Category: ENERGY_STORAGE_MN Politics_International_MN TRANSPORTATION_BATTERIES_KEY

Tom Perriello saw it coming but could do nothing to stop it. André Kapanga too. Despite urgent emails, phone calls and personal pleas, they watched helplessly as a company backed by the Chinese government took ownership from the Americans of one of the world’s largest cobalt mines.

New battery technology has long been the ambition among automotive manufacturers. Industry players are hopeful that improved tech will bring improved energy density, longer lifespans, and faster recharging.

In early July, General Motors announced it had made a “strategic investment” in Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR), a company that is planning to produce lithium for electric vehicle (EV) batteries in a cogeneration project with a geothermal project in California’s Salton Sea. The goal: domestically and sustainably produced American lithium.

A battle is raging in Nevada as the U.S. Fish, and Wildlife Service announces it will be listing Tiehm’s buckwheat flower as an endangered species, striking a blow to a lithium mining project in the region. Lithium is required for the batteries that power electric vehicles, which the government is making significant investments in to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint. But environmentalists argue that the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine in Nevada will do more harm than good. 

The IEA looked into the amount of minerals needed to fuel the energy transition, and pretty quickly worked out ‘there is no shortage of resources’.  The world has plenty of lithium, nickel, rare earth metals and so on.  This is what the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has been saying for a while,[2] and fits with the work done by the Energy Transitions Commission[3] on mineral availability.