Transcript for Outside/In episode: The Lithium Gold Rush
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Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In, a show about the natural world and how we use it. I’m Sam Evans-Brown. And this is producer Taylor Quimby.
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Taylor Quimby: You only have to count to three on the Periodic Table of the Elements before you get to lithium. Hydrogen, helium, lithium.
It’s the lightest metal in the world, light enough to float, soft enough to cut with a butter knife, 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. It wants to react to just about everything around it.
So, you won’t find pure lithium in nature.
It’s always in disguise - dissolved in a salt water solution, or locked up in a crystal.
Emily Hersh: THere’s no lithium nuggets. There’s no mines where you just go hack out tons of lithium ready to go.
Taylor Quimby: This is Emily Hersh - the self-styled First Lady of Lithium. She’s a consultant who has worked in oil and gas and even gold.
Emily Hersh: That idea of pure lithium as a chunk of metal only exists in specific laboratory conditions.
But Pure lithium metal has to be kept in certain conditions, so it doesn’t react to air or water.
Emily Hersh: Because it’ll burn. Or it’ll catch on fire.
Taylor Quimby: Which didn’t stop me from ordering some off of Amazon just to see it for myself.
I bought a few grams from a company that caters to people who want to collect their own physical periodic table of the elements. It came in a tiny glass vial filled with mineral oil.
I poured it into a metal pot full of cold water, and the lithium sizzled like garlic in oil - bubbled and steamed until it there was nothing left to see.
Online you can find all sorts of more dramatic reactions on Youtube.
[bubbling sounds of lithium combusting in water]
Taylor Quimby: Despite its tendency to combust, Lithium has had a lot of uses over the years - to make specialized ceramics or glass, medication for bipolar disorder,in lubricants, as a trigger for thermonuclear bombs..
[Bomb SFX]
Taylor Quimby: It was even an ingredient in the early formula for 7-up…
[7-up commercial]: It’s 7-up. SO good. So pure. So wholesome.
Taylor Quimby: … but all those applications will be dwarfed in the coming years by its use in lithium ion batteries for electric cars.
Emily Hersh: If you want to pick the element that is most changing the way that we as human beings interact with energy, it’s lithium. Because lithium gives us the ability to pick energy up, move it around, and use it later.
Batteries are arguably the linchpin that binds our transition to renewable energy together.
We need them to store the power from wind and solar - and we need them on the road.
After all, cars and Trucks account for a full twenty percent of all US emissions. Moving away from gas vehicles is essential.
Chloe Holzinger: Can you hear me alright? Is my voice coming in okay?
Taylor Quimby: This is battery analyst Chloe Holzinger.
Chloe Holzinger: So my name is Chloe Holzinger. I’m a senior analyst at IHS market.
Taylor Quimby: There are three things that car manufacturer’s want out of an electric car battery.
First, energy density - how much energy you can cram into a defined space.
Chloe Holzinger: And that translates to, in a vehicle setting, how far can I go on a single charge.
The second thing is power.
Chloe Holzinger: How much of that energy can I get out of that battery at any one time. And the third one is cycle life.
That’s how many times you can charge and discharge the battery before it starts to crap out.
Chloe Holzinger: Those are the three metrics that lithium ion batteries really kill it in.
No wonder some people call lithium, white gold.
Chloe Holzinger: There’s not really any technology that has the ability to displace lithium ion in a vehicle application for the next 10 to 15 years I would say.
And Lithium-ion batteries get better and better every year: One hopeful Tesla competitor, a company called Lucid Air, says it’s first electric vehicle will get 500 miles on a single chargeThat’s far enough to get from New Hampshire, where I am, to Washington DC with 10 miles to spare.
No wonder, after years of relatively slow growth, people are paying attention: Electric vehicles only account for 2.8 percent of global car sales today - but the more optimistic reports suggest they’ll outpace gas vehicles in 10 to 20 years.
That means loads more batteries - and loads more lithium.
A few years ago, Tesla and Panasonic built what was then the biggest lithium-ion battery plant in the world: The gigafactory, in Nevada. CEO Elon Musk described the scope then.
