Use Google translate Doc. And yes please discuss. Even in English I'm having trouble working out the gist of it. I think maybe they are in negotiations.
A litigation paralyzes the search for lithium lithium just 25 kilometers from Galicia
The Portuguese Lusorecursos and the Australian Novo Litio plead for the exploitation rights
MIGUEL VILLAR
MARTA VÁZQUEZ
OURENSE / THE VOICE 4/17/2018 3:59 PM
The
extraction of lithium in the Portuguese border, just 25 kilometers from Ourense, is going through a moment of
uncertainty . For several months now, the Australian company that had begun drilling in the region of Montalegre-Boticas,
Novo Litio, pleaded with the Portuguese
Lusoresources for the exploitation rights of the area, in a confrontation that the Portuguese media have already baptized like the lithium war.
At stake is a very ambitious project that could place the neighboring country as the major supplier of the mineral that Europe needs to power its electric cars and that explains the interest of local companies to ensure control of the area. The current prospecting contract, whose holder is Lusorecursos, was signed on December 7, 2012, with an expiration date of five years, although in 2016 the mining Novo Lithio, then called Dakota Minerals, agreed with the Portuguese firm the purchase of those rights. The source of the problem is that Lusorecursos apparently did not officially make this assignment, which led the Australian mining company to report it to the courts at the end of last year.
But for now all he has obtained are setbacks. The most recent was issued last February by a court in Guimarães, which ratified another previous decision of the first instance in which the request of Novo Litio was rejected to keep the exploitation, given the risk that the license could lapse without having The project was undertaken. In its application, the mining company asked for legitimacy to request the Portuguese Minister of Economy to make the contractual transfer effective. He did not achieve his purpose.
In spite of everything,
the Australians seem not to have intention to desistir in their claims, so it is probable that soon there is new news of the judicial swings of a project in which Novo Lithium has been working during many months.
The decision is not strange, since they
have already invested a lot of time and money in the prospections to make an assessment of the geological resources in a mine located at a thousand meters of height , near the small village of Morgade, in an area where in the second half of the last century there was already a wolfram deposit. Employees of the company confirmed months ago to La Voz, during a visit to the area, that in this project, which was in an intermediate phase, "millions of euros" had been invested.
For months, there worked in turn a team composed of six geologists and nine other operators of the company Spidrill, a firm of Bierzo (
León ) which was entrusted with the task of carrying out the surveys and which brought four machines in the area. The tests, aimed at quantifying the economic value that the mine could have - phase prior to the possible opening of a farm from which the lithium used to make the batteries of the cars would be extracted and that would directly benefit Galicia-, they were made with drilling methods, at a depth of between two and three hundred meters underground. These samples were then sent to
Australia for evaluation.
The previous experience of the Australian mining company in projects of this type in other European countries, which has made it one of the world's leading experts in the separation of lithium from the rest of the minerals that are usually found underground, seemed a point in favor of the project coming to fruition, but now nothing is clear.
At stake the opening of a mine in Morgade and a future factory for Tesla
Lithium is already considered the gold of the 21st century and there are many countries that bid to host the megafactory of electric cars that the American Tesla wants to open in Europe. If
Portugal finally found a deposit with sufficient potential to supply this mineral, essential for the batteries of the cars, the country would win whole in the race to host that facility. And everything indicates that this is what has caused the legal battle for mining exploitation rights in the Montalegre region.
A war that does not affect the interests that the Galician automotive sector has in this whole matter and that do not depend on which company will finally take the cat to the water. If the results of the tests confirm the best prospects and licenses are obtained to open a mine in Morgade, this would be a great employment opportunity for Galician workers, due to the proximity of the farm to the province of Ourense. If at a later stage the Tesla factory were set up, the benefits for Galician companies in the automotive sector would be enormous.
Since Novo Lithium acknowledged months ago that "Portugal has a very great potential for lithium" and, in fact, they themselves were pending authorization to conduct more surveys in other areas where they thought there might also be deposits. They pretended to be the suppliers for Europe of this mineral and already had the financing to achieve it.
(20min delay)