Posts Tagged ‘Seth Fletcher’
How 29 Long-Ignored Elements Could Make or Break the Clean-Energy Revolution
Depending on who you ask, these long-ignored, widely-scattered elements are either a dealbreaker or no problem at all
The trouble, he proposed, was that the world didn’t contain enough economically recoverable lithium to support such a switch. Moreover, the viable pockets of lithium that did exist were concentrated in just a few countries. “If the world was to swap oil for Li-Ion based battery propulsion,” he wrote, “South America would become the new Middle East. Bolivia would become far more of a focus of world attention than Saudi Arabia ever was. The USA would again become dependent on external sources of supply of a critical strategic mineral while China--home to significant lithium deposits--“would have a certain degree of self sufficiency.”
This article was adapted from by senior editor Seth Fletcher, which comes out May 10 from Hill & Wang.Tahil wasn’t the most credible source. Earlier that year, he had published another paper, “Ground Zero: The Nuclear Demolition of the World Trade Centre.” In it, he argued that two nuclear reactors, buried some 260 feet below the World Trade Center, were deliberately melted down at the same moment the hijacked airliners hit the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, “peak lithium” was an irresistible story. Tesla Motors and General Motors had both recently unveiled the first electric cars of the 21st century, both of which ran on lithium-based batteries. In July 2008, the U.K. Guardian summed up the issue: “With oil supplies a continuing concern, focus is switching to lithium for electric vehicles. But debate rages about how much of it is available.”
In January 2010, I attended the second-annual Lithium Supply and Markets Conference in Las Vegas. Between panel sessions, I intercepted R. Keith Evans, a geologist who has spent more than four decades studying global lithium deposits. Tahil’s paper had drawn Evans out of retirement. “It was total bullshit,” he said.
Riding an escalator from the conference hall to the casino, he explained how Tahil inspired him to write an updated estimate of the world’s lithium supply, “An Abundance of Lithium.” This was not the first lithium scare, Evans said. He told me about an urgent conference held by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1975 to warn of an impending shortage of lithium--for use in nuclear fusion reactors. That scare inspired the first serious estimate of the Western world’s lithium supply, which in 1975 was pegged at 10.65 million metric tons. In subsequent years, geologists steadily discovered more deposits. By 2010, Evans estimated the known world supply to be some 28.4 million metric tons of lithium metal, or 150 million metric tons of lithium carbonate, the most common form in which lithium is produced and sold. In contrast, the global market for lithium that year was roughly 100,000 metric tons. An electric-car boom could double that demand within a decade, but even so, Evans said, there would be plenty of lithium.
for a closer look at six elements that could fuel a clean-energy revolution.
By the time I met Evans, another potential resource shortage was making headlines. China, which produces 95 percent of the world’s rare-earth metals--a group of elements heavily used in the manufacture of hybrid cars, windmills and other clean-energy technologies--signaled its intent to cut back on exports, claiming that it had to reduce production in order to protect its reserves. Last September, China used its rare-earth monopoly as a weapon, suspending shipments to Japan in retaliation for the seizure of a Chinese fishing vessel. Almost immediately, U.S. Department of Energy officials were on Capitol Hill testifying before Congress about the state of American rare-earth-element supplies.
Since then, concern about the supply of elements used in clean-energy technology has only grown more acute. This February, a committee of scientists representing the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society warned that our mineral-supply vulnerabilities extend beyond rare earths. The U.S. relies on other countries for 90 percent of its “energy-critical elements”--29 elements, including rare earths, whose intrinsic properties make them essential ingredients in thin-film solar panels, high-efficiency wind turbines, advanced electric-vehicle motors, high-capacity batteries and other clean-energy innovations. Disruptions in supply, the committee warned, could “significantly inhibit” meaningful deployment of fossil-fuel-free inventions that “could otherwise be capable of transforming the way we produce, transmit, store, or conserve energy.”