Elon Musk: It’s not going to be just the biggest lithium-ion battery factory in the world, it’s going to be bigger than the sum of all the other lithium ion battery factories in the world.
Today, Tesla is building a new plant - this time in Austin, Texas. The Terrafactory.
When it’s finished, Musk projects the factory will use as much as eight-hundred thousand tons of lithium annually.
That’s two and half time current production for the entire globe.
Elon Musk: It’s difficult to describe in words, but it’s a heck of a big factory.
So… where’s all that lithium gonna come from?
[Outside/In theme plays]
Sam Evans-Brown: Today on Outside/In: the Lithium gold rush.
In one version of a sustainable, carbon-neutral future, the world’s cars will transition from fossil fuels to electricity. And right now, the vision of that world absolutely depends on the lithium ion battery.
But when you try to square that world with the reality of the global lithium supply - and what it takes to extract it - that vision is not so simple.
Producer Taylor Quimby tells the story.
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One problem - or let’s say challenge - with transitioning to renewable technology - is that the future may require way less fossil fuels… but it will require a monumental increase in these specific types of metals.
Emily Hersh: Graphite, lithium, cobalt, rare earths, scandium, copper, silver, palladium, platinum - the mineral intensity of those compared to now is in some places is 800 times what it is today.
Solar panels, wind turbines, batteries - they all rely on stuff that comes… from mines.
Emily Hersh: I think that there is a cognitive dissonance in people in general that mining is a thing of the past, or that mining is bad. Or that things don’t come from mines. It came from a mine.
Laptops, tablets, smartphones, digital cameras, e-bikes and hover-boards… all these things contain lithium.
But lithium isn’t a raw commodity like steel, or coffee beans, or natural gas.. It can’t be traded, or passed around by and for different products - It’s only useful when processed for particular battery chemistries.
Compared to combustion engines, batteries might actually seem pretty simple from an engineering perspective. But from the perspective of a supply chain - the steps required to buy, transport, manufacture, and assemble a product - lithium-ion batteries are arguably more complex.
Emily Hersh: So the lithium-battery supply chain has at least five specific stages. You’ve got your lithium extraction.
Chloe Holzinger: Getting the lithium out of the ground.
That’s your mine - much more on this stage later.
Chloe Holzinger: The second is making that lithium ore into a lithium chemical.
Chloe Holzinger: The third step is taking that lithium chemical and making a cathode powder.
Batteries have two sides - a cathode, and an anode.
Emily Hersh: And then you’ve got the cell makers.
Cells are maybe what you think of when you picture a battery - like a double or triple A.
Chloe Holzinger: And from there, those cells are shipped to a final step.
Emily Hersh: The battery pack makers.
For the longest time, I thought Tesla batteries were bigger versions of the one in my Honda Civic - one big square block.
Instead, they’re made up of more than 7,000 cylindrical cells, lined up and wired together in a thick casing that monitors and directs the cells, This is the battery pack. It’s a complex machine in it’s own right - and it’s designed to be virtually indestructible. Remember the exploding Samsung phones? That’s what happens when you’re lithium ion battery pack fails. But int he case of an electric car, you know - it looks like a flaming car.
Internet video audio: [sound of fire] Oh [beeped] dude. That’s a brand new car. Wow, I can feel the heat from here. Oh that’s a Tesla dude!
For the most part, each of these steps belongs to a connected, but separate industry - industries separated by expertise and equipment, and sometimes, by geologic necessity, by geography.
Chloe Holzinger: Today’s lithium ion battery industry is pretty segmented by region.
The breakdown you’re about to hear is a broad simplification, but generally speaking, it’s true:
Chloe Holzinger: Lithium comes from South American and Australia, Cobalt comes from the Congo, Nickel comes from Indonesia, the batteries get made in East Asia.
There are lot of minerals we could have focused on in this episode - cobalt for example, which is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where issues around child labor have been raised by both critics and advocates for electric cars.
Because of these issues, some - but not all battery makers have effectively lowered or eliminated cobalt from their batteries.
