(Bloomberg) — The world’s biggest lithium miner wants to extract more of the battery metal from old cars as demand surges and aging electric vehicles are traded in.
Albemarle Corp. is making investments and partnering with automotive equipment manufacturers on the recycling effort, which it calls “critical” to its future growth.
The miner is part of a growing list of companies looking to grab a share of the market for recovered battery materials as lithium supplies show signs of tightening.
North America cross-border supply chain aimed at loosening China’s grip on battery minerals
On both sides of the US-Canada border, a regional electric vehicle (EV) supply chain is being created, with the potential to transform mining in Canada and loosen China’s grip on the minerals used in batteries.
While Canada has an abundance of nickel, cobalt, graphite and lithium, the country has little local production of EV batteries. But, as global demand surges, US and Canadian leaders have discussed a joint approach to benefit local miners and manufacturers, as well as cutting their reliance on Chinese imports.
“We’ve been betting 100 per cent on having a vertically integrated value chain in Canada,” says Arne Frandsen, managing partner and co-founder of investment group Pallinghurst, which has invested in graphite and lithium mines in Quebec.
Cobalt epitomises the minerals conundrum at the heart of the green technology revolution.
It’s a key ingredient in the chemistry that powers electric vehicles and, along with other battery materials such as lithium, is facing a sustained demand surge as the world decarbonises.
But the world’s largest cobalt supplier is Democratic Republic of Congo, where up to a fifth of production is generated by artisanal miners working in squalid and dangerous conditions with little if any pricing power for their hard-won ore.
Littering the abyssal plain of the Pacific Ocean are an estimated 21 billion tonnes worth of polymetallic nodules containing high grades of manganese, nickel, copper and cobalt – the so-called “battery metals” that Tesla (Nasdaq:TSLA) has warned may soon be in short supply.
They sit on top of the sea floor just waiting to be hoovered up, and several companies, including one from Vancouver, DeepGreen Metals, is in the race to begin harvesting them.
Getting the 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 that U.S. President Joe Biden has committed to will require a massive shift to renewable energy and electric cars.
https://science.thewire.in/
Despite what we often hear, the energy transition is not as simple as building solar panels and wind turbines everywhere. It requires an overhaul of some of the key systems underpinning our economy, minerals being one of them.
In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) takes stock of which and how much mineral resources we’ll need as we decarbonise the world’s energy architecture.
I spoke with Jagabanta Ningthoujam, manager with RMI-India, who specialises on electricity, batteries and hydrogen. Formerly associated with the World Bank’s Climate Smart Mining Facility, he discusses the global race for mineral access through an Indian perspective.
US and Europe risk being left behind unless they secure cobalt supplies for batteries, says Ivan Glasenberg
The car industry in the US and Europe risks being left behind by their Chinese rivals unless they secure supplies of cobalt, according to the world’s biggest producer of the key battery metal.
Glencore chief executive Ivan Glasenberg told the FT Future of the Car Summit on Wednesday that western carmakers would be naive to think they could always rely on China to supply the batteries for electric vehicle fleets.
Glasenberg said Chinese companies had been quick to realise the vulnerability of their supply chains and “tied up” lots of cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cobalt is a metal needed in the lithium-ion batteries used in longer-range electric vehicles.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
There are all sorts of wars, a shorthand term beloved by politicians, economists and journalists. There is the trade war, the diplomatic war, the new Cold War, the war against the pandemic.
Yet another one is on the horizon – the infrastructure war – and it goes a long way to explain why commodity prices are soaring, with some of them, including copper and iron ore, hitting record prices in recent days. The war could trigger a new commodities “super cycle,” if we’re not in one already.
The infrastructure war is as much geopolitical as economic. It pits America against China, each of which is trying to lock up the resources required to rebuild their infrastructure and ramp up the transition to a clean economy, which will require vast amounts of copper, cobalt, nickel, zinc and steel to produce everything from electric vehicles (EVs) and wind turbines to “smart” power grids and solar panels.
Washington, DC (CNN)Fewer than 40 years after humans discovered Tiehm’s buckwheat, a Nevada plant with yellow flowers, they may drive it to extinction in pursuit of electric vehicles, a technology widely hailed as being environmentally friendly.
