Frankly I find the attacks against brine on an environmental level by hard rock advocates as extremely hypocritical to say the least. All these resources will be required and sustainable extraction is important. It obviously gets more complicated in locations like the Atacama that have several large conflicting users of water from that basin - you may have heard of Escondida. However given the mantra behind EVs and the battery revolution is heavily based on carbon emissions, I find it all a little hard to swallow. It's not like there is some big secret about the carbon intensity of spodumene, so why go to such lengths to accuse another source of being environmentally unfriendly while staying quiet about the negative impacts of spodumene production and in particular conversion? There are actually many great advantages of hard rock over brine, perhaps focus on them because environmental accusations will only end up drawing attention to the carbon intensity of spod.
AJM Price at posting:
5.3¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