We’re sticking with lithium in part because , experts have told me that it’s basically the one thing that can’t be substituted or replaced in a lithium ion battery
In other words, whatever pressures the lithium supply chain is subject to now, have to be addressed.
But there is no Central Lithium Planning Committee that is balancing supply and demand, or strategizing on how to extract lithium in ways that prioritize the environment, or social justice.
Instead there is the market - and a patchwork of regulations that differ from place to place. So despite being so interconnected - links in the supply chain are sometimes dangerously siloed.
Chloe has been to industry conferences up and down the world of lithium. At electric car conferences, she says you’ll see...
Chloe Holzinger: Demand charts just exponentially increasing.
Upstream, at the battery conferences…
Chloe Holzinger: I go to battery conferences and it’s just a bunch of nerds geeking out about ‘this is a cool battery chemistry!’
But all the way at the source in the raw materials department?
Chloe Holzinger: And then you go to a lithium conference, and it’s… it’s a little more conservative.
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Chloe Holzinger: It’s really a stretch to make that connection between the battery in your car, and the mine where it comes out of. I would say that the only people who have regularly asked me questions about that tend to be oil and gas companies.
Oil and gas. Upstream from the green revolution is an industry that’s still built on the principles of extraction - an industry that hasn’t moved as fast as renewable tech on the other end.
A surplus of raw lithium materials in recent years has made prices fall. That slowed production increases: after all, why increase supply when prices are low?
But with demand expected to increase dramatically in the near future, there are fears that demand will soon outstrip supply.
Some analysts are projecting shortages of battery grade lithium as early as 2022
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Mike Wise: There’s a saying we have in Georgia, if you can’t grow it, it has to be mined.
This is Smithsonian geologist Mike Wise.
I called Mike, because initially, I thought that a possible shortage of lithium had something to do with the mineral itself. After all, it’s not exactly common.
Mike Wise: It’s rarer than copper or gold, but more abundance than something like tin. Somewhere around 20th in overall abundance in the Earth’s crust.
I also called Mike because I, perhaps like many of you, had a sort of simplistic idea of what Lithium mining entails: that Lithium mines were underground holes where people with headlamps chip away at veins of lithium ore trapped in rocks.
And while technically, lithium can be found that way… in fact it can be found everywhere on the planet - even in the ocean - to mine something, it has to be found in high enough quantities to be profitable. And for the rock formations that sometimes contain lithium, called pegmatites, that can be tricky.
Mike Wise: It’s not easy. Even though pegmatites are widespread across the globe, they’re not large deposits.
But the real factors leading towards a lithium shortage, I’ve learned, are economic, environmental, and essentially, human. Mining pegmatites, like mining gold or coal, is messy business. It involves open-pit mines - GIANT HOLES SO BIG THEY COULD SWALLOW MOUNTAINS. Moving and digging all that rock requires loads of energy and produces tons of carbon-dioxide. Waste includes heavy metals and acid drainage that can contaminate Earth and water. And eventually, mines run out - and miners move on.
From the 1950s, until the 1980s, nearly all of the world’s lithium was extracted from a pair of mines in North Carolina.
All that was before 1991, Sony released the first consumer product to use a lithium ion battery. The Handycam camcorder.
Since then, global Lithium production has increased dramatically.
But as demand has grown, and the products that lithium enables proliferated across the united states - digital cameras, laptops, cellphones - , lithium mining in the United States became virtually non-existent.
So if we’re not mining our own lithium s… where is it coming from - and who is being affected?
Patrick Donnelly: It’s hard perhaps for listeners to understand just how remote this location is - this is 200 miles northwest of Las Vegas and 200 plus miles south of Reno, the nearest town is Dire which has maybe 100 people.
This is Patrick Donnelly, the Nevada State Director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental organization that in the pantheon of environmental organizations stands out for prioritizing endangered species over land development… even if that development is for renewable energy The place he’s talking about is called Rhyolite Ridge, a long dry slope that lies on the Western side of an ancient volcanic caldera.
It’s home to a little red and yellow flower called Tiehm’s Buckwheat.
Patrick Donnelly: It’s about 6 inches tall when it’s in full bloom… during the winter it’s just a stump so to be honest, except when the flowers are in bloom it’s not much to look at.
