Lithium used to be used to treat mania and mood swings, and now its availability or lack thereof is making market swings. In the 1950s, Canada was actually a player in the international lithium market, with a mine in Quebec providing tons of the salt, then failing as the market failed.
Fast forward to 2021, and lithium is a core component of the electrification of transportation, in all of our electronic gadgets and a lesser component for grid storage.
Canada actually has massive lithium reserves underground. Can it return to being, if not the king of lithium, at least a well-positioned pawn?
In addition to its history with lithium, Canada’s federal government established an initiative to try to kickstart battery manufacturing here, working with the mining industry to extract the various minerals required, something Canada has in abundance.
Rather absurd amounts of lithium are locked into the pre-Cambrian Shield. But here’s the thing. I know the pre-Cambrian Shield personally and deeply. I carried a lot of blasted hard granite chunks in North Bay, Ontario, landscaping a terraced set of walls on my parent’s property down to the flood plain below.
For the rest of this article: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/24/canada-used-to-provide-a-lot-of-worlds-lithium-but-can-it-revive-that/