Environmentalists say the benefits of Tiehm’s buckwheat could be vast, but its full significance is unknown. What’s certain, they say, is that guarding Tiehm’s buckwheat is important for preserving biodiversity on Earth.
The flower is so newly discovered that it hasn’t been studied thoroughly, they say. But botanists say they’re impressed with Tiehm’s buckwheat’s ability to thrive where few species can — poor soil that’s full of boron and lithium.
Mining companies need to invest nearly $1.7 trillion in the next 15 years to help supply enough copper, cobalt, nickel and other metals needed for the shift to a low carbon world, according to consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
The United States, Britain, Japan, Canada and others raised their targets on cutting carbon emissions to halt global warming at a summit in April hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden. read more
Meeting those targets will need large-scale deployment of electric vehicles, storage for power generated from renewables and electricity transmission, all of which require industrial materials, such as lightweight aluminium and metals used in batteries such as cobalt and lithium.
https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/
Ardiden options battery metal properties to Great Northern Lithium for possible sale
Perth-based gold explorer Ardiden is optioning its northwestern Ontario lithium assets to a new junior mining entity, also from Australia.
Ardiden has signed an option agreement with Great Northern Lithium, to acquire 80 per cent of Ardiden’s lithium portfolio. The total consideration could be up to A$8.7 million if a sale goes through.
Great Northern Lithium is described in an Ardiden news release as being led by an experienced team, well-schooled in lithium exploration and in bringing deposits into production around the world.
A race is on to produce lithium in the United States, but competing projects are taking very different approaches to extracting the vital raw material. Some might not be very green.
Atop a long-dormant volcano in northern Nevada, workers are preparing to start blasting and digging out a giant pit that will serve as the first new large-scale lithium mine in the United States in more than a decade — a new domestic supply of an essential ingredient in electric car batteries and renewable energy.
The mine, constructed on leased federal lands, could help address the near total reliance by the United States on foreign sources of lithium.
But the project, known as Lithium Americas, has drawn protests from members of a Native American tribe, ranchers and environmental groups because it is expected to use billions of gallons of precious ground water, potentially contaminating some of it for 300 years, while leaving behind a giant mound of waste.
Soaring metals prices may be good for miners, but they risk the ongoing transition to clean energy as batteries, solar panels and wind turbines need considerable amounts of copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium and other minerals to be manufactured, a report warns.
According to The International Energy Agency (IEA), reaching the goals of the Paris climate agreement would result in a quadrupling mineral demand by 2040.
Yet a lack of investment in new mines could substantially raise the costs of clean energy technologies, the IEA said on Wednesday.
https://www.corporateknights.com/
Last summer, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced he would be issuing “giant contracts” to mining companies capable of supplying Tesla with nickel in an “environmentally sensitive” way. “Please mine more nickel,” he asked bluntly.
By October, Tesla was in talks with Vale, the world’s largest producer of the mineral, about securing sustainable nickel from its Canadian mines to power Tesla’s electric vehicle batteries.
No firm definition of “environmentally sensitive” was given, but as minerals become increasingly critical to a low-carbon future, attention around how those minerals are extracted and produced is growing sharply.
President Biden’s plan to rapidly shift to electric vehicles and renewable energy could find itself in conflict with another, less prominent commitment: improving the sustainability of the mineral and metals sector.
Much of that tension has to do with soaring demand worldwide for the rare earth elements used to make low-carbon goods, as well as the short amount of time the United States has set to reduce its carbon footprint.
“There’s an intrinsic conflict, yes,” said Kevin Book, who heads the research team at ClearView Energy Partners LLC. But “there’s got to be a first thing and a second thing, and right now it looks like climate is the first thing,” he said.
As chief executive of Burnaby-based Ballard Power Systems Inc., the company that hopes to disrupt trucking, municipal transit buses, railways and shipping with its proprietary hydrogen fuel cell technology, Randy MacEwen has made countless sacrifices.
He spent this past Christmas quarantined in a guarded hotel suite in Shanghai for two weeks, doing burpees and calisthenics to pass the time — all the while waiting to venture into a country where, out of respect for the culture, he calls one of his closest business associates, “big brother.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time learning about the Chinese culture,” MacEwen told the Financial Post.