Taylor Quimby: The soil in Rhyolite ridge has such high-mineral content that most plants struggle to take root there - but there is one plant that thrives there - Rhyolite Ridge is the only place in the world you’ll find Tiehm’s buckwheat.
Patrick Donnelly: There’s six populations of the buckwheat, which are spread over a couple square miles. The mine’s footprint, the open pit footprint, would inhabit 85% approximately of the buckwheat’s habitat.
Ioneer Promotional Video: Rising above the vast high desert, between Reno and Las Vegas Nevada, the 100% Ioneer owned Rhyolite Ridge project is made possible by the globally unique...
Tiehm’s buckwheat grows on top of a mix of lithium and boron ore - a deposit that a company called Ioneer is hoping will be the first to bring US lithium mining backup to speed.
Ioneer video: This one of a kind deposit is expected to become a globally significant, long-life, cost effective source of critical lithium and boric acid vital to a sustainable future. As the first major American supplier of lithium...
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The mining of lithium and other metals is governed in the United States, to this day, by the General Mining Law of 1872.
If you are a citizen of the United States over the age of eighteen, you have the ability to explore and prospect for silver, gold, platinum, tungsten, uranium and more, on Federal lands, and stake your claim.
The price, set in 1872, is between two-fifty, and five dollars an acre.
The law has since been amended to exclude certain resources like petroleum and shale, but in a nutshell, what this means is that since 1872 companies and individuals have extracted 100s of billions of dollars of natural resources on public lands, left thousands of abandoned mines sprinkled across the country, and paid the Federal government next to nothing to lease that land.
There have been lots of efforts to update these laws, originally created during The Gold Rush.
There was the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act of 2007.
The Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act of 2009, of 2014, 2015, and 2017.
All of them died in Congress. No wonder Patrick feels like the game is rigged.
Patrick Donnelly: Nevada is a banana republic for the mining industry. The mining industry runs this state, the mining industry owns our politicians, and the mining industry does whatever the hell it wants in Nevada.
That being said, staking a claim does not a mine make.
Here again is Emily Hersh.
Emily Hersh: Within a mining project’s life, there is a prospecting phase, there is an exploration phase. There is a production phase, and there is a mine closure phase.
The company that would eventually become Ioneer LTD, was formed in 2007. They partnered with mining companies and started prospecting for mineral deposits.
Emily Hersh: So the prospecting phase is just what it sounds like. A guy on a horse. Or a lady on a horse.
I’m not convinced this is the case, but regardless, it wasn’t until 2016 the company landed on Rhyolite Ridge, are started the process of staking a claim. Then exploration began.
Emily Hersh: To do exploration, you’re talking about 100s of millions of dollars of science.
This step includes drilling dozens of deep cores to figure out how big the deposit is, and whether it will be profitable. It includes building a pilot plant - a miniature version of what could eventually become the processing arm of this lithium mine.
Exploration seems like the wrong word. It’s so technical.
Emily Hersh: And the exploration phase for a mine last… I would say between 7 and ten years, easily.
So right now, Ioneer is still in the middle of this phase. And this is their first mine. They’ve spent many millions of dollars, and should everything go right, it’ll be at least another three years before it’s up and running.
In other words, by the time mining companies know whether a project will be profitable or not, they have every incentive to plow forward and recoup their losses - flowers be damned.
Patrick Donnelly: So this is basically Ioneer’s solution to the buckwheat problem - there solution is, well we can wipe it out in its native habitat and stick it somewhere else and call it good.
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But when Ioneer discovered that their mine project would cover most of its habitat, they started funding studies at the University of Nevada to see if scientists could artificially cultivate and replant the buckwheat to another location.
Early results are looking good. But through a right-to-know request, The Center for Biological Diversity in Nevada also obtained documents that reveal how Ioneer has pressured the scientists to release findings before the work is completed.
Patrick Donnelly: Ioneer is trying to use this science to greenwash the mine when the science itself is inconclusive and I think the thing that was most revealed by these records is that the researchers are deeply uncomfortable with being put in that position.
