmental standards.”

Potential for circular economy

As the industry pushes ahead, Lefebvre sees big potential for Nova Scotia to establish battery recycling infrastructure in conjunction with its lithium mining ambitions. “I would hope, too, that even if they decided to break ground, that they would still look into the economic investment and opportunity of getting into the recycling industry,” she says. “This is a circular-economy integration that we could start in the coming years – as soon as you put a facility on the ground, create a bunch of green jobs.”

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Natural Resources Canada deems lithium “infinitely recyclable,” and Kirby echoes the importance of battery recycling, which recovers up to 95% of material, including lithium, cobalt and nickel. “Minerals are a finite resource, and we should reduce, reuse and recycle them as much as possible,” he says. “Lithium batteries are just one example of where society needs to further improve recycling efforts.”

Cirba Solutions, which operates across the United States and in Trail, B.C., reports recycling 36 million pounds of lithium-ion batteries over three decades. In Quebec, Lithion Technologies says it’s slashed average greenhouse gases from battery recycling operations by 75%, using wet shredding technology to salvage 98% of minerals.

In a March 2025 report, EAC said it hopes Nova Scotia’s government will pivot toward battery recycling as the critical-mineral industry grows.

Lefebvre emphasizes that without such facilities anywhere in Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia is well positioned to establish itself as a hub for the battery recycling industry and potentially even manufacture new batteries in province, rather than focus on exploiting raw lithium.

Evert Lindquist reports from Revelstoke, B.C. He has reported in Uganda on nature-based solutions and written for Canada’s National Observer, Climate Stories Atlantic, The Energy Mix and The Narwhal.

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“We’re only producing a few commodities,” says Elizabeth Holley, a professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. “The question is: What else is in those rocks?”

The answer: a lot.

In a study published today by the journal Science, Holley and her colleagues aimed to quantify what else is in those rocks. They found that, across 70 critical elements at 54 active mines, the potential for recovery is enormous. There is enough lithium in one year of U.S. mine waste, for example, to power 10 million electric vehicles. For manganese, it’s enough for 99 million. Those figures far surpass both U.S. import levels of those elements and current demand for them.

Critical minerals are essential to the production of lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and other low- or zero-carbon technologies powering the clean energy transition. Where the United States gets those minerals has long been a politically fraught topic.

The vast majority of lithium comes from Australia, Chile and China, for example, while cobalt comes predominantly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While securing a domestic supply of rare or critical materials has been a U.S. policy goal for decades, the push has intensified in recent years. Former president Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, included incentives for domestic critical mineral production, and this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order invoking wartime powers that would allow more leasing and extraction on federal lands.

“Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production,” the order read. “It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”

Trump also made critical minerals a cornerstone of continued support to Ukraine. Meanwhile, China recently expanded export controls on rare earth metals, underscoring the precarious nature of the global market.

Holley’s research indicates that increased domestic by-product recovery could address this instability. Even a 1% recovery rate, it found, would “substantially reduce” import reliance for most elements. Recovering 4% of lithium would completely offset current imports. “We could focus on mines that are already corporate and simply add additional circuits to their process,” Holley says. “It would be a really quick way of bringing a needed mineral into production.”

This latest research is “very valuable,” says Hamidreza Samouei, a professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University who wasn’t involved in the study. He sees it as a great starting point for a multipronged approach to tackling the by-product problem and moving toward a zero-waste system. Other areas that will need attention, he says, include looking beyond discarded rock to the “huge” amounts of water that a mine uses. He also believes that the government should play a more aggressive policy and regulatory role in pushing for critical mineral recovery. “Mining is a very old-fashioned industry,” Samouei says. “Who is going to take the risk?”

The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced a by-product recovery pilot program, and the Pentagon took a $400-million stake in the operator of the country’s only rare-earth metal mine. At the same time, Congress recently repealed large chunks of the Inflation Reduction Act, which would have driven demand for critical minerals, and has slashed federal funding to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, among other research arms.

The general thrust of the Science study is “not new,” says Isabel Barton, a professor of geological engineering at the University of Arizona. “It is a very hot topic in mining these days.”

The attention is contributing to a burgeoning shift in thinking, from an intense focus on the target mineral to consideration of what else could be produced, including critical minerals. “There are some that are probably relatively simple. There are others that are heinously difficult to get to,” Barton says, and whether a mineral is recovered will ultimately come down to cost. “Mining companies are there to make a profit.”

Figuring out the most economically viable way forward is exactly the next step Holley hopes this research will inform. By-product potential varies considerably by mine, and the analysis, she says, can help pinpoint where to potentially find which minerals. For instance, the Red Dog mine in Alaska appears to have the largest germanium potential in the country, while nickel could be found at the Stillwater and East Boulder mines in Montana.

“The [research and development] funding on critical minerals has been a little bit of a scattershot,” Holley says. “Our paper allows the development of a strategy.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

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“Sheer mineral wealth hasn’t always translated into development, particularly for the communities who live next to mines,” said report author Colin Robertson, a senior investigator at Global Witness.

The team investigated mining projects for lithium, an essential mineral in the production of batteries for electric vehicles and power storage, in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Namibia. They highlighted the risk that future mining will “embed corruption, fail to develop local economies, and harm citizens and the environment.”

Last January, residents living near Uis in western Namibia started noticing a daily convoy of trucks leaving an area they believed to simply be an artisanal mining site. The large vehicles were passing through the community on their way to the port of Walvis Bay on the country’s western shore, according to Jimmy Areseb, a community activist. In reality, the trucks were exporting minerals from an extensive operation residents knew little about. In March, people took to the streets to protest the activities of Chinese miner Xinfeng Investments, the owner of the trucks and entity extracting resources, alleging the company was carrying out large-scale industrial mining without the proper permits or social license.

Uis sits at the heart of an area of immense cultural, ecological and economic significance. The mining site falls within the expansive Tsiseb Conservancy, which supports residents through legal wildlife hunting. Ancient rock art believed to be thousands of years old lies a few kilometers from the town of Uis. These rocky outcrops also hold pegmatites, igneous rocks traditionally mined for tin, and, more recently, lithium.

In a petition, some community leaders, including Areseb, alleged that the company didn’t properly consult with community members when it appeared on the scene last year, adding that leaders of the operation bought off local chiefs to obtain permissions for their mining project. Areseb accused the government of “total negligence,” overlooking the interest of ordinary citizens in granting approvals.