When oil is cheap and seemingly limitless, the inefficiency of the gasoline engine is acceptable. But oil is no longer cheap, and it's not limitless.
Not all of these elements are rare, but none are as abundant as the dominant raw materials of 20th-century industry: iron, aluminum, silicon and the nine others that make up 99 percent of the Earth’s crust. Historically, only scientists working on lab-scale projects had much use for them, so geologists had little incentive to look for new sources. The consequence is a severe lack of knowledge about the prevalence, availability and cost-effectiveness of energy-critical elements. This lack of knowledge breeds anxiety. In August 2010, for instance, the libertarian magazine Reason ran the headline “Forget peak oil. What about peak lithium, peak neodymium, and peak phosphorus?” In the case of lithium, the panic has begun to subside as we’ve learned more about the element’s abundance. But will the same be true of the other 28 energy-critical elements? And what can the state of lithium supplies tell us about the rest of them?
To understand why a group of obscure elements suddenly commands such attention, consider the competition between gas-powered and electric cars. The internal combustion engine is an intrinsically inefficient machine. The average gas-powered car converts only 12.6 percent of gasoline’s energy into work. But the extravagant energy density of oil makes up for an engine’s inadequacies. Every gallon of gasoline contains 33,000 watt-hours of energy. Even 12.6 percent of that is enough to propel a several-thousand-pound car 30-some miles on the highway. And when oil is cheap and seemingly limitless—as it was for most of the 20th century—such inefficiency is acceptable.
Oil is no longer cheap, however, and it’s certainly not limitless. We have entered what Hampshire College professor Michael Klare calls the “age of tough oil,” in which the easily extractable deposits have been depleted, sending us drilling for oil miles beneath the surface of the ocean. Meanwhile, the growing Indian and Chinese middle classes appear poised to double the number of cars on the planet by 2050, to as many as two billion automobiles.
If they are going to replace gas-powered cars, electric vehicles need the best possible batteries, and today those batteries are based on lithium. Lithium is the third-lightest element on the periodic table, well suited to lightweight energy storage. Because of its extreme reactivity, it can form the basis for more-energy-dense batteries than just about any other element. The rechargeable lithium battery has already helped transform portable electronics, enabling the shift from the 30-ounce Motorola DynaTAC (commonly known as the Michael-Douglas-in-Wall Street phone) to the 4.8-ounce iPhone 4. Now automakers are betting that lithium could be equally transformative for transportation.
But lithium and the batteries based on it are only part of a larger system. Exploiting every milliwatt-hour of electricity stored in that battery requires the most efficient electric motors possible--and the magnets within those motors call for rare-earth elements such as neodymium and dysprosium. Generating electricity from renewable sources such as wind and sun requires ultra-efficient machines as well. Naturally, the most efficient wind turbines use rare-earth-based magnets; advanced thin-film solar panels use either tellurium or indium.
In each of these cases, energy is so valuable that the highest-performance materials available are worth the trouble and money, even if they require hard-to-find elements. “If you were running this electric motor off the outlet in your home, where electricity is 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, who cares that it’s a less efficient magnet?” says Gerbrand Ceder, a materials-science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the committee that produced the APS/MRS paper on mineral-supply vulnerabilities. “Instead we’re pushing a lot of applications where the use of energy is critical and the energy is very expensive.” For now, energy-critical elements aren’t necessary in household appliances. Wind turbines and electric cars, however, almost aren’t worth building without them.
Yet the cost and availability of the elements that deliver such efficiency could be a problem. To be deployed on a massive scale, the machines of the clean-energy age must be cost-competitive with today’s fossil-fuel-based systems. But clean technology can’t be cost-competitive unless it’s manufactured on a large scale, and nothing is going to get built in volume if the raw ingredients aren’t available and affordable.
