The Lithium Gold Rush
Lithium. It’s the lightest metal in the world: light enough to float, soft enough to cut with a butter knife, and a silvery white that’s almost luminous until it’s exposed to air. With a single electron in its outer shell, an atom of lithium is also highly unstable, which is one of the qualities that makes it perfect for batteries.
In one version of a sustainable, carbon-neutral future, the world’s cars will transition from fossil fuels to electricity. And right now, that vision absolutely depends on lithium, the most important ingredient in the lithium-ion battery.
But there is no “Lithium Central Planning Committee” balancing supply and demand, or making sure that lithium is mined in environmentally and socially responsible ways.
Several grams of highly combustible lithium metal, ordered from a company that caters to Periodic Table hobbyists, and delivered by Amazon. The lithium is floating in mineral oil to prevent it from reacting with air and water.
Dropped in a pot of cold water, the lithium immediately began to sizzle like garlic in hot oil.
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From the 1950s until the 1980s, nearly all of the world’s lithium was extracted from a pair of mines in North Carolina. As demand has grown, products that lithium enables proliferated across the United States - digital cameras, laptops, cellphones. Meanwhile, lithium mining in America has become virtually non-existent.
So if we’re not mining our own lithium… where is it coming from, and who is being affected?
Australia is the largest single producer of lithium, but 60% of the world’s lithium reserves can be found underneath the massive salares (or salt flats) of South America, where activists, scientists, and indigenous communities have warned that extraction of lithium (and other minerals) threatens fragile ecosystems and economies.
Photo courtesy of Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE. This negative image shows lithium brine evaporation ponds in Chile´s Atacama salt flat, one of the world’s largest sources of lithium.
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This story features Emily Hersh, Chloe Holzinger, Mike Wise, Patrick Donnelly, Thea Riofrancos, Emiliano Gullo, Ramón M. Balcázar, and Julian Brave NoiseCat.
More reading/listening:
The Minerals Manhattan Project Podcast
Associated Press: Rare wildflower could jeopardize lithium mine
Anfibia Magazine: White gold - the violent water dispute in Argentina
Washington Post: Mining lithium for electric cars is hurting this desert’s local environment
Reuters: Pandemic slows electric vehicle revolution due to lithium battery shortage
Credits
Outside/In was produced this week by Taylor Quimby, with Sam Evans-Brown and Justine Paradis.
Erika Janik is our executive producer.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
Special thanks to Vivas Kumar, Brett Birdsong, Sam Kalen, and Stan Whittingham.
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