Rather than bringing tangible benefits, the mining activity interferes with the breeding of wildlife like springbok, hyenas and rhinos that bring in revenue for the conservancy, he said, adding that they’re scared away by the noise from the mining operation.

“We’re not saying the company must go,” he said, adding the community just wants a seat at the table so that “we can discuss the way forward.”

According to documents reviewed by Mongabay, a Namibian company, Long Fire Investments, owned by businessman January S. Likulano, bought 10 mining claims for around $160 in total to carry out small-scale mining in the region. Only Namibian citizens can apply for small-scale mining permits, which are much cheaper than industrial mining permits issued to foreign companies. The Global Witness report cited ties between Long Fire Investments and Tangshan Xinfeng HongKong Ltd., owner of Xinfeng Investments, as evidence that the Namibian company was a front for Tangshan Xinfeng.

In an export application, Long Fire Investments requested permission to export 55,000 metric tons of lithium-rich ore valued at $32 million to Tangshan Xinfeng. Such a relationship allows the Chinese company to profit from a major lithium deposit for a pittance of its actual value while dodging the need for a proper environmental impact assessment for industrial mining by operating under small-scale mining permits.

“A company is exporting minerals worth millions. The royalty fee they pay our government is only 2%,” 28-year-old Areseb said. “We cannot allow this while the hospitals are falling apart, schools are falling apart, the roads, everything in our country is debilitated.”

An assessment of Namibia’s mining code found that fiscal requirements for foreign companies, including the royalty rate of 2% for industrial mining of minerals, were hurting the government. The policy translates into low upfront revenue for the state, and isn’t designed to bring proportional benefits when the price of minerals like lithium increases on the global market, according to the assessment. Battery-grade lithium carbonate sold at $37,000 per metric ton in 2022 compared to around $6,000 per metric ton in 2012, while the royalty rate has remained unchanged since 2009. Thus, the status quo boosts miners’ profits.

Local communities and Namibian parliamentarians have also accused the company of housing workers in “apartheid conditions” while failing to deliver on promises to build processing facilities within Namibia.

In November, Xinfeng announced that it plans to launch a lithium-processing plant in Namibia in the first quarter of 2024. In an email to Mongabay, a Xinfeng representative declined to comment on the allegations or share documents proving the operation’s legitimacy. Likulano also didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In Zimbabwe, another activist, Farai Maguwu, director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, described a similar experience of exclusion and exploitation at the Bikita mine, calling it “typical extractivism.” In January 2022, Sinomine, a Chinese company, purchased Bikita Minerals, which operates the largest lithium mine in the Southern African nation. Following the takeover, its new owners ramped up production from 3,000 to around 10,000 metric tons a month, primarily for export to China and Japan, according to a report in the Reuters.

“The communities watch mineral-laden trucks leaving every day, yet there is no investment in public goods, in health, education, or supporting alternative livelihoods,” Maguwu said. “[The company] are here only to loot. There is no connection with the priorities of the communities they operate in.”

In 2023, following media reports, the Zimbabwean government briefly shut down the mine, citing exploitative labor conditions.

Foreign mining companies aren’t the only ones exploiting the country’s natural resources; “sanctioned local elites” are also profiting, with the complicity of the state at the expense of citizens, according to Global Witness. In Zimbabwe’s Sandawana mine, more than a decade after production of emeralds ceased, a newly coveted mineral was discovered: lithium. Artisanal miners were the first to seize the opportunity, but the Zimbabwe Miners Federation (ZMF) soon obtained a lease for the mine.

It was set up to allow artisanal miners, who tend to be materially poor, to formally participate in and benefit from the mineral rush. ZMF’s president, Henrietta Rushwaya, is an associate of Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, sharing ties of traditional kinship. An Al Jazeera investigation had previously linked Rushwaya with corruption and money laundering in the gold mining sector. She was convicted and fined for gold smuggling this November. The report cited the involvement of players like Rushwaya as red flags for persistent corruption in the sector.

Political elites swooping in to take advantage of lucrative opportunities is nothing new. The Global Witness report alleges the incident in Zimbabwe came at the cost of the artisanal miners, who pay to be part of the ZMF even though the body doesn’t appear to promote the interests of small miners. They’re paid lower prices for mined ore than before, even as the ZMF strikes profitable deals to export lithium. The federation didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment.

“Where the nation must benefit, it’s the leaders who are benefiting,” Maguwu said. “It’s daylight robbery of the people of Zimbabwe.” Not only do corrupt leaders corner profits from the trade, they also fail to promote sustainable development that would benefit a broader section of the populace, he said.

One of the ways to prevent exploitation is to shut out companies that “socialize the costs and privatize the profits,” Maguwu said. He described a situation where companies consume community water resources and pollute common water bodies during mining. The costs of these actions are borne by the communities at large, but when it comes to the profits from mineral exploitation, the companies are mainly concerned about compensating their shareholders.

“Currently, there is no competition, so the Chinese just do as they please because they are in bed with the ruling elites,” Maguwu said.

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre notes that allegation of human rights violations, environmental harms, and labor abuses are as much present in mining operations linked to Canadian, U.S., U.K., Australian and European companies and investors as Chinese companies.

And, in some cases, competition between corporations can prove detrimental, with protracted battles paralyzing projects. In the DRC, two foreign companies are vying for control of the vast Manono lithium deposit, which could become Africa’s largest lithium mine. The project has been mired in corruption allegations and legal challenges for more than five years now. Australian company AVZ Minerals and Chinese mining behemoth Zijin Mining Group Ltd. are both vying for control of the concession, with a state-owned mining entity, Cominière, involved in alleged suspect dealings with both.

Though the Manono mine has yet to produce any lithium ore, the Global Witness report says the project may have generated about $28 million for shell companies incorporated in tax havens, windfall gains made through sales of mineral rights acquired below market price from government-controlled Cominière. Little of that money has reached either DRC government coffers or the communities living near the deposit.

AVZ did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment, while Zijin Mining denied allegations that it was involved in corrupt dealings with respect to the Manono project.

Despite being aware of the fraught nature of this 21^st-century mineral rush, Maguwu said he remained hopeful that encouraging competition between companies worldwide is the way to ensure better outcomes for Zimbabweans through competition over favorable contracts and standards benefiting the country, with some businesses emerging as models for others.