Patrick says that Ioneer is trying to use this early science to present an optimistic picture… - and prevent Tiehm’s Buckwheat from being listed under the endangered species act.
Which of course, is exactly what the Center for Biological Diversity is petitioning for.
Patrick Donnelly: We recently got a positive initial finding for the US Fish and wildlife service, so that moves the buckwheat to a longer formal 12 month review period for that endangered species status, so we will be waiting for that.
If the flower gets listed - it could spell the end of the mine project at Rhyolite Ridge.
Patrick says that the Center for Biological Diversity is not inherently opposed to mining lithium.
Patrick Donnelly: Look we are in a global extinction crisis, there are species going extinct all over the globe. Biodiversity is what gives us clean drinking water and clean air to breathe and puts food on our table. And so if we let species go extinct because of our own desires, we are threatening our own way of life on Earth. And so… I hear you - we need lithium. There are many, many, many places to get lithium that don’t have an endemic species of flower directly above them.
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If this were a coal project, there would be little conflict for environmentalists - it would have all the same harms, and none of the benefits.
But mining for materials related to our renewable transition forces environmental activists and policymakers to confront trade-offs that traditionally, were problems easily blamed on the opposition.
Whatever raw materials aren’t produced in places like Rhyolite Ridge, are produced somewhere else. Places where mining may put other species, and human lives, at risk.
Climate policies like the Paris Accords and The Green New Deal push for a dramatic increase in renewable technology, but don’t tackle the tough decision-making those increases will require.
This isn’t a problem that the environmental movement is ignoring, BUT Conservatives, sometimes in bad faith, have leapt on this reality - claiming that the cure for climate change is worse than the problem.
And they’re not just talking about the environment - they’re also talking about US security.
Rare earth metals, like lithium, require a complicated chemical process in order to become useful from a commercial point of view. Emily Hersh:
Emily Hersh: China blew everyone out of the supply chain by in essence subsidizing that second step. The US that we are dependent on China for this chemical that’s needed to make permanent magnets that’s needed to make electric vehicle motors, windmills, missile guidance systems. But even that realization is not enough to change the behavior.
National security hawks have seized on this fact to point out that because some mineral supply chains have grown largely outside of the United States, dramatic growth in renewables puts money in the hands of the Chinese.
That doesn’t have to be the case for lithium, Emily argues - but it will be, if we aren’t willing to make trade-offs.
Emily Hersh: The critical minerals for the lithium supply chain… they ARE in the united states. WHy don’t we extract them and process them in the United States. Because they’re more expensive. Why is it more expensive? The United States has some of the environmental standards in the world. It’s a reality.
[Break]
Welcome back to Outside/In, I’m Sam Evans Brown. Producer Taylor Quimby just laid out that the lithium needed for the renewable energy transition isn’t being mined in the United States… so where does it come from?
Thea Riofrancos: When we talk about governments or economies that are dependent on natural resources, we kind of mean the most upstream part of a supply chain.
This is Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals, about South American conflicts over oil and mining, and an upcoming book called Brine to Batteries. She likes alliteration.
Thea Riofrancos: Apparently it’s a thing for me.
Thea says that the trajectory of South American resource extraction starts 500 years ago with the Spanish conquistadors mining for precious metals...
Thea Riofrancos: When the spanish first came we were looking at a lot of gold and silver.
And continued into the modern era with agribusiness and petroleum products.
Thea Riofrancos: [montage] Oil, soy, beef, tubber, right from the Amazon - before synthetic rubber was invented, sugar, tobacco, a bit later, bananas, tropical fruits.
And that trajectory continues today in the form of lithium brines.
People who know about this subject will have been wondering when I was going to mention that 60% of the world’s lithium reserves - which is to say 60% of all the economically mineable lithium that we currently know about - can be found underneath the massive salares, or salt flats, of South America.
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Thea Riofrancos: You know you are 7500 feet in the air. But like around you there’s mountains that go way taller than that. Some of them are snow-capped, some of them are volcanoes.
Salt flats are ancient desert lakes - closed basins where shifting climate and geology led massive quantities of water to dry up, leaving behind a rich crust of minerals and salt.
