US to Offer Record Loan for Lithium Americas Project in Nevada – by Ari Natter (Bloomberg News – March 13, 2024)

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/

(Bloomberg) — The Biden administration is offering a $2.26 billion loan to help Lithium Americas Corp. develop a Nevada lithium deposit that’s the country’s largest.

The conditional loan from the US Department of Energy will provide the vast majority of the capital needed to fund the first phase of development, the Vancouver-based company said in a statement Thursday, confirming an earlier Bloomberg News report. Shares of Lithium Americas jumped 28% in New York trading and 18% in Toronto as of 9:32 a.m.

Read more

Strolling down Ontario’s Electric Avenue – by Tamer Elbokl, PhD (Canadian Mining Journal – March 4, 2024)

https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/

The global demand for lithium is projected to reach 1.5 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) by 2025 and over three million tonnes by 2030. As the world moves away from fossil fuels, the world needs a stable supply of quality lithium to achieve a low-carbon future, and Canada needs lithium (among other critical minerals) to achieve its net-zero target.

In 2022, the government of Ontario announced its first critical minerals strategy, aiming to secure the province’s position as a global leader of responsibly sourced critical minerals, including lithium. The provincial government plan is to work alongside all stakeholders including the federal government, the mining sector, manufacturing Indigenous Peoples, and local communities.

Read more

Oil Fields of Arkansas Are the Newest Locations for a Lithium Battery Rush – by Boyce Upholt (Mother Jones – March 11, 2024)

https://www.motherjones.com/

“Production at existing sites could negate the benefits of the clean technologies they power.”

The town of Smackover, Arkansas, was founded a hundred years ago when a sawmill operator got lucky: his wildcat oil well yielded a gusher. For a time in the 1920s, the oil field beneath the clay hills and swampy creeks in this stretch of southern Arkansas was the world’s most productive site. Now, boosters say the region will help usher the world into an oil-free future, thanks to the discovery of underground brines that are rich in lithium.

Lithium is one of the most important metals in the transition to renewable power. Lithium-ion batteries are, thanks to their lightweight and high energy density, currently the top choice for storing energy in electric vehicles, and a potential tool for grid storage, too. Global production of the metal tripled throughout the 2010s, and demand is projected to increase as much as 40-fold by mid-century.

Read more

Gulf oil giants Saudi Aramco, Adnoc set sights on lithium (Mining.com – March 11, 2024)

https://www.mining.com/

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ national oil companies plan to extract lithium from brine in their oilfields, in line with efforts to diversify their economies and profit from the shift to electric vehicles (EVs), three sources told Reuters.

Other oil companies, including Exxon Mobil and Occidental Petroleum, plan to take advantage of emerging technologies to filter lithium from brine, as the world seeks to move away from fossil fuels.

Read more

China strengthens its grip on global lithium trade amid processing plant building boom in Zimbabwe – by Jevans Nyabiage (South China Morning Post – March 10, 2024)

https://www.scmp.com/

China is getting a head start in the global rush for lithium after several mining companies completed multimillion-dollar processing plants for the “white gold” in Zimbabwe.

Major Chinese companies, including Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Sinomine Resource Group and Chengxin Lithium Group, all completed the construction or upgrade of lithium processing plants in Zimbabwe last year.

Read more

Kazakhstan positions itself for lithium windfall (Eurasianet.org – March 6, 2024)

https://eurasianet.org/

The National Geological Service says the country has lithium reserves of around 75,600 tons.

Kazakhstan is positioning itself as an important potential global supplier of high-quality lithium just as demand surges for the mineral, which is indispensable for the booming power-storage technology industry. The auspices are good, although few firm investment commitments have materialized.

Speaking at a conference in Seoul on March 5, researchers from the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources announced that they had discovered sizable lithium reserves in an area of eastern Kazakhstan.

Read more

Vancouver lithium company announces investor interest from China, despite Ottawa’s warnings – by Niall McGee (Globe and Mail – March 7, 2024)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Another deep-pocketed China-based buyer is attempting to invest in a Canadian critical-minerals company, even as Ottawa fires a warning shot that it is monitoring such deals closely, and prepared to intervene.

On Tuesday, Vancouver-based Lithium Americas Argentina Corp. (Lithium Argentina) said it had attracted a US$70-million investment from China-based Ganfeng Lithium, which would see it take a 15-per-cent stake in its Pastos Grandes project.

Read more

Frontier Lithium finds mine, refinery project partner in Mitsubishi – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – March 4, 2024)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

No news from Ottawa on critical infrastructure funding for key northern bridge and access road

Sudbury’s Frontier Lithium has attracted a heavyweight partner in Mitsubishi Corporation to develop its massive PAK lithium project in northwestern Ontario.

On the opening day of the PDAC mining show in Toronto, Frontier Lithium announced a definitive agreement with Mitsubishi to establish a joint venture partnership for both its proposed $US576-million fully integrated mine and a lithium chemicals conversion refinery.

