Powering electric cars: the race to mine lithium in America’s backyard

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At his small red brick farmhouse home near the Catawba river in the rural Piedmont region of North Carolina, Brian Harper is caught up in the dilemma facing America’s big push towards a future powered by green energy.Running in a band beneath the soil close to Harper’s land lies America’s biggest deposit of spodumene ore, a mineral that when processed into lithium is crucial to building rechargeable batteries of the kind used in electric vehicles.Seeing the business opportunity in this fast-growing area, Piedmont Lithium, a mining company originally incorporated in Australia, began knocking on the doors of the old houses surrounding a roughly 3,000-acre site several years ago, offering to buy up land so that it could start drilling a large pit mine to extract the mineral.With the International Energy Agency projecting a boom in demand that vastly exceeds planned supply in coming years, Piedmont found no difficulty pledging future sales of lithium to Tesla, America’s poster-child electric car company, even before they secured all of the necessary mining permits.But while it has successfully bought up some parcels of land, Piedmont Lithium has run into staunch opposition from many of its potential new neighbours, including Harper, who runs a small business making cogs and gears for industrial machinery just a little down the road from the proposed new mine.Piedmont Lithium’s offices in Belmont, Gaston County. The company has run into staunch opposition from many of its potential new neighbours near its proposed mine © Ernest Scheyder/Reuters“When they start blasting and the floor is shaking, there’s no way my machinery will be able to function properly,” says Harper. In keeping with almost every home on the rural country roads running around and through the proposed mine site, Harper has a small picket sign in his front garden displaying a red stop sign and in large font, struck through with a red line: “Gaston County Pit Mine”.Others spoken to by the Financial Times argue that a hard rock mine of the size that Piedmont proposes would cause light, noise and dust pollution, as well as contaminate their water supply with poisonous runoff materials.Many of the houses surrounding the site of the proposed mine are not connected to a municipal water system, and instead extract their drinking water from wells, compounding worries that any accidental runoff or contamination of groundwater from the mine would poison their water sources.Piedmont Lithium says the company has “several” noise and dust mitigation plans in place, including limiting the number of trucks being used. It pledged to keep hazardous water out of surface water creeks, streams and the groundwater, and to monitor water quantity and quality in local wells. “If we become aware of any issue with local wells, it will be corrected,” the company says.Piedmont has argued in public meetings that its new mine, which would be accompanied by a processing plant, would bring new jobs to the area.But the company’s plan to launch one of the first big new lithium mines in decades, and only the second operational lithium mine in the US at present, has already fallen behind schedule. Construction was meant to be under way by 2020. As of May 2022, it has yet to apply for all of the permits it needs to break ground.The US electric vehicle battery industry is central to President Joe Biden’s plans to create a greener, more innovative economy, and his administration is determined to expand domestic mining of the minerals on which green technologies rely. At the end of March, it invoked the Korean-war era Defense Production Act to free up more money to be used to assist in the domestic mining of lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and manganese.Macie Putnam and her mother, Cathi, inspect a map during a Piedmont Lithium public hearing held in November 2021 at the Gaston County Courthouse © Mike Hensdill/The Gaston Gazette/USA Today/ReutersBut lithium represents perhaps the greatest opportunity for the US. The International Energy Agency named lithium as the mineral for which there was the fastest growing demand as the world transitions from oil and gas to a green energy grid. If the world is to meet the global climate targets set as part of the Paris Agreement, at least 40 times as much lithium will be needed by 2040 compared with today.The US holds about 8mn tonnes of lithium, according to the US Geological Survey, putting it in the top five most lithium-rich countries in the world. Yet it mines and processes only 1 per cent of global output. Much of the rest comes from China, Chile and Australia.As the US attempts to surge ahead in the global race to build batteries that will power the green transition, Washington is encouraging companies such as Piedmont to break ground on more mining projects across the continental United States. But it also wants to ensure state regulators, environmental activists and local communities are not left behind in the rush.America in the raceThe explosion in the electric vehicle market has set off a “battery arms race”, according to Simon Moores, chief executive of consultancy Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which specialises in data on lithium ion batteries.Battery manufacturers will be trying to source the raw minerals needed to make batteries, including cobalt, nickel, graphite and lithium. Yet while scientists are having early success developing batteries that do not need cobalt or nickel to function, there are so far no leads on eliminating lithium. According to Moores, “lithium is the one that terrifies the industry”.The IEA says more than 80 per cent of the world’s lithium is mined in Australia, Chile and China, which alone controls more than half of the world’s processing and refining. The US has a single open lithium mine, in Nevada, and imports the majority of its supply from Argentina and Chile.The US’s willingness to allow its manufacturing to take place overseas has attracted criticism. “America has, I would say, at the altar of the big fossil fuel companies, given up being technologically innovative when it comes to energy,” says Emily Hersh, an analyst at consultancy DBDC Group, and the chief executive of a company undertaking a lithium brine exploration project in Nevada.“We outsource everything for slightly lower costs,” says Hersh. “We have punted the supply chains behind the technology we use and love to cheaper jurisdictions, or jurisdictions without stringent environmental policy, so that we can get them cheaper and faster.”In 2018, then-president Donald Trump issued an executive order aimed at breaking the US dependence on minerals from abroad, especially from China, declaring a “national emergency” that would theoretically open up funding for domestic mining and processing.The supply shortages of the Covid-19 pandemic prompted Washington to pay even closer attention to the security of its critical imports. After Biden took over the White House, in early 2021, he ordered a further review of critical supply chains for a whole host of imports deemed important to national security, including minerals, pharmaceuticals and computer chips.Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill has made billions of dollars available to help boost American processing of minerals needed for batteries © Al Drago/BloombergLater that summer, the US Department of Energy released a blueprint specifically aimed at reviving the US’s battery supply chain, including securing access to the raw minerals needed to make batteries by incentivising “safe, equitable and sustainable” domestic mining, and investing in processes to recycle dead batteries to re-use the minerals they hold.The DoE noted that China dominates the supply chain for the manufacturing of lithium batteries, including the processing of minerals. Biden’s infrastructure bill has made billions of dollars available to help boost American processing of minerals needed for batteries.While there is only one operational lithium mine in the US at present, a number of companies are pressing to get mining projects operational. Lithium Americas is planning a mine at Thacker Pass in Northern Nevada, while Australia-based Ioneer USA Corp also wants to build a large mine in southern Nevada, about 530km north of Los Angeles. Several other companies are proposing projects that would extract lithium from geothermal brine, including one at California’s largest lake in Salton Sea.In Washington, both Democrats and Republican lawmakers have said they would support updating the federal law dated from 1872 that governs mining on American public lands. Lawmakers variously want to boost US mining capacity and insert more robust environmental protections. While that law does not apply to the Gaston County mine, which is being earmarked for privately owned land, it would affect the vast majority of potential mines in Nevada.The explicit support for hard rock mining has attracted criticism from environmentalists, who argue that the government should focus its efforts on recycling initiatives.Lauren Pagel, policy director at Earthworks, an environmental advocacy group, says the US must get “serious about responsible sourcing of clean energy minerals”.