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Lithium

Germany secures access to world’s second-largest lithium deposit – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – December 12, 2018)

http://www.mining.com/

Germany and Bolivia today sealed a partnership for the industrial use of lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric cars and cell phones. ACI Systems will work with state-owned Bolivian Lithium Deposits (YLB) on installing four lithium plants in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats, which hold the world’s second-largest lithium deposit.

The joint venture also plans to build a factory for electric vehicle batteries in the country. While more than 80% of the lithium extracted will be exported to Germany, the company is said to be in talks with other European companies.

The partners expect to produce up to 40,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide per year, beginning in 2022, over a period of 70 years. President Evo Morales sees a prosperous future for the impoverished nation, pinning his hopes on the rapid rise in the global price of the so-called white petroleum.

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What really powers your smartphone and electric car – by Lynsey Chutel (Quartz.com – December 8, 2018)

https://qz.com/

The rechargeable lithium-ion battery helps define our era. It powers our smartphones and electric cars, and promises a future where we’re better able to store renewable energy. It also requires lithium and cobalt, minerals that some of the world’s poorest countries happen to have in abundance.

That should be good news for all concerned, but mismanagement and graft—common in extractive industries—are making the latest mining boom looks uncomfortably like the bad old days of previous booms.

This week provided reminders of that. First, the Democratic Republic of Congo tripled its levies on cobalt, of which it has the world’s largest natural supply, in a move that could result in pricier smartphones and production slowdowns for electric-car makers. Also, HSBC released a report showing that the projected market share of electric vehicles will be smaller than first thought, due to the high price of lithium and cobalt amid soaring demand.

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Exclusive: Albemarle pushes Chile to reverse lithium quota decision – filings – by Dave Sherwood and Ernest Scheyder (Reuters U.S. – December 5, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

SANTIAGO/HOUSTON (Reuters) – Albemarle Corp (ALB.N) has launched an aggressive lobbying campaign after Chilean regulators denied its request to boost lithium output, stressing the company’s importance to Chile’s economy and workers, according to records reviewed by Reuters.

The behind-the-scenes moves come even as Albemarle has publicly brushed off worries from analysts and investors about rising regulatory pressure in Chile, home to the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a crucial ingredient in electric car batteries and mobile phones.

Ellen Lenny-Pessagno, who became Albemarle’s Chile country manager in October, met with the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission (CCHEN) on Nov. 23 to discuss the rejection, according to filings with Chile’s lobbyist transparency website that have been previously unreported.

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High Risk-High Reward Lithium Bet Drives Argentina Mining Surge – by Laura Millan Lombrana and Jonathan Gilbert (Bloomberg News – December 5, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

High risk/high reward. That’s the bet being made by global lithium miners in Argentina who are brushing aside a recession, a currency crisis and political uncertainty in their hunger for the mineral that helps power electric cars.

Rising demand and limited supply have resulted in lithium prices tripling over four years. In response, companies have been scrambling to build new mines, putting Argentina and Chile, two of the world’s largest producers of the mineral, squarely in their sights.

But while Chile may be more economically stable, top producers there — Albemarle Corp. and Soc. Quimica y Minera de Chile SA — have struggled to obtain licenses to expand. Meanwhile, Argentina President Mauricio Macri is pushing a more pro-market agenda.

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Tianqi buys stake in lithium miner SQM from Nutrien for $4.1 billion – by Antonio De la Jara (Reuters U.S. – December 3, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – China’s Tianqi Lithium Corp (002466.SZ) has purchased a 23.77 percent share in Chilean lithium miner SQM (SQMa.SN) from Canadian fertilizer giant Nutrien (NTR.TO), the Chilean stock exchange said on Monday, for a total sale price of $4.066 billion.

The sale to Tianqi comes as Chinese companies increasingly scour the globe for the raw materials necessary to ramp up Chinese production of electric vehicles. Lithium is a key component in the batteries that power everything from cellphones to electric vehicles.

“A minority stake in SQM is great from our perspective, especially when we look at long term growth and expectations for the lithium industry,” said Ashley Ozols, business development manager for Tianqi, after the deal closed.

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Bolivia’s Almost Impossible Lithium Dream – by Laura Millan Lombrana (Bloomberg News – December 3, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

A small army of workers from cities and villages across Bolivia boards the buses for the last leg of a commute that can last days. The meandering, bumpy dirt roads, the thin air at high altitude, the ordeal of bringing labor into the blinding white plain of the world’s largest salt flat—all of this stands between anyone who dreams of retrieving Bolivia’s lithium riches and turning it into electric-car batteries.