No matter the ownership of the companies, what both Areseb and Maguwu said would benefit their countries was domestic value addition. Zimbabwe, Namibia and other countries have banned the export of unprocessed lithium, but it remains to be seen whether this leads to the development of domestic processing facilities and related economic benefits for local communities in these producer nations.

In one encouraging sign, Zimbabwe’s mining minister said the country’s earnings from lithium exports shot up from $70 million in the first nine months of 2022 to $209 million in the same period this year. The ban on exports of unprocessed lithium came into force in December 2022. However, export earnings accrue to companies. As long as beneficial ownership remains in the hands of foreign entities, it isn’t clear how much increased export earnings will boost domestic revenues or the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans.

“There’s an increased awareness that African countries have to take a larger share of the value chain as part of a just transition,” Robertson said. “But there’s a big risk that we’ll see more of the same pattern unless real efforts are made to do things differently during this new boom.”

This story was first published on Mongabay. Read the original article here. 

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But do not be fooled: geopolitical tectonic shifts are happening here, on the axis of the so-called lithium triangle, where roughly 60% of the green energy transition’s most coveted resource is stored.

Lithium has never been more in demand. The precious metal that powers batteries – everything from cellphones and laptops to solar panels and electric vehicles – is now woven into the tapestry of moves and countermoves by the world’s largest powers, as they acquire supplies and set up production lines.

By some estimates, global demand for lithium will grow 40-fold by 2040, mostly for EVs and renewable-energy storage. As a result, the world’s eyes are fixed on the protagonists of the lithium triangle: Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, whose high-altitude salt-flat brines are estimated to contain 52 million tonnes of lithium.

China, where most of the raw materials for batteries are processed, has already staked a dominant claim in all three countries, investing US$2.7 billion in Argentina alone, where it will produce more than a quarter of that country’s lithium by 2030. Western companies are also playing a growing role, while the United States’ historic climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, is sure to spur more action.

As the “white gold” rush ramps up, each lithium-triangle country offers a case study in how, and perhaps how not, to regulate a coveted mineral critical to the green transition, with high stakes all around.

“In theory, we’re doing this for a better environment and a better world, and – in theory – the whole value chain should have that goal in mind,” says Patricia Vásquez, an energy expert and global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. “That’s what the energy transition is all about.”

And yet, growing resistance on the ground warns of a clean energy transition that is masking neocolonial practices of extraction and leaving local communities by the wayside.

Lithium, three ways

As far as supply is concerned, there is lots of it. But not all lithium is created equal. The highest quality comes from hard rock, brine or clay. Until now, Australia has been the top lithium producer through its vast hard-rock deposits, followed by Chile, China and Argentina. The lithium in the lithium triangle is found in brine, while Mexico has clay deposits that have not yet been commercially developed. A note about terminology: resources are stockpiles of lithium that have not yet been certified for their viability, while reserves are those that are considered to be market ready.

Within the lithium triangle, Chile has the largest reserves, at 9.2-million tonnes, buried in the Atacama Desert, a mystical place in the north of the country about the size of the state of Colorado. Bolivia has the largest amount of untapped resources.

Bolivia: Playing catch-up

Between the mid-1500s and the early 1800s, a Bolivian mining town nestled into an eroded volcano was the source of 20% of the world’s silver. The precious metals from Cerro Rico – “rich mountain” – gilded Europe and bankrolled Spanish conquests but left scores of Andean people dead or destitute.

In this century, Bolivia has attempted to prevent a repeat of that foreign plundering. Under Evo Morales, a socialist who was the country’s first Indigenous president, a national lithium firm was established in 2017 to control every aspect of the value chain, including extraction, refinement, battery production and electric vehicles. Foreign companies could take part in projects, but the government would call the shots.

Vásquez says that the end result of Bolivia’s state-controlled policy is that “they have produced very little lithium, even though they have the largest resources in the world.” Large collaborations with foreign partners have faltered, and there have been technical challenges. The brine found in Bolivian salt flats has low concentrations of lithium and relatively high impurities such as magnesium, which makes it less profitable and carries other environmental costs.

But the government has stepped up its search for international partners, with President Luis Arce declaring earlier this year the “era of industrialization of Bolivian lithium” in full swing. He signed a US$1-billion agreement with three Chinese companies that will build two lithium-extraction facilities in the Uyuni and Oruro salt flats, in the country’s southwest, with a combined production capacity of 200,000 tonnes per year. In June, the government also inked agreements with a Russian state firm and another Chinese company, Citic Guoan Group.

Argentina: Open for business

Of the three countries, Argentina has been the most eager to get moving on lithium with outside investors. With tax incentives and low royalties, it is promoting an “open for business” stance that is touted by politicians at every level, and private investment has flooded in.

There are a total of 38 lithium projects in Argentina: three are operating as mines, six are under construction, and the remaining 29 are at various stages of exploration. Since 2020, lithium projects in Argentina have generated US$4.2 billion in investments, according to a report from the Wilson Center.

And while Argentina is known for its economic instability, the fact that lithium falls under the jurisdiction of provincial governments has given it the ability to create financial conditions that promise to insulate investors from some of the volatility. Argentina is expected to overtake Chile as the largest lithium producer in the region by 2030.

Chile: A new national plan

Chile is the top global producer of high-quality lithium from brines. In 2022, it accounted for 30% of all the world’s lithium production. But it’s been losing market share, generating anticipation about how it would continue to unlock this mineral resource.

Against this backdrop, Chile’s leftist president, Gabriel Boric, announced a plan this year to do mining differently, creating a new state-owned company to steer the development of lithium, a resource that has been deemed strategic since the 1970s and largely under the control of the government. Until now, Chile has granted permission to only two private lithium projects. Royalty and export prices have been on the higher end of the scale, with a small percentage – as much as 3.5% – set aside as revenue transfer to local Indigenous communities.

Under the new scheme, all new lithium contracts in Chile will be public–private partnerships under state control, and new less-contentious, water-conserving mining techniques will be favoured. While the goal is to increase lithium production by authorizing new licences, the government says it will create a protected area of salt flats that amounts to 30% of their surface area.

“We want Chile to become the world’s leading producer of lithium while protecting the biodiversity of the salt flats,” Boric said at the announcement. “This is the best chance we have at transitioning to a sustainable and developed economy.”