Given infinite money, as the APS/MRS report notes, “there is no absolute limit on the availability of any chemical element, at least in the foreseeable future.” Theoretically, scientists can wring tiny quantities of many elements from a random bucket of dirt--it just might cost a fortune to do so. So there are two key questions about neodymium, tellurium, lithium and the 26 other energy-critical elements: How much is there? And more crucially, what will it cost to get them out of the ground?
The world’s largest lithium producer, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile S.A. (SQM), operates in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, where the soil is so barren that NASA has used it to calibrate microbe-detecting Mars robots. Last May, I traveled to northern Chile to see the company’s operations. Andrés Yaksic, a marketing manager from SQM, met me in San Pedro de Atacama, a tourist oasis about 50 miles north of SQM’s plant. On a bright, chilly morning, we set out for the facility. The sky was a spotless cobalt blue as we drove south toward the Salar de Atacama, the salt flat that is one of the world’s most abundant sources of lithium. SQM says the Salar de Atacama contains some 40 million tons of measured, economically extractable lithium carbonate.
After about an hour on the highway, we turned right onto a gravel road through the salar. Bulldozed salt dams and white mounds the size of suburban office buildings speckled the landscape. We stopped at a small office building and put on boots, blaze-orange safety vests and hard hats. Then we walked outside to meet Álvaro Cisternas, a stout, deeply tanned operations manager who would be taking us out to the evaporation pools.
Satellite images of SQM’s facility show huge white and cerulean squares carved into cocoa-colored earth, like the world’s largest swimming facility. In these pools, brine pumped from a subsurface aquifer bakes in the quasi-Martian sun for months. Water evaporates, the brine concentrates, and in time, minerals begin to precipitate. Later, the brine designated for lithium production is piped into a dedicated series of evaporation pools, each one a deepening shade of yellow. A tanker truck then carts the final product, a solution of 6 percent lithium, to a plant three hours away on the Pacific coast. There it is processed into lithium carbonate, a white powder that looks so much like cocaine that I didn’t dare try to fly back to the U.S. with samples.
After we walked among the pools, Cisternas drove us to the top of a small mountain of salt that had been set aside as an overlook. Evaporation pools, tractors, trucks, outbuildings and hills of valuable salt stretched for what appeared to be miles, though the air there was so dry and clear and the view was so completely uninterrupted that getting a firm perspective on the operation’s size was difficult.
For now, energy-critical elements aren't necessary in household appliances, but wind turbines and electric cars almost aren't worth building without them.SQM extracts 31 percent of the world’s lithium supply from this salt flat each year, which is just 40,000 of the salar’s known 40 million metric tons of reserves. Earlier, Yaksic had told me that within a matter of months, operations could scale up to supply three or four times the total global demand. Now, to emphasize the company’s world-beating capacity, Cisternas and Yaksic pointed to group of pools in the distance and explained that every year SQM actually pumps some hundreds of thousands of metric tons of lithium back into the salar—lithium that has been unavoidably harvested in the pursuit of the real moneymaker. Despite being the world’s largest lithium supplier, SQM generates more revenue from “specialty plant nutrition,” potassium fertilizer for our hydrangeas and geraniums.
Among the energy-critical elements, lithium is abnormally easy to mine, at least from brine-based sources like the Salar de Atacama. Nevertheless, the situation with many other critical elements might also be less dire than is often reported. “Most of the issues, in my opinion, are a bit overblown,” says MIT’s Gerbrand Ceder. “There are enormous buffers in the system.”
The first is simply that if the price of an element goes up, people have incentive to spend more money refining that element from raw ore. “There’s a lot of mining waste that still contains a lot of metal,” Ceder explains. That waste can, in many instances, yield more metal than we’re currently getting from it. In the case of energy-critical elements, whose production typically piggybacks on the extraction of more widely used minerals, the scrap pile could be a valuable source of reserves.
Another, often overlooked buffer is simple hierarchy of demand: If the supply of an element is limited, then the industries that need it most will take it away from those that need it less. Platinum, for example, is an indispensable catalyst in the exhaust filters that car companies are required to install on their automobiles. If platinum demand goes up, that doesn’t mean car companies will use fewer catalytic converters. It means couples will exchange fewer platinum wedding rings.