These workers will spend two weeks at the Uyuni salt flat in the southern tip of Bolivia before they return home for a seven-day rest. They are attempting to build a world-class lithium mine on top of the Andes mountains, about 12,000 feet above sea level at the heart of landlocked Bolivia. The nearest port is at least 500 kilometers and a border crossing away.

From above, this vast area appears so white it gets mistaken for a giant snow plain. The salt crystallizes in the dry season, forming millions of tile-looking hexagons that span an area as large as Connecticut. During the wet season, it’s covered by a thin layer of water that forms a giant mirror, reflecting the sky so neatly that the line of the horizon disappears. The visual effect draws thousands of visitors and the Dakar Rally every year, making it Bolivia’s top tourist destination.

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Lithium producers race to dominate South American output: Roskill – by Ben Kilbey (S&P Global Platts – November 26, 2018)

https://www.spglobal.com/

London — There is a battle to be the “supreme” lithium producer in South America, with Chile now facing competition from other countries on the continent, research outlet Roskill Information Services said Monday.

Speaking at the annual Mines & Money exhibition in London, Robert Baylis, managing director of Roskill, said the global shift away from carbon to renewables and electric was creating a massive demand boost for lithium.

Baylis said he sees lithium demand growing at around 30% annually, from around 94,000 mt in 2018 to 1 million mt and above from the late 2020s. However, he cautioned that recent price volatility and weakness could be putting off increased investment on the supply side.

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CAQ’s credibility on environment tested by proposed mine near pristine Abitibi water source – by Jonathan Montpetit (CBC News Montreal – November 25, 2018)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/

The 500 residents of La Motte, Que., don’t have have a gas station or even a convenience store, but they do enjoy some of the best-tasting drinking water in North America. So when an Australian mining firm began seeking approval to build an open-air lithium mine just a stone’s throw from the community’s water source, reactions were decidedly mixed in the town, located 50 kilometres northwest of Val-d’Or.

Some were eager for the 132 jobs the company, Sayona, is promising to create. La Motte’s town council unanimously passed a motion in July endorsing the project. Others, though, are concerned about the proposed mine’s proximity to the Saint-Mathieu-Lac-Berry esker, the 8,000-year-old ridge of stratified sand and gravel that naturally filters rain and snow in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region of northern Quebec.

Residents have struggled to get answers about the environmental risks of a project that would rip a hole — 1,000 metres long, 600 metres wide and 200 metres deep — into the terrain.

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Race for lithium illustrates EU drive for ‘strategic’ raw materials – by Frédéric Simon (EURACTIV.com – November 21, 2018)

https://www.euractiv.com/

The European Union is accelerating plans to develop lithium mining and refining capacity on its territory as part of a concerted EU push to develop a strategic value chain for manufacturing electric car batteries inside Europe.

With the electrification of transport, the race to develop a complete battery manufacturing value chain in Europe is now underway. And despite a slow start, the EU is rapidly catching up. One year ago, the European Commission launched a European Battery Alliance, bringing together automakers, chemical and engineering executives in a bid to compete with Asian and American manufacturers.

The objective is to build a whole value chain for the manufacturing of batteries in Europe, a strategy that came to the forefront earlier this year when the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced financing to build Europe’s largest battery factory, in Sweden.

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Lithium King Bets Big on Demand Shift With Australia Mine Deal – by Laura Millan Lombrana (Bloomberg News – November 21, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Albemarle Corp. agreed to pay $1.15 billion for a stake in a giant lithium mine in Australia, guaranteeing the biggest producer of the mineral greater access to a more refined form of the raw material that’s increasingly being used in electric-car batteries.

The Charlotte, North Carolina-based company will take a 50 percent stake in a potential joint venture with Mineral Resources Ltd. that will own and operate the Wodgina hard-rock lithium deposit with a mine life of over three decades. Under the deal, Albemarle will manage the marketing and sales of lithium hydroxide, which fetches a higher price than lithium carbonate. Mineral Resources rose as much as 33 percent, the most since July 2006, in Sydney trading Thursday.

Albemarle plans to expand output in Australia to gain from rising demand for lithium hydroxide, also known as spodumene. The mineral works better with cathodes containing higher levels of nickel, helping electric cars go further on a single charge. The deal signals the company’s swift reaction toward shifting demand that has previously been concentrated mostly on lithium carbonate.