Troubled waters

The conventional method of getting lithium out of the salt flats involves drilling into the crust of the earth and pumping out brine into evaporation pools that are then treated with chemicals. It’s this process that is often depicted in aerial photos of giant phosphorescent squares dotting the desert landscapes of South America. The process was once promoted as inherently more sustainable than the mining of other minerals in the region, but evidence has been mounting around drained water levels in wells, rivers and wetlands, harming wildlife and local communities in a region where water is already scarce.

Mining companies have downplayed the impact of their water extraction because they say that the salty brine is not fit for human or fauna consumption and that their extraction of freshwater is minimal, but local communities that consider themselves guardians of an arid and fragile ecosystem continue to sound alarms.

“In Chile, the big critique is that there have never been proper hydrological studies to map the impact it has had on the water table, because it is so intensive on water use,” says Kirsten Francescone, assistant professor in the International Development Studies program at Trent University and former Latin America program coordinator for MiningWatch Canada.

In Argentina’s Catamarca Province, for example, small Indigenous communities in Antofagasta de la Sierra, where American mining giant Livent has been running its Fenix lithium mine for more than two decades, say a river has dried up because of overuse of water, and sheep and llamas have perished. Livent announced this year that it would expand its lithium plant, tripling production to 60,000 tonnes by 2025.

It’s often Indigenous communities that bear the brunt of the local impact because the mining occurs in territory where they live, eking out a meagre existence as farmers. Those same communities are at the forefront of protests, road blockades, lawsuits and investigations that seek to thwart lithium projects in all three countries on environmental or economic grounds.

In Bolivia in 2019, authorities cancelled a German lithium project by ACI Systems Alemania that would have secured the mineral for Germany’s electric car industry following weeks of demonstrations by residents of Potosí, who said there wasn’t enough local benefit in the deal. In Chile, Indigenous communities such as the Coyo and the Atacameña de Camar managed to block lithium mining contracts after a court ruled last year that they were not properly consulted, as is required by law. And in Argentina, a caravan of Indigenous land defenders set up camp in a plaza in front of the country’s Supreme Court, in Buenos Aires, after a violent crackdown against demonstrators opposing a law that restricted their right to protest in the northern province of Jujuy.

“We should be in the mountains with our sheep,” said Salustriana Geronimo, a grandmother, sitting inside the small makeshift hut she had crafted out of tarp. “We’re not going to allow them to just do what they want.”

Although mining companies tout the local benefits they bring to communities that are often lacking in basic infrastructure, and governments trumpet more jobs, the feeling on the ground for many is that they remain impoverished as others become wealthy. So far, being part of the green energy transition has yet to meaningfully change that.

“Mining always produces winners and losers, and mining companies feed off of those divisions,” says Francescone, who doesn’t see the fundamentals of how the industry operates changing under the lithium paradigm. “What’s different about lithium mining is the buzz and the almost false hope,” she adds. “It’s very easy to tell a story that makes people feel good about it because of what the metal does. But unfortunately, we are in a moment where more mining in general, because of the climate crisis, is going to make the ecological pressures on mining regions even more salient.”

But others insist there are ways to mitigate the damage and push toward a more equitable lithium industry. A 2022 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) laid out more than half a dozen recommendations it said “could help heal the ‘exhausted’ Puna de Atacama region without impeding the transition to a cleaner future for the planet.” In addition to strengthening environmental standards, boosting metal recycling and bringing in a moratorium on brine evaporation, it called on governments to go beyond revenue-sharing models with local and Indigenous communities: “While the existing benefit-sharing agreements in this region may offer a foundation for industry partnerships with communities, these agreements have thus far formalized conflict.” Advocates say that obtaining free, prior and informed consent for the use of land territory and resources from Indigenous Peoples (as Bolivia, Chile and Argentina all committed to doing when they ratified the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) is essential for governments and companies wanting to operate sustainably and equitably – and run into less resistance.

Chile’s new lithium strategy calls for more dialogue with Indigenous communities. The Chilean government also says it will favour projects that use a new technology that extracts lithium without relying on the traditional – and environmentally contentious – evaporation process, thus reducing the amount of water that is required in an area as arid as the Atacama Desert.

“Direct lithium extraction,” using adsorption, ion exchange and other electrochemical processes, can remove lithium ions from brine water in hours, rather than months. “It reduces the times and tightens the production, like a clock, giving you a different predictability in terms of the output,” says Victor Delbuono, an economist who specializes in natural resources with Argentine NGO Fundar. Since it may rely on solar panels, rather than the sun, in the extraction process, it also requires an additional investment in renewables, he notes.

The technology will be used by some of the new Bolivian projects and has already been incorporated into one stage of Livent’s process in Argentina. The NRDC also points to the extraction of lithium from brines at geothermal power plants, a method being developed in California, Germany and England, which proponents suggest could be more sustainable.

The efforts by the Chilean government to overhaul its approach to lithium were welcomed by a wide swath of local communities, activists, environmentalists and NGOs, who nonetheless voiced several concerns, in particular that they were not consulted about the new strategy and that some of the processes appear to emulate those used by the mining industry. A statement signed by 173 individuals, organizations and Indigenous communities also described the pursuit of EVs as a “false solution to climate change that benefits the most contaminating economies on the planet, reproducing highly demanding modes of consumption to the detriment of serious climate commitments.”

Can these countries use the green revolution to break free of a pattern that dates to colonial times – that of foreign interests extracting riches and leaving little behind? Or will the green revolution further entrench it?

Whatever the approach from each country, Delbuono, the Argentine economist, says the region’s central role will not last forever.

“We’re already working on sodium batteries,” he says. “The window is small for technology.”

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires–based journalist and associate editor at Corporate Knights

The post Lessons from the ‘white gold’ rush in Latin America’s lithium triangle appeared first on Corporate Knights.

While there are many ways human activity has brought about climate change, global electricity generation sources are among the leading culprits. Despite small upticks in the supply of wind and solar power, we have not yet reached a point where we are able to dislodge the fossil fuels that are entrenched in the power mix of many countries.

But why is this still the case?

Since renewable sources deliver an intermittent supply of power, we also need a way to store this energy to meet the demand of the grid when the sun is not shining, or the wind is not blowing. This is a major challenge, as the switch to renewable power also requires establishing long lasting, safe and affordable energy storage systems. As such, finding a cheap, safe and alternative battery to lithium is the key to moving the needle to a completely renewable power sector.

