The plans of bureaucrats gang aft agley
So, the people of Northern Portugal are not too keen on having a lithium mine outside their back door:
But his rural idyll has been disturbed by miners drilling boreholes as they push to dig four vast lithium mines right beside the village. The prospecting has sparked resistance from residents who fear the mines will foul the soil, drain the water and fill the air with the rumbling thunder of heavy trucks.
“They are destroying everything,” said Gomes, who runs the only cafe in the village with his partner. “They are taking our peace.”
Covas do Barroso is among the first villages caught up in Europe’s efforts to green its economy. As the continent weans itself off fossil fuels that poison the air and heat the planet, demand for lithium is surging, to build batteries that can run electric vehicles and balance renewable-heavy power grids.
There’s no particular reason why this needs to be done. The lithium content of the lithosphere is 2,850,000 billion tonnes or so (our calculation, therefore wrong, but within orders of magnitude of correct) and we need 20 million to supply the global car fleet. It’s not in short supply. It can be gained from salars, from hard rock mines in other places (we know of one fully built and ready to roll mine which is simply not operating so low are current prices), from extraction of geothermal brines under Cornwall and other granites, from the salinatewd wastewater from desalination plants, from old oil wells, and, well, there are many, many places it could come from. It’s not in short supply.
So, why Portugal? Well, could be that this is one of the world’s finest deposits so should be used. As far as we’re aware that’s not actually true. So, why?
The answer, for EU officials and the Portuguese government, is to obtain a soft white metal that is needed to stop burning fuels that make extreme weather dramatically worse – and do so without relying exclusively on foreign suppliers. Europe produces almost no lithium itself.
Oh, right. The managers of a free trade zone have not heard of the benefits of trade.
Rather sums up why the world is as it is, doesn’t it?
Tim Worstall