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WA’s newest lithium mine officially opens, with plans to expand already in motion – by Hamish Hastie (Sydney Morning Herald – November 16, 2018)

https://www.smh.com.au/

The lithium train shows no sign of slowing in WA as the state’s newest mine officially opens, with plans already in motion to expand the Pilbara operation. The first shipment from Pilbara Minerals’ Pilgangoora lithium-tantalum project left the mine on October 2 but was officially opened by WA Mines and Petroleum Minister Bill Johnston on Friday.

Located 120 kilometres south of Port Hedland, the mine will produce 330,000 tonnes of lithium a year and about 300,000 pounds of tantalum. The Pilgangoora project’s workforce peaked at more than 800 during construction, but now there are about 200 operational staff on-site and in Perth.

The opening comes just more than four years to the day the first hole was drilled and is one of the fastest major lithium developments in recent history. Plans are already underway to expand the mine.

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Chilean regulators reject Albemarle’s plans to boost lithium output – by Dave Sherwood (Reuters U.K. – November 13, 2018)

https://uk.reuters.com/

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – Chilean environmental regulators have rejected plans by Albemarle Corp (ALB.N), the world’s top lithium producer, to expand output from the Salar de Atacama salt flat, according to filings with Chile’s Environmental Assessment Service (SEA).

SEA said in a resolution on Monday that Albemarle’s environmental impact statement, which included plans to build a new plant to produce 42,500 tonnes of lithium carbonate in northern Chile, lacked key information to gauge the project’s impact, prompting an “early termination” of its review.

“The applicant [Albemarle] does not present the details necessary to rule out significant adverse impacts on the quantity and quality of renewable natural resources, including the soil, water and air,” the regulator concluded in the Nov. 12 resolution, which was first reported by Reuters.

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COLUMN-Lithium price tensions highlight need for an LME contract – by Andy Home (Reuters U.K. – November 8, 2018)

https://uk.reuters.com/

LONDON, Nov 8 (Reuters) – What’s the price of lithium, the “hot metal” at the heart of the electric vehicle (EV) revolution? The spot price in China has collapsed over the course of 2018 as the market absorbs a wave of supply, much of it from the new hard-rock mines that have come on stream in Australia.

Outside of China, however, the picture is very different with the price of lithium in bigger-volume contracts consolidating an upwards trend that has been running since 2015. The divergence shows how pricing lithium is still very much work in progress.

It also explains why the London Metal Exchange (LME) is looking to enter the fray with what would be the first exchange-traded lithium contract. The spot lithium carbonate market has collapsed from an average $26.18 per kilogram in December 2017 to $11.23 in October, according to Fastmarkets MB.

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‘We’re just not there’: Batteries not ready to replace fossil fuels, says lithium miner – by Cole Latimer (Sydney Morning Herald – November 5, 2018)

https://www.smh.com.au/

A battery material miner headed by global energy experts says the world is still a decade away from large batteries and renewables replacing baseload power.

Junior lithium miner ioneer, whose board includes the former chairman of lithium miner Orocobre, James Calaway; the former president of Shell, John Hofmeister; and the former head of Rio Tinto’s minerals and energy division, Alan Davies, said batteries and solar aren’t ready to replace gas or coal.

“Today, when people say you can apply lithium-ion batteries to create baseload from intermittent power they’re just not right,” Mr Calaway told Fairfax Media. “It’s too expensive. It’s a folly to think it will be a switch that just goes from one to the other. People can talk about intermittency, and how batteries will solve intermittency, it’s coming but we’re just not there.

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With $4.1 billion at stake, Nutrien waits on Chilean court to rule on ‘Hail Mary’ lawsuit – by Gabriel Friedman (Financial Post – October 20, 2018)

https://business.financialpost.com/

The giant potash company is tussling with a powerful businessman: the former son-in-law of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet

Saskatchewan-based Nutrien Ltd. persuaded antitrust authorities earlier this month to sign off on its US$4.1 billion sale of its stake in a South American lithium producer. But now the giant potash company is tussling with a powerful businessman: the former son-in-law of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Julio Ponce, a billionaire with a checkered past whose father-in-law previously ruled Chile, has filed a lawsuit seeking more time to review Nutrien’s US$4.1 billion sale in Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile to a Chinese buyer.

If the lawsuit delays the sale long enough, some analysts believe Nutrien may be forced to ditch its Chinese buyer and sell its stake in SQM on the open market — for as much as US$1 billion less than the original price.

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