Beyond lithium-ion batteries

As with electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries have become a popular option for the grid, as they offer a high energy density, modular solution for energy storage. But the use of lithium-ion batteries has also brought along its own challenges with high cost of materials, risk of fire and explosion and lack of recycling practices limiting the widespread adoption of lithium-ion batteries for the grid.

One incredibly promising option to replace lithium for grid scale energy storage is the rechargeable zinc-ion battery. Emerging only within the last 10 years, zinc-ion batteries offer many advantages over lithium. These include cheaper material costs, increased safety and easier recycling options.

With grid-scale energy storage potential at a considerably cheaper cost — and higher levels of safety — widespread commercialization of zinc-ion batteries could be exactly what is needed to integrate renewables into energy infrastructure in Canada and other countries.

The cost of a battery

For Canada to reach the decarbonization targets set in the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, including a grid powered by 90 per cent renewable electricity, the deployment of zinc-ion batteries will be crucial.

Studies have shown that for renewables to become the source of 90 to 95 per cent of all electricity, the cost of energy storage must be below US$150/kWh. Modern lithium-ion systems are still sitting around US$350/kWh. In part, this is due to high manufacturing costs and their reliance on expensive raw materials to achieve the high energy density needed for modern electric vehicles.

Zinc-ion batteries on the other hand, could solve the cost and abundance issues. Using inexpensive, abundant materials such as zinc and manganese not only makes them cheaper to produce, but lowers risk from supply chain disruptions or material shortages that affect lithium-ion materials such as lithium and cobalt.

The annual production of zinc globally is over 100 times that of lithium. Not to mention that demand for lithium and cobalt is anticipated to outweigh the supply within the next decade.

Zinc is a safer option

With rigorous safety standards being created for batteries used in homes, factories or within the electrical grid, safety is key to getting the public to embrace them. In this way, zinc-ion batteries offer further advantage.

The flammable and toxic solvent based electrolyte of lithium-ion batteries is replaced with a water-based alternative, removing the risk of fire and explosion.

Conversely, the safe disposal of lithium-ion batteries can also be a difficult task, as they contain toxic compounds. Recycling these batteries is currently economically infeasible due to high costs leading to large numbers of spent cells ending up in landfills.

Fortunately, zinc-ion batteries simplify end of life treatment. The nontoxic, aqueous electrolyte used in zinc-ion batteries means that well established methods like those for lead-acid battery disposal can be used. Also, the metallic zinc anode could be easily reused in new batteries.

The future of energy storage

To reach its goal of 90 per cent renewable energy by 2030, Canada must look for alternatives to lithium-ion batteries to enable decarbonization of its power sector. Leveraging the cost, abundance and safety benefits of zinc-ion batteries, Canada can accelerate the integration of wind and solar power across the nation.

Zinc-ion batteries support Canada’s decarbonization goals and prove an opportunity to capitalize on a rapidly expanding battery market. While zinc-ion batteries are a relatively new technology, their potential to support grid scale energy storage within Canada and worldwide cannot be understated.

With the help of Canadian research and manufacturing, including efforts from McMaster University and Dartmouth, N.S.-based Salient Energy Inc., the integration of zinc-ion batteries could become a reality within the next several years, establishing Canada as an industry leader.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Storm William D. Gourley is a PhD candidate in chemical engineering, and Drew Higgins is assistant professor in the department of chemical engineering, both at McMaster University.

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This utility-scale project, several years in the making, will provide backup storage to Canada’s most populous province and is being built by Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation (SNGRDC) and NRStor, a storage start-up, with $50 million in backing from the Canada Infrastructure Bank. (Tesla, Northland Power and Aecon are also partners.) SNGRDC CEO Matt Jamieson (of the Tuscarora Nation) rhymes off the benefits: local jobs, cleantech investment, emission reductions and a major boost for the region’s clean energy infrastructure, in which Six Nations is a significant investor. Indeed, the deployment of grid-scale energy storage projects will allow wind and solar farms to operate at full capacity – something that hasn’t happened in recent years because Ontario’s system operator curtailed the use of renewables in favour of gas plants that can be turned on and off as demand requires. 

But for Jamieson, the Oneida Energy Storage facility’s most salient calling card is that it will kick-start a long overdue investment in a critical piece of the energy transition puzzle that has been overlooked for years. “We are the first movers,” he says of the Indigenous-led project. “We’ve created the utility-scale energy storage market in Ontario.”

The energy transition over the next three decades will be possible only with the deployment of huge electricity storage systems, such as Oneida’s that can hold a charge for up to four hours, as well as other longer-duration storage technologies that can hold energy for 10 hours or longer. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has stated that the rapid scaling up of energy storage systems will be critical to bridge the hour‐to‐hour variability of wind and solar electricity on the grid, “especially as their share of generation increases rapidly in the net zero scenario.” As a 2022 MIT Energy Initiative study put it, “Energy storage enables cost-effective deep decarbonization of electric power systems that rely heavily on wind and solar generation without sacrificing system reliability.”

That goal will require electrical utilities to add tens of thousands of megawatts (MW) of energy storage in large-scale facilities as they expand their portfolio of renewables. Over the past few years, according to IEA data, the U.S., China and Europe have driven up investment in short- and long-term energy storage, with about 6,500 MW installed as of 2021. In the U.S., the world leader, much of that investment has been driven by incentives and building code requirements adopted in states like California and Maryland, with others, like New York, establishing ambitious targets for the next decade. 

Ontario is making an especially big bet on storage to help meet the rising electricity demands of electric vehicles and economic growth during the closure of the Pickering nuclear power station. Last year, the province issued a major request for proposals to acquire 2,500 MW in energy storage through 2027; the Oneida project is part of this push – the largest to date in Canada.

Where the sun doesn’t shine

For many years, electricity storage was limited to one technology: pumped hydro. This old-school technique, which requires a lot of civil engineering and dams that have excess generating capacity, uses surplus or inexpensive electricity to run huge pumps that fill hydro reservoirs. The stored energy can be used later when grid operators decide to release the water, thus driving the turbines that generate new power. However, the rapid investment in wind and solar over the past 15 years has raised the stakes for energy storage technologies. Both of these renewables are intermittent, and so it makes sense for utilities or system operators that want to invest in clean generation to figure out how they can store electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and then use those stored electrons later, as needed. “There’s a symbiotic relationship between the two,” says Travis Lusney, director of power systems for Power Advisory LLC, a consulting group. 