Tellurium provides another example. In addition to cadmium-telluride thin-film solar panels, tellurium is used to make thermoelectric devices (which convert wasted heat into electricity) and steel alloys. If demand for tellurium goes up, it will quickly become clear who needs it most. “What you find for tellurium is that the solar industry sits way on top of the chain,” Ceder says. “The value that they get from it is so high that the steel guys are going to get screwed, and then after that the thermoelectric guys.”
Not every expert is so assured. Jack Lifton, a co-founder of the consulting group Technology Metals Research, has argued that the economics of tellurium production don’t work and that, in the years ahead, tellurium production might actually decrease. Copper producers are responsible for nearly all the world’s tellurium, which is extracted as a by-product of the refining process. As those companies move to new and more-economical refining methods, they may no longer produce tellurium. Supply could dwindle rapidly.
Another challenge is that some energy-critical elements are genuinely rare. Tellurium is, and so is rhenium, a platinum-group element blended into superalloys to allow jet engines to operate at higher, more efficient temperatures. Rhenium is actually five times as rare as gold. That’s why five years ago, General Electric started an intensive rhenium-recycling program while simultaneously searching for an alternative superalloy, which it found within a few years. In February, the Japanese government and 100-plus Japanese companies began a similar, $1.3-billion program designed to reduce the nation’s reliance on Chinese rare earths by one third.
One obvious way to reduce reliance on a critical element is to find substitutes. Toyota and Nissan, for example, are developing rare-earth-free motors for their hybrid and electric vehicles. But substitution can be a long, expensive process. “The truth of the matter is, it’s rare that a straight replacement works,” Ceder says. “Usually you need a reengineered product.”
Ceder is trying to make the design of materials a shorter and less involved process. He uses vast banks of computers to calculate the quantum-mechanical interactions that determine the characteristics of chemical compounds. His goal is to find novel combinations of elements that produce materials more useful than what’s available today. “In 10 years we’re going to be designing materials purely computationally,” he says. “And it’s about time. I can cue up 1,000 calculations on a Friday, and they’ll be done by Monday. When we go in the lab to make something today, the hit rate is 50 percent.”
Recycling is perhaps the most obvious way to reduce reliance on energy-critical elements. As Thomas Graedel, a professor of industrial ecology at Yale University, has argued, we need to start thinking of our cities as “anthropogenic mines”--mineral deposits whose ore comes in the form of used cars, computers, batteries and the like.
Currently, U.S. recycling of energy-critical elements is minimal. In 2010 effectively no tellurium, very little lithium, and only 17 metric tons of platinum-group elements were recycled. That same year, the U.S. imported 195 metric tons of platinum-group elements alone. The APS/MRS report recommends that the federal government create a “critical materials” designation for products high in crucial elements and use cash deposits to encourage consumers to recycle them.
If platinum demand goes up, that doesn't mean car companies will use fewer catalytic converters. It means couples will exchange fewer platinum wedding rings.Even if we better manage our supply of energy-critical elements, at some point we will need new mines. In the past few years, mining companies have announced plans for rare-earth mines in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Kazakhstan and Vietnam. New and established lithium producers are developing techniques to extract the mineral from hard-rock ores in Australia and elsewhere. Meanwhile, investors and politicians are pressing for something that has long been taboo: opening mines for energy-critical elements in the U.S.
The U.S. sits on at least 13 million metric tons of rare-earth deposits, four million tons of lithium, and significant deposits of other energy-critical elements. Few of those deposits are being mined, however, largely because of strict permitting processes and environmental regulations. Such constraints typically result in a delay of seven or more years between the exploration of a mine and its actual exploitation.
