(Bloomberg) — As the mining industry gathers in Toronto this week for one of its biggest annual events, the focus will be on two groups of metals: one that’s seeing soaring demand across the world, and another with almost no industrial utility.
Thousands of investors, executives, bankers and government officials are set to converge on the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada conference at the biggest mining hub in the Americas.
LONDON, June 15 (Reuters) – Is the white-hot lithium market about to be dowsed in a cold cyclical shower of oversupply? Goldman Sachs thinks so.
“We expect lithium prices to continue to correct for the rest of the year and remain under pressure from increasing supply over the next few years,” the Wall Street heavyweight argued in a May 29 battery metals research note. (“The end of the beginning”). It’s a bold call, given the supply-chain stresses that have caused spot lithium carbonate prices to surge over 900% since the start of 2021.
As battery-powered electric vehicles become a mainstay on the nation’s highways — and a key piece of President Biden’s environmental policy — the U.S. is facing a formidable challenge in its efforts to compete in the global battery race.
“The problem is, we’re just pretty far behind here,” Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, told The Hill.“We should have been planning for this a decade ago,” he added. “But I think we can get things moving, now that there’s bipartisan support for it.”
At the end of May, Goldman Sachs rattled lithium stocks after the investment bank declared the battery metals bull market “over for now”.
Goldman called today’s lithium levels a “fundamental mispricing [that] has in turn generated an outsized supply response well ahead of the demand trend.” Goldman predicted an average around $55,000 a tonne for this year, but its forecast for 2023 was particularly eye-raising – a very precise $16,372 a tonne.
Probably not, despite what some analysts think
Lithium is not as glamorous as gold or platinum. But it has quickly become one of the world’s most important metals. It is a key component in batteries, so the surge in demand for electric vehicles and other battery-powered technology has led to a corresponding increase in demand for the stuff.
As supply has failed to keep up, prices have soared. The spot price of lithium carbonate, a compound that can be converted into lithium, rose by 477% in 2021, and a further 77% this year. But more recently several banks have predicted that the bull market for lithium was over and that its price would soon crash. Are they right?
Metals are quickly becoming the new oil as fossil fuels are phased out and replaced with clean energy and electric cars. The green energy transition relies on mining to produce enough lithium, cobalt, and nickel for the expected boom in solar panels, wind turbines, and electric car batteries over the next decade.
The only problem is that most of those metals are already in short supply. Paltry investments by governments in mining, the complexity of recycling rare metals, and geopolitical trade squabbles are already hampering metal production.
We need to persuade Canadians to stop being ashamed of the riches our great nation holds
With Doug Ford winning a second term as premier of Ontario, the province is poised to enter a mining renaissance. Between the commitments made to the sector during the provincial election and those set out in the federal budget this spring, Ontario has an unprecedented opportunity to become a global leader in mining again. Just one thing stands in our way: Canadians’ negative perception of mining.
To change that, government money alone won’t be enough. We need to persuade Canadians to stop being ashamed of the riches our great nation holds to being proud of Canada’s resource heritage and its potential to be a leader in the shift to a more prosperous and carbon-neutral world. From solar panels to electric vehicles, Canadian minerals are essential to a greener future.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/
BacTec estimates there is $27 billion worth of nickel in Greater Sudbury’s mine waste
A Toronto-based environmental technology company is working on a pilot project in Sudbury to separate valuable minerals from mine waste with bacteria.
BacTech Environmental Corporation plans to have its pilot plant in Sudbury operational by July, and will use a process called bioleaching to extract minerals like nickel and cobalt from mine tailings. Tailings are the waste material that’s left over after minerals are extracted from a mine.
There isn’t enough lithium mined, and there can never be enough lithium mined and processed into end-user forms economically, to replace the use of fossil-fueled internal combustion engines in the powertrain systems of the current one and one-half billion personal and mass transportation vehicles with electric motors powered by rechargeable lithium-ion type storage batteries.
I think that most of the managers of the global OEM automotive, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries know this, but they are powerless in the face of the demands of politicians who have given in to the greens who are unaware of the limitations of physical natural resource production and processing for non fuel minerals, and who rely on the advice of narrowly and poorly educated and just plain dumb “experts” who have credentials but no experience of business operations, real-world economics or even rudimentary geology.
https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/
The word cobalt came from kobold, a variant of the German word kobalos, a satyr and shape-shifter of Greek mythology who mocked the work of humans. By the Middle Ages, miners in the dark depths reported that touching the metal burned their fingertips, a sure sign that demons were watching them. And so the “demon metal” it became.
Cobalt – with a capital C – is synonymous with the silver rush of over a hundred years ago in northern Ontario. The town of Cobalt got its start when silver was discovered in 1903, and that mining rush outshone any gold rush in the previous 200 years.
Goldman Sachs rattled lithium stocks after the investment bank declared the battery metals bull market “over for now”. Goldman calls today’s lithium levels a “fundamental mispricing [that] has in turn generated an outsized supply response well ahead of the demand trend in focus.”
In this context, Goldman sees prices on a downward trajectory over the course of the next two years, with a sharp correction in lithium from today’s levels to an average of just under $55,000 this year. For 2023, the forecast is for an average price of just $16,372.
(Bloomberg) — Democratic Republic of Congo could see about 10 new mines for metals key to powering the green-energy transition within four years, according to the director of the country’s mining registry.
About 500 of the nation’s mining permits are in advanced development and will soon lead to new projects for lithium and cobalt — battery metals driving the electric vehicle revolution — while mines for copper, tin, tantalum and tungsten will also be built, Jean Felix Mupande told a conference in the southeast city of Lubumbashi. Congo is already the world’s No. 1 cobalt producer and Africa’s biggest copper miner.
Chrysler parent Stellantis plans to get a substantial amount of the lithium needed for its electric vehicle batteries from a former tourist mecca in California. The automaker announced a deal Thursday with Controlled Thermal Resources, which has offices in California and Australia, to supply “battery grade lithium hydroxide” for use in EV production in North America.
That means Stellantis, which also controls the Jeep, Ram, Dodge, Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Maserati brands, will join General Motors, which announced a similar agreement last year, in tapping Controlled Thermal’s expected lithium production in the Salton Sea Basin, an area near the U.S. border with Mexico.
Mr. Blair, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, is a former director of national intelligence and commander of U.S. Pacific Command. He is chairman of SAFE, an energy-security organization.
President Biden recently invoked the Defense Production Act to boost supplies of the minerals needed to power electric vehicles and reduce America’s oil dependency. Yet, even with this welcome executive action, the U.S. can’t produce enough of some minerals, such as nickel.
America must rely on undependable, often hostile foreign-controlled sources for these key materials. There is an alternative: finding politically safe, economically viable and ecologically responsible ways to get these minerals somewhere else, including the depths of the oceans.
Bolivians thought green energy would make them richer. Now locals worry they’ll be exploited again
The mountainous region of Potosí in southern Bolivia was one of the richest places in the Spanish Empire. In the 16th and 17th centuries more than half the world’s silver came from one mountain in the region. Potosí’s barren landscape has yielded plenty of other riches since then, including aluminium, lead and zinc.
In the 19th century a British company built a railway line to carry minerals from landlocked Bolivia to the Chilean coast, from where they were shipped to Europe. Potosí, home to a rail junction that connects La Paz, Bolivia’s administrative capital, with Chile and Argentina, remains an important transport hub.