Storage has another potential climate benefit as well. On very hot afternoons when all the air-conditioning is running flat out, or during other times when electricity demand is particularly high, system operators often rely on natural-gas-fired “peaker plants” to provide top-ups. These facilities can be turned on and off quickly (unlike nuclear plants). If power generated by renewables can be stored and then used when demand surges, the storage technology effectively displaces the burning of fossil fuels, thus reducing emissions.

We are the first movers. We’ve created the utility-scale energy storage market in Ontario.

 

– Matt Jamieson, CEO, Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation

Over the past decade or so, a number of energy storage technologies have been piloted, with varying degrees of success. Early wind entrepreneurs thought to run the current generated by a turbine through water, thereby producing hydrogen that can be compressed, stored and used as a fuel. Other approaches include the capture of waste heat or using surplus power in air compressors, with the highly pressurized gas stored and available for later use as an energy source. Justin Rangooni, executive director of Energy Storage Canada, says there are several other short- and long-duration storage technologies in the research-and-development pipeline, many of which rely on various advanced materials, common metals, and chemicals, from sodium to zinc and aluminum. 

As the technology and the market mature over the next few years, the choice of the mode of energy storage used by utilities or institutions like hospitals will be determined by the application. “What storage is saying is ‘What do you need [and] what are you trying to achieve?’ and then looking at the menu of options in terms of energy storage technology,” says Rangooni.

Growing battery farms 

Battery farms, using large-scale versions of an EV power pack, turn out to be the most scalable solutions for grid operators, and also the most mature from a commercialization perspective. Six Nations’ Jamieson says that during the Oneida planning process, he went to San Francisco to see the plant where Tesla makes the Megapack, and his team also vetted other vendors. “There’s a lot of considerations around emergency-response planning, fire suppression, exposure, protection, earthquake, floods, and all sorts of mitigation tactics have gone into this technology,” he says. “It comes down to the bankability of performance that we’re looking for, to ensure that all stakeholders are satisfied.” Tesla has installed hundreds of megawatts of battery storage capacity in Australia as part of the country’s push to enable utilities to use more renewables without destabilizing grids. 

Six Nations had another crucial perspective that informed its decision to pursue the battery farm deal. For several years, the First Nation has invested heavily in solar and wind farms in southwestern Ontario, including on the site of a huge and now decommissioned coal-fired generating plant. But Jamieson says the income from the renewables has ebbed because of a policy called “curtailment,” which means these facilities may be temporarily taken off-grid because the power they’re producing isn’t needed at that moment. “There’s a deferral of compensation, which doesn’t help the ratepayers,” says Jamieson. 

Six Nations certainly isn’t the only renewables producer that has faced this problem, which occurs specifically because this clean power can’t be stored until it’s needed. Investments in large-scale battery storage will effectively have a double benefit because they’ll enable those wind and solar farms to generate more revenue for the community, Jamieson points out. “We look at this from [the perspective of] where’s the opportunity to enhance the positioning of renewables in the province? Without some sort of an energy storage solution, we will be continually facing this [issue because] of the intermittent nature of how renewables function.”

The sprawling new Oneida battery farm, as he puts it, “is a new tool in the tool kit.”

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability, and business. 

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“Five disposable vapes are being thrown away every second by young people in the United States despite the devices containing reusable lithium-ion batteries,” reports the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “Over a year, this amounts to 150 million devices—which together contain enough lithium for about 6,000 Teslas.”

Lithium is an “in-demand metal” because of its use in rechargeable batteries for mobile phones, electric vehicles, and more—and the need is expected to increase fivefold by 2030, the Bureau says. Lithium-ion batteries are also used in e-cigarettes or vapes to heat the “e-juice” liquid nicotine solution they contain.

“Even though most disposable vapes contain a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, they are designed to be discarded once the liquid runs out.”

Since vapes have become incredibly popular, the impact of this waste can be substantial. More than 14 million single-use vapes are purchased in the United Kingdom each month, with more than 50% of them “needlessly being thrown away” after their 3,500 or so puffs are exhausted, said Scott Butler, executive director of Material Focus.

“This means that every week one million vapes are not recycled,” he added.

On top of the wastage, discarding batteries combined with other mixed garbage pose a real danger of fires at waste processing sites. One U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report identified 245 fires between 2013 and 2020 that were definitely or likely caused by lithium-ion batteries in waste facilities like garbage trucks and warehouses.

“One incident resulted in four firefighters being taken to hospital to be treated for chemical burns,” writes the Bureau.

The batteries are meant to be recycled, but the process can be a difficult and confusing, with some vapes needing to be taken apart to properly do so. Regulatory oversight has so far proved insufficient to ensure disposal guidelines are being followed and that manufacturers are complying with collection requirements.

As a result, more and more vapes find their way into landfills, where critical minerals accumulate instead of being used for the energy transition. One calculation described the critical minerals from vapes discarded in the UK over one year as “equivalent to 6,200 Tesla Model 3 batteries being driven once and then thrown away,” or 617,000 e-bike batteries.

“Every one of the batteries that are in a vape like this holds about one-third of the battery that’s in your phone,” Alex Fairclough, an engineer who teaches at Newcastle University, told VICE. “The fact that we’ve got hundreds of millions of these things just getting put into a $20 vape that gets thrown in the bin, it’s tragic.”

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

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“The question is not whether we decarbonize the transportation sector, but how we decarbonize it,” the report’s lead author Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College, said during a webinar discussing the research.

“What this report will get into is the fact that there are multiple electrified futures ahead of us that all get us to zero emissions but differ dramatically in how much mining they would require and how much mobility they would provide to Americans.”

Transportation is the single largest source of U.S. emissions, making its transition off fossil fuels central to the country’s decarbonization strategy. So far, President Joe Biden’s administration has pushed to cut transportation emissions by electrifying personal vehicles—a strategy that comes with its own suite of environmental and human rights crises because it will require a massive amount of lithium for battery manufacturing, the Guardian says.

“Conversations [about the dangers of mining] can lead folks to think that there’s a zero-sum trade-off: either we address the climate crisis or we protect Indigenous rights and biodiversity,” Riofrancos told Grist. “This report asks the question: is there a way to do both?”

The report finds that a decarbonization scenario that reduces car dependency and limits electric vehicle (EV) battery sizes can lower the demand for lithium between 18 and 66%. “Even if the car-centricity of the U.S. transportation system continues, limiting the size of EV batteries can cut lithium demand by as much as 42%.”

