A litigation paralyzes the search for lithium luso just 25 kilometers from Galicia The Portuguese Lusorecursos and the Australian Novo Litio are claiming the rights of exploitation
The extraction of lithium on the Portuguese border, just 25 kilometers from Ourense, is going through a moment of uncertainty. For several months, the Australian company that started drilling in the region of Montalegre-Boticas, Novo Litio, pleads with the Portuguese Lusorecursos for the exploitation rights of the area, in a confrontation that the Portuguese media have already baptized such as the lithium war. At stake is a very ambitious project that could place the neighboring country as the great supplier of the mineral that Europe needs to power its electric cars and that explains the interest of local companies to guarantee control of the area. The current prospecting contract, which is owned by Lusorecursos, was signed on December 7, 2012, with an expiration date of five years, although in 2016 the mining company Novo Litio, then known as 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 that assignment effective, prompting the Australian miner to file suit in court by the end of last year.
But for now all he has achieved are setbacks. The most recent one was issued last February by a Guimarães court, which ratified another previous decision of first instance rejecting Novo Litio's request to stay with the operation, given the risk that the license could expire without there being any undertaken the project. In her lawsuit, the miner asked for legitimacy to require the Portuguese Minister of Economy to make the contractual transfer effective. It did not achieve its purpose. Despite everything, the Australians seem to have no intention of giving up on their claims, so it is likely that soon there will be new news of the judicial ups and downs of a project in which Novo Litio has been working for many months. The decision is not strange, since they have already invested a lot of time and money in the prospecting to realize a valuation of the geological resources in a mine located to thousand meters of height, near the small village of Morgade, in an area in which in the second half of the last century there was a tungsten deposit. Employees of the company confirmed to La Voz several months ago during a visit to the area that in that project, which was in an intermediate stage, "millions of euros" had been invested.
For months, a team of six geologists and nine other workers from the company Spidrill, a firm in Bierzo (León), took charge of the survey and took four machines in the area. The tests, aimed at quantifying the economic value that the mine could have - a phase prior to the possible opening of an operation from which the lithium would be extracted with which the batteries of the cars are manufactured and which would directly benefit Galicia - were made with drilling methods, to a depth of between two and three hundred meters underground. These samples were then sent to Australia for evaluation.
The previous baggage of the Australian miner 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 with which it is usually underground, in favor of making the project come 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 many countries are bidding to host the megafactory of electric cars that the US Tesla wants to open in Europe. If Portugal finally found a field with sufficient potential to supply that mineral, essential for car batteries, the country would win whole in the race to host that facility. And everything indicates that this is what has provoked the legal battle for mining rights in the Montalegre region.
A war that does not affect the interests of the Galician automotive in all this matter and that do not depend on what the company that finally takes the cat to the water. If the results of the tests confirm the best prospects and obtain the licenses to open a mine in Morgade, this would represent a great opportunity of employment for the Galician workers, by the proximity of the exploitation with the province of Ourense. If Tesla's factory was set up at a later stage, the benefits for Galician companies in the automotive sector would be enormous.
From Novo Litio they recognized for months that «Portugal has a very great potential for lithium» and, in fact, they were still pending authorization to carry out further surveys in other areas in which they thought that there could be also deposits. They intended to be the suppliers for Europe of this mineral and already had the funding to do so.
NLI Price at posting:
5.3¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