They are landscapes that sometimes get compared to the moon, or to Mars.
Thea Riofrancos: So the whole expanse is like white and grey, these little patches of like red, and all of these shades of gray between them that you don’t even know exist until you see them.
The salt flats of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia are also “David-Attenborough-famous”.
Nature Documentary Narrator: The vast salt flats of Chile’s Atacama desert were seemingly designed to repel life. Which animals are capable of conquering these lands? The flamingo, of course.
What you won’t see in nature documentaries, is that the edges of the salt flats are also home to dozens of indiginous communities.
And what you also won’t see - in some cases just miles away from nature reserves and flamingos - are the lithium brine plants.
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Thea Riofrancos: The lithium is in this brine that’s subsurface, and it’s sucked out. We can think about it like a drinking straw. It is sucked out, and it is then arrayed in these enormous, like many football fields sized, evaporation ponds.
They are in some cases literally bigger than nearby indiginous towns, objectively mesmerizing to look at. There are bright blue ponds, fading to greenish, and brown - all of them perfect squares or other unnatural shapes. Do a google image search for lithium brine ponds and you’ll see what I mean.
But how do they work? Well, these salt flats are some of the driest places on the Earth. They’re hot, there’s almost no rainfall. So they pump the brines into the ponds… sunshine evaporates water, the mineral content increases. Once it’s high enough, they pump it to another pond and the process keeps going…the brines get thicker and slushier as they go from pond to pond, and eventually the lithium content is so high they can move it to the next step for chemical processing.
Thea Riofrancos: They don’t have to use a ton of toxic chemicals, or reagents to help the concentration process. Mostly it’s nature doing the work.
But by pumping out all of the underground brine from underneath these desert ecosystems, and then letting it just evaporate into the air, lithium brine plants pose a different problem: they deplete ground water.
Thea Riofrancos: If you talk to anyone from any of those companies, or hear them quoted - they will always say that brine and water are two separate things and brine has like no human value so whatever. No one else agrees with them. And I mean no one else. Not regulators in the Chilean government, even those in favor of lithium development don’t think there’s no relationship between brine and fresh water.
Activists, scientists, and community members have all warned - the amount of water and brine being extracted for mining threatens to destabilize fragile ecosystems and economies.
When mining companies deplete brines, Thea says, the fresh water that sits on top and around the brine is dragged down by gravity and other natural forces.
Thea Riofrancos: Regardless of whether the fresh water is directly being depleted, which it is, and regardless of whether it’s being contaminated, which it is, it’s also literally being made less easy to access through the irrigation systems for farming and potable water.
This is why, in some indigenous communities you might see or hear a familiar phrase: Water is life. No to lithium.
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That being said - opposition isn’t universal.
I tried hard to get in touch with some of the people whose lives are directly touched by lithium mining in South America, but because of how remote these places are, and partly because of the pandemic, I wasn’t able to get anybody from the salt flats on the phone.
Emiliano Gullo: You get in the car, and you can make… two hours. And you gonna see nothing. I mean, nothing.
But I was able to talk to this gentleman - Argentine journalist Emiliano Gullo, who wrote about lithium mining for Anfibia Magazine.
Emiliano Gullo: They’re talking about people that are left alone by the state. By everything, by everyone.
He admits that, coming from Buenos Aires, a twenty hour drive from Jujuy, the province where lithium is mined, he thought this story was pretty straightforward - that lithium is just one more resource foreign companies are looking to capitalize on, at the expense of local communities.
But it was more complicated than he thought.
Emiliano Gullo: I wanted to show this controversy. I went to Jujuy with an idea, and I came with two ideas.
In his reporting, he watched a group of 200 indigenous Kolla protestors drive away a mining company drilling for lithium in the Guayatoyoc Lagoon, North of the salt flats.
The company had shown up without any prior or informed consent from local communities.
Emiliano Gullo: 26 - The logic always is, let’s start digging with no permission, with no authorization. If there are any problems, okay we’ll see.
The people here in Argentina, but also in Chile’ and Bolivia - are demanding the right to prior and informed consent.