Read more

The Boom in Battery Metals for EVs Is Turning to Bust – by Rhiannon Hoyle (MSN.com/Wall Street Journal – February 19, 2024)

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/

When the world’s most valuable lithium company last year announced plans for a $1.3 billion plant in South Carolina, local officials hailed it as transformative for the Palmetto State.

The high-tech project from Charlotte, N.C.-based Albemarle was designed to process different sources of lithium, including from recycled batteries, and serve as a supplier of the critical mineral for South Carolina’s burgeoning electric-vehicle industry.

Read more

Are Lithium Stocks at Rock Bottom? – by Stephen Wilmot (Wall Street Journal – February 19, 2024)

https://www.wsj.com/

The volatile metal has spawned a volatile market, and prices have fallen too far to cover the cost of supply needed for electric vehicles

If investing is about pouncing at the point of maximum pessimism, lithium stocks must be worth a fresh look.

The metal used to make electric-vehicle batteries has given investors whiplash. Prices rose rapidly in 2021 and 2022 before falling even faster in 2023. Seaborne spot supplies of the benchmark compounds, lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide, now cost roughly what they did in mid-2021, according to data from the price-reporting agency Fastmarkets.

Read more

US wildlife service considering endangered status for tiny snail near Nevada lithium mine – by Scott Sonner (Associated Press – February 8, 2024)

https://apnews.com/

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Federal wildlife officials have agreed to conduct a full, year-long review to determine whether a tiny snail found only in high-desert springs near a huge lithium mine being built along the Nevada-Oregon line should be listed as a threatened or endangered species.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a finding published Thursday in the Federal Register that enough scientific exists to warrant the review sought by environmentalists who say that groundwater pumping required for the operation of the Thacker Pass mine could push the Kings River pyrg to the brink of extinction.

Read more

The Great Salt Lake Is Full of Lithium. A Startup Wants to Harvest It. – by Scott Patterson (Wall Street Journal – February 12, 2024)

https://www.wsj.com/

Lilac has raised $145 million from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, other investors

America’s biggest saltwater lake may hold a key to the country’s energy future. This summer, a California startup plans to start construction on a project to suck up water from the Great Salt Lake to extract one of its many valuable minerals: lithium, a critical ingredient in the rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles.

The water will then be reinjected back into the lake, which Lilac Solutions says addresses concerns about the damaging effects of mineral extraction. At its peak, Lilac says it will use a series of pipes to suck up 80,000 gallons of water a minute to harvest the mineral. The company plans to eventually produce up to 20,000 tons of battery-grade lithium a year at its site in northern Utah, located among fields of cattle and pickleweed.

Read more

‘The wind just died down’: Lithium miners try to hold on as prices slump – by Naimul Karim (Financial Post – February 6, 2024)

https://financialpost.com/

Falling prices hurting investor appetite and threaten to crush exploration

Miner Paul Cowley decided two years ago to shift his focus to lithium from gold when his company acquired the mineral rights for multiple small claims containing the light metal in central Alberta.

Given lithium’s skyrocketing prices and investors pouring money into companies associated with the metal needed to power electric-vehicle batteries, the chief executive of TSX Venture-listed Indigo Exploration Inc. thought it was the perfect time to make the move.

Read more

Activists, Hollywood take down top 50 mining company – by Frik Els (Mining.com – January 31, 2024)

https://www.mining.com/

The ranks of the most valuable mining companies in the world were throughly scrambled in 2023 as governments intervened, lithium and nickel prices tumbled, gold hit records and a new listing went ballistic.

At the end of 2023, the MINING.COM TOP 50* ranking of the world’s most valuable miners reached a combined $1.42 trillion, up a healthy, if far from spectacular $48.7 billion over the course of 2023. Mining’s top tier is also worth $330 billion less than in March 2022.

Metal and mineral markets are volatile at the best of times – the nickel, cobalt and lithium price collapse in 2023 was extreme but not entirely unprecedented. Rare earth producers, platinum group metal watchers, iron ore followers, and gold and silver bugs for that matter, have been through worse.

Read more

Opinion: Critical minerals boom goes bust – by Jennifer Hewett (Australian Financial Review – February 1, 2024)

https://www.afr.com/

The collapse of lithium and nickel prices is a rude awakening for Australia’s miners, but also reveals the challenges in the Albanese government’s ambition for greater domestic manufacturing.

The West Australian government’s budget is still flush with mining royalties thanks to iron ore. But although iron ore will continue to sustain the state’s finances, last year’s excited rhetoric about Australia instantly becoming home to a rich new resources boom in critical minerals is now looking distinctly threadbare.

In early 2023, WA politicians were marvelling that lithium royalties had suddenly grown to be worth $1 billion a year, for example, albeit a distant second to iron ore. Then minister for state development and now premier Roger Cook boasted of WA’s ambitions in critical minerals processing, extending from lithium hydroxide to nickel sulphate to battery manufacturing.

Read more