The researchers designed a material flow analysis and paired it with socioeconomic pathway modelling to determine decarbonization scenarios for U.S. transportation. They outlined four possible scenarios: one where the current transportation sector is electrified but otherwise the same, and three others that envision different scales of ambition for reducing battery sizes and implementing societal changes like improving public transit, densifying metropolitan regions, and expanding battery recycling.

“In terms of summarizing just the most effective ways for us to reduce future lithium demand while meeting our 2050 goals for decarbonization, we need to focus on reducing demand for passenger vehicles,” co-author Alissa Kendall, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis, told the webinar. Kendall said that will mean investing in better mobility options and densifying urban areas, while also reducing battery sizes and encouraging battery recycling.

The Biden administration’s strategy so far does not align with the report’s proposals. It emphasizes vehicle electrification and expands domestic lithium mining through the Inflation Reduction Act.

“The conversations are happening, but they’re not connected with congressional funding priorities at all,” said Riofrancos.

Can lithium mining be sustainable?

If the U.S. continues on this trajectory, the increased demand for lithium mining will be environmentally destructive and, since 79% of the country’s known lithium deposits sit within 56 kilometres of Native American reservations, would disproportionately affect Indigenous communities.

For example, mining the lithium deposits near Thacker Pass, Nevada, “will cause irreversible harm to the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, their ancestral massacre sites, water, air, medicines, and culturally important wildlife,” said Kassandra Lisenbee, outreach and just energy transition director at Great Basin Resource Watch.

Such communities are facing “complete changes to their lifestyles from these projects.”

Mining Thacker Pass will disturb roughly 5,695 acres of habitat, pull groundwater equivalent to the amount used by 15,000 U.S. households annually, and produce a lifetime total of 354 million cubic yards (270.7 million cubic metres) of clay tailings waste that could leak and contaminate the area’s soil and water, the report states.

“Just solutions should centre on directly affected communities who deserve free, prior and informed consent,” said Lisenbee. “We need to be thinking about more than carbon and protecting biodiversity and protecting our carbon sinks that are water resources.”

“We need to think about how lithium, in and of itself, can be a major driver of climate change, as well.”

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management approved the Thacker Pass mine less than one year after posting a notice of intent in January, 2020, even though similar regulatory reviews usually take three to five years, Lisenbee said. Advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against Lithium Americas Corp. to stop the mine, but it was dismissed in a recent court ruling upholding the federal approval. The company says it plans to begin construction this year.

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

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Historically, EVs have been about $12,000 more expensive than gas cars, in large part thanks to battery costs. But as batteries become cheaper every year, EV sales have been growing exponentially. The cost of lithium-ion batteries plummeted 89% from 2010 to 2020, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In 2016, batteries accounted for 48% of the cost of EVs. Today, that’s fallen to 26%.

It’s not the only trend driving the conventional car industry off a cliff.

Pandemic is fuelling “peak auto”

Other than spikes in leisure-wear sales, the pandemic has dramatically slowed consumer spending – and cars are the second largest capital expense for North American families, after housing. Seventy million U.S. households own two or more cars, and pre-pandemic, the average American worker spent five work weeks a year in traffic commuting to and from their jobs. Now that approximately 40% of the U.S. and Canadian labour force is working from home and corporate leaders and businesses have accepted that people can do so productively, some families will decide they don’t need a second car. This will have big implications for car sales.

While some studies have found that those who are still commuting often prefer driving solo to taking the subway or ride-hailing, KPMG projects that the work-from-home trend, along with more people shopping online, could take seven to 14 million cars off U.S. roads alone.

A growing number of pandemic-era commuters who don’t want to crowd into mass transit are going the micro-mobility route, fuelling sales of bikes, e-bikes and electric scooters – particularly in place of the staggering 60% of U.S. car trips that are less than five miles. Scooter-sharing companies Lime and Bird are the two fastest-growing firms in U.S. history – both reached $1 billion in market valuation within 12 months of launch. All scooter-sharing companies combined are set to exceed 500 million rides globally in 2021.

In Canada, Calgarians have taken almost two million rides on rented e-scooters. There are also pilot projects in Waterloo, Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa and Kelowna. For a growing cohort of millennials debating whether to buy a car or use a scooter-sharing service at 35 cents a minute, the choice is pretty clear-cut.

Shifting national policies

National policies are already dramatically accelerating the adoption of EVs. For instance, Norway has the most aggressive goals globally, prohibiting the sale of any new fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2025. The target is already working. In December, 67% of all new cars sold in the country were pure battery electric vehicles, and when plug-in hybrid EVs are included, that figure jumps to 87%.

In November, Britain announced that it would ban the sale of new gas and diesel cars and vans from 2030 onward – five years earlier than previously promised.

In the U.S., California has banned the sale of new gas-powered cars and trucks by 2035. Considering that California has the fifth-largest economy in the world, the move sends a strong signal to American automakers. The signal would be even stronger if Canada and the incoming Biden administration instituted a North America–wide ban on new internal-combustion vehicle sales.

Closer to home, Quebec announced it will ban sales of new gas-powered cars from 2035. Montreal may do so by 2030. B.C. will follow suit in 2040.

Pension fund liabilities

Traditional car companies face another threat: pension fund liabilities. Legacy auto companies made historical commitments to retired employees. Many of these had defined benefits. For some car companies, these future commitments exceed the value of the pension fund. That gap between the value of the pension fund and the liabilities is called “unfunded liability.”

General Motors is one of the 10 U.S. companies with the largest pension-funding gaps relative to their market capitalizations. GM’s unfunded pension liability is a whopping US$14.4 billion according to S&P Global Ratings – that’s about 24% of the company’s current market worth. Ford’s is US$10.2 billion, or 30% of its market value, as of November 2020.

Their pension troubles aren’t surprising if you track the market cap of GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler (FCA). Even if you combined the market value of these three legacy automakers and multiplied by six, it would still be less than the value of Tesla, at US$717 billion as of December 2020.

Total cost of ownership

Electric cars are not only becoming cheaper to buy; they’re also cheaper to drive and have serviced. While the traditional gas car has more than 2,000 moving parts, an EV has just 20, which means there are far fewer ways that an EV can break down. Maintenance costs for an EV are a stunning 50 to 70% less than for a gas car. Similarly, fuel costs for an EV are roughly 70% less, depending on the electricity rates in your province or territory.