For them, and the more populated towns where tourism feeds local economies, lithium poses a threat.
But in the most remote areas, Emiliano says, some people felt differently. In Catua, a town of about 700, a lithium company promised residents to pave the roads, and build a natural gas pipeline so they don’t have to keep hauling cylinders in by truck.
Emiliano Gullo: In Catua… we found these guys they were so anxious to start working with the mining company, with lithium company. They were happy. And that was a shock, because we got there thinking okay, this is so easy to see. And it’s not so easy.
Again, here’s Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals.
Thea Riofrancos: You know, I think it’s interesting.. When there are pre-existing livelihoods people defend those livelihoods and are more resistant to the incursion of extraction. When there’s a sense of just total lack of opportunity, people may be willing to accept some of the promises of the mining company.
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Even in communities like Catua, where locals are welcoming lithium extraction and hoping to see an economic boost - I was shocked to what a small impact these gargantuan operations can have. A 2019 survey by the Inter-American Development bank showed only 12 people in Catua were employed by the mining industry - and only 566 people in the whole province of Jujuy.
Thea Riofrancos: It’s not very labor intensive. The picture of one’s head of early twentieth century coal mining, it’s just not how it works anymore. It’s like robotics or AI and these self-driving machines. So it doesn’t create a ton of direct, or well-remunerated, or dignified labor - what it creates is like a service economy around the mine.
Ramón M. Balcázar: Extraction is normalized in the Global South, for everyone. For us and for you.
This is Ramon Morales Balcazar, a founding member of the Plurinational Observatory of the Andean Salt Flats.
When I spoke to him, he was in Mexico City, in a room with tall concrete walls, a towering skylight, and lots of hanging plants. It was beautiful but sounded a bit like a pool, FYI.
Ramón M. Balcázar: Between 20 nd 25 percent of all the lithium in the world comes from the Atacama salt flats. That cannot be sustainable.
For about four years, the Plurinational Observatory has been fighting expansion of lithium mining, and raising awareness about water issues - that it threatens livelihoods, and the ecosystems.
Ramón M. Balcázar: So a lot of people thought that it would be impossible to stand against lithium mining because it’s like a green mineral.
One thing that has made the group pretty successful, relatively speaking, is that the group draws its coalition from the entire area, sometimes reductively referred to as The Lithium Triangle.
Ramón M. Balcázar: A bunch of indiginous leaders, academics, some activists from three countries, also from different nations… like Atacama, Kolla, Aimata...
Still, it’s an uphill battle, Ramon says. If you think the Mining Law of 1872 is lax - remember that the regulatory structures in most South American countries are far more mining-friendly than what you’ll see in the US.
Ramón M. Balcázar: Because brine is cheaper, that’s why they like brine so much, it’s just cheaper and our regulations are super loose. Companies like SQM are involved in corruption, bribery. They have been interfering actually in the environmental regulation itself...
SQM is a Chilean company - one of the biggest lithium producers in the world. The principal stockholder is the son-in-law of former Chilean dictator Pinochet.
I asked Ramon what he thought about the situation in Nevada - where The Center for Biological Diversity is fighting the Ioneer lithium mine on account of the Tiehm’s buckwheat:
Ramón M. Balcázar: Yeah, maybe that’s another aspect of this coloniality behind extraction. So in Atacama Salt Flat, there are many species, many plants… there is a lot actually to save there, to preserve. But for some reason, nature in our side of the planet is totally disposable. And for some reason, a tiny plant in Nevada is not. Which is good. But it makes you think about how people see themselves and their duty towards nature, because it’s theirs.
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When you talk about the social and environmental costs of a renewable energy transition, the narrative inevitably starts to feel like a zero sum game. Our electric vehicles, for the extinction of a flower, or the water source for a people, and a desert ecosystem.
Every person I spoke with for this story rejects that notion.
Emily Hersh: There’s more research going into the brines at oil fields, and the brines at geothermal deposits.
Patrick Donnelly: There are promising technologies out there that allow for lithium to be extracted using an electrolysis process and then water to be reinjected.
Thea Riofrancos: Car companies are getting concerned about this, and I don’t want to say they have good motives, cause there motives are their brand right? But Volkswagen send a team of observers to the Atacama desert to look into the supply chain issues,
There are promising new mining technologies that could reduce water waste, lithium recycling startups that could reduce our overall production needs, compacts that give communities more agency around mining projects that take place in their backyard.
But most people I spoke with also acknowledged - with visible discomfort on Zoom - that the trade-offs aren’t as utopian as we’d prefer.
Julian Brave NoiseCat: I guess the point here is that just because we are transitioning to a future powered by clean energy doesn’t mean that we’re going to relieve ourselves of the fundamental dynamics of extractive industries.
This is Julian Brave Noisecat, Vice President of policy and strategy for the left-wing think tank Data for Progress. He says, a lot of environmental justice advocates were driven to action because of oil, gas and mineral projects that exploit native communities, poor communities, and communities of color. So understandably, the push for renewables is part of desire to emancipate society from that paradigm.
But action on climate change is needed urgently.
Julian Brave NoiseCat: And you know this is something that I wish was not true, but the reality of politics and policy is encountering truths that you wish were not there but are in fact there, that there may in some instances be a trade-off between just and equitable outcomes, and the imperative to move very quickly. I think that’s largely a function of the fact that we’ve waited so long.
For activists, that trade-off may be even harder to swallow as time goes on. When I was speaking with battery analyst Chloe Holzinger, she said something that gave me pause.
Chloe Holzinger: Now is actually a really good time to make an acquisition. While vehicle sales are actually going to fall because of a recession…
It took me a minute to realize what she meant, was that now is a great time for legacy fossil fuel companies - the ones that activists want to hold accountable for their actions of the past — like Exxon-Mobil, or Shell — to get into the lithium game.
Chloe Holzinger: I don’t think we can make this huge energy transition to clean technologies without bringing along some of those older players.
Here’s a weird truth to contend with: the first lithium ion battery - was patented by Nobel prize winner Stan Whittingham in 1979 - when he was working for Exxon-Mobil.
Chloe Holzinger: Exxon Mobil played a key role in building lithium ion batteries. They then had a mixed role after inventing them. But they were there at the very beginning.
Of course, all of these trade-offs are built on the assumption that there is one we aren’t willing to make. Which is a world - that isn’t filled with electric vehicles. At least, not as many as you may have imagined.
Here again is Thea Riofrancos.
Thea Riofrancos: Consensus in the US is that we’re all going to own Teslas. Or maybe not Teslas, or whatever, maybe not Teslas those are kind of expensive. But we’re all going to own electric vehicles, we’re going to swap in electric vehicles for ICE vehicles and change nothing else. We don’t need to change the highways, the privatized transit system, we don’t need to change the suburbs the built environment...
Thea Riofrancos: What I think pains me the most is that we’re going to change nothing about the way we consume or produce, but just switch out the energy source - and a lot of the environmental effects are going to remain.
So which future is it? The one where our lithium comes at the cost of traditional environmental and social concerns? The one where we change our behavior — even just a little… own 1 car instead of 2…
Or a future we haven’t yet dreamed up?
Patrick Donnelly: It’s very troubling because we don’t have another paradigm in which to deploy. We don’t have some alternative mining industry that isn’t a bunch of shady operators and environmental villains to tap into.
In order to clean up our energy, Someone, somewhere is going to get their hands dirty. The question is who.
Patrick Donnelly: So I don’t know, maybe I should quit my job and go into lithium extraction. Maybe that’s the future - all of the environmentalists become energy developers and mining executives.
CREDITS
This episode of Outside/In was produced by Taylor Quimby, with me, Sam Evans-Brown, and Justine Paradis.
Erika Janik is our Executive Producer.
Maureen McMurray is Director of Recycling Unobtanium.
Special to everybody who spoke to Taylor for this story: Vivas Kumar, Brett Birdsong, Sam Kalen, and Stan Whittingham.
If you want to learn a lot more about the mining of lithium and other metals related to renewables, check out Emily Hersh’s podcast, The Minerals Manhattan Project.
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.
Our theme is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a product of NHPR.