For Canadians, EVs will eventually be cheaper to insure, too. Since Teslas come equipped with a number of autonomous safety features and have been found to have 85% fewer accidents per million miles travelled compared to cars with no autonomous features, Tesla is offering policies to California Tesla owners at 20 to 30% less than traditional insurance companies. The company plans to expand its insurance to other U.S. states in the future.

Autopilot overtakes gas cars

ARK Invest predicts the rise of autonomous EV fleets by 2024. Think Uber and Lyft but green and without a driver. The predicted cost of transportation will plummet from the 70 cents (U.S.) per mile car owners pay to just 25 cents per mile – that’s a two-thirds cost reduction. Who is going to buy a new car when they can get around effectively with “mobility as a service” (MaaS) for a third of the cost?

Traditional car companies are facing death by a thousand cuts: the climate crisis, the fall of fossil fuels, electrification, the rise of autonomous EV fleets, Tesla, legacy pension liabilities, shifting mandated national policies, and dampened demand for autos in general. According to Cathie Wood, ARK’s founder and chief investment officer, EV sales will grow nearly 20-fold, from 1.8 million in 2019 to 35 million, or 40% of total global auto sales, in the next six years. I predict that two major global car companies will cease to exist by the end of 2025. They will either go bankrupt or merge – as did Fiat Chrysler, which in December got EU approval to merge with Peugeot.

In the U.S., the switch from horse-drawn carriage to car was swift. In 1910, only 11% of passenger miles were by car; by 1920, it was 81%. Expect the same swift shift from fossil-fuel-powered cars to EVs. The demise of traditional auto firms will come far faster than we imagine.

Jim Harris is the author of the international bestseller Blindsided, which focuses on disruptive innovation.

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Tomorrow’s energy system will look very different from today’s — and that tomorrow is coming quickly. The assets of today’s energy economy can help build and launch the new industries required for a low-carbon future. And few opportunities are more intriguing than the growing lithium market.

The world needs lithium – and Alberta has plenty

It’s estimated that three billion tonnes of metals will be required to generate clean energy by 2050. One of those key metals – lithium, a light, highly conductive metal – is critical to the construction of battery electric vehicles (BEV). As global automobile manufacturers design hundreds of new BEVs, demand for lithium is expected to triple in the next five years alone.

Most lithium today originates from either hard rock or salt flats in Australia and South America. Alberta’s oil fields hold abundant deposits of lithium in subsurface brine, but so far it’s been overlooked as industrial waste. With new processing technologies and growing concerns about the security of global supplies, this is set to change. In January, Canada and the U.S. finalized a Joint Action Plan on Critical Minerals to ensure supply security for critical minerals such as lithium and to promote supply chains closer to home.

This presents a major opportunity for Canada and Alberta. Lithium brine will be produced much like the oil that came before it. This lithium originates from many of the same reservoirs responsible for driving both Alberta’s economy and the broader transportation fuel sector for decades. The province now has extensive geological data and abundant infrastructure, including roads, power lines, rail and well sites. Most importantly, Alberta has a highly trained workforce. With very little retooling, the province could deliver significant volumes of newly strategic lithium.

Specialized technologies known as direct lithium extraction, or DLE, are being developed to unlock lithium-brine resources like those in Canada. In Alberta, E3 Metals* has formed a development partnership with U.S. lithium heavyweight Livent Corporation to advance and pilot its DLE technology. Prairie Lithium and LiEP Energy formed a joint venture to pilot lithium extraction in Saskatchewan. And Vancouver’s Standard Lithium is already piloting its own DLE process in southern Arkansas, where the geology is very similar to Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Heavy on quality, light on emissions

All lithium produced today has a carbon footprint, most of which can be tied back to energy-intensive processing. The purity of lithium is essential to battery safety and performance, but this comes at a cost when lithium is mined with trucks and shovels and then refined in coal-heavy China.

As automakers look to source more sustainable raw materials, Alberta’s experience with green technologies such as renewable electricity and carbon capture and storage can make it one of the world’s largest suppliers of zero-carbon lithium.

Beyond raw materials

The rewards would be considerable. E3 Metals’ Alberta project alone could generate annual revenues of US$1.8 billion by 2030, based on projected production and price forecasts. This would create thousands of direct jobs, and many more indirectly.

To truly grow this industry, however, Canada needs to move beyond its comfort zone. Rather than produce lithium as yet another raw-commodity export, Canadians should be manufacturing end products, such as batteries, for the electrified economy. With nickel and cobalt refining, graphite resources and abundant petrochemical infrastructure already in place, Canada must aim for a larger piece of the supply chain.

By 2030, the global battery market is expected to be worth $116 billion annually. The timing is right to invest in a strategic commodity and grow our manufacturing sector. This is why the Alberta-based Energy Futures Lab has called lithium one of the ‘Five big ideas for Alberta’s economic recovery.’  The assets of today’s energy economy can be used to help build and launch new resource industries like lithium, required for the low-carbon energy system of the future.

Industry needs support

To do this, however, governments will have to step up the way they did a generation ago. In 1975, the Alberta government kick-started oil-sands development by funding the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority. AOSTRA developed a technology called SAGD (steam-assisted gravity drainage) that now accounts for 80% of Alberta’s in situ oil-sands production.

Canada’s lithium industry needs similar support. Despite the compelling long-term economics of lithium, some industry investors need help to balance the risks of pioneering such a new industry in Canada. The U.S. government has recognized a similar need, with the Department of Energy’s recent US$30 million earmarked for innovation in critical minerals processing and the California Energy Commission’s recent grants of US$7.8 million for geothermal-related lithium extraction.

To accelerate lithium development in Canada, this kind of leadership is needed. Government-assisted financing could help early-stage lithium-extraction technologies kick-start a whole new industry.

Aspiring lithium producers are also looking for government’s help to repurpose inactive oil and gas wells. The federal government has earmarked $1 billion for cleaning up inactive Alberta oil wells. Allocating a small percentage of that total for repurposing wells could help transform environmental liabilities into valuable clean-energy assets.

The North American lithium-battery supply chain will soon be looking for local sources of supply. Now is the time for Alberta and Canada to capture the abundant economic opportunities of the clean-energy future.

*Liz Lappin is VP of Corporate Affairs & Exploration for E3 Metals Corp., president of the Battery Metals Association of Canada (BMAC) and is a fellow of the Energy Futures Lab.

Alison Cretney is managing director of the Energy Futures Lab.

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