Even then, the need to secure North American sources of critical elements must be balanced with an appreciation of the destruction that mining involves. This balance could be particularly difficult to achieve with rare-earth minerals, whose extraction almost always dredges up the low-level radioactive materials uranium and thorium. Leakage of lightly radioactive water helped lead to the 2002 closure of the Mountain Pass mine in southeastern California, which was once the world’s largest source of rare-earth elements. Still, Molycorp, the Colorado-based company that owns Mountain Pass, is redesigning and rebuilding the mine’s on-site refinery. The company has plans to reopen Mountain Pass this year and quickly begin producing 20,000 tons of rare-earth oxides annually.
Lithium extraction doesn’t involve toxic waste and radioactive slag, but the environmental impact of a mine is always contentious. The day after the conference in Las Vegas, I flew to northern Nevada with a group of investors and mining executives to visit the proposed Western Lithium mine, one of America’s largest and most advanced energy-critical-element projects. In a shed behind the rented ranch house that serves as the company’s field headquarters, where plywood tables were covered with core samples from the mine site, I talked to Western Lithium’s CEO, Jay Chmelauskas, who talked about the clean-energy revolution like a man who had just found God. His last project was the undeniably less virtuous task of overseeing the construction of one of the largest open-pit gold mines in China. “Now I wake up every day, and I’m saving the world,” he said.
We put on rubber boots and weatherproof jackets, loaded into 4x4s, and drove toward a low mountain range about 12 miles to the west. This was pronghorn antelope country, desert bighorn sheep territory. After about 20 minutes, we turned off the paved highway onto a dirt lane, drove to the top of a sagebrush-covered hill, and stopped at a gash that backhoes had dug some 15 feet into the earth. We walked down into the trench. My boots bounced on the damp, liver-hued clay; it was like walking on a giant sheet of Play-Doh. Western Lithium’s latest figures show that this clay sponge contains the equivalent of at least 1.5 million metric tons of lithium carbonate, enough to satisfy current world demand for more than 12 years.
In two to five years, the ground beneath our feet would be an open pit mine. If that one isn’t enough, four more clay deposits to the north can be opened up. Earlier I had asked Chmelauskas what the environmental impact of a mine like this would be. Mining lithium from clay may be less damaging than many other extractive industries, but it is never impact-free. With energy-critical elements, as with gold, silver, coal, oil or anything else we take out of the ground, there will always be tradeoffs. “I mean, we’re going to put a big hole in the side of that mountain,” Chmelauskas said. “But you have to weigh the net costs.”
This article was adapted from by Seth Fletcher, out now from Hill and Wang. You can also check out Seth's other posts about here on PopSci, or follow Bottled Lightning on , or follow Seth on Twitter
. So many options!
At Least for the Next Ten Years, “Peak Lithium” is Nonsense
At the Lithium Supply and Markets conference in Toronto, analysts make clear that until 2020 there will literally be more than enough of the element to go around
The noise about “Peak Lithium”—the idea that not enough economically extractable lithium exists in the world to support a large-scale switch to cars powered by lithium-based batteries—has quieted significantly in the past year, but I still sometimes get asked: Are we going to run out of this stuff?
Not any time soon. In fact, as a noted market analyst made clear this morning, so many companies are developing so many lithium deposits around the world that many of them will probably go out of business, because they’re on track to dramatically oversupply the world with lithium.
Currently, most of the world’s lithium comes from a handful of companies, most notably SQM, Chemetall, and FMC; they extract lithium from high-altitude salt flats in northern Chile and Argentina. Those companies have long insisted that they have access to so much lithium, and that they could expand supply so easily and quickly, that the dozens of independent lithium prospectors who hope to capitalize on arrival of the lithium-ion-powered electrified automobile are doomed.
This morning, Edward R. Anderson, president of the independent consulting firm TRU Group, told the assembled group of international lithium prospectors much the same thing. According to TRU’s latest study of the lithium market—an update of an earlier study TRU conducted for Mitsubishi, which the group presented at the first Lithium Supply and Markets Conference in Santiago, Chile in January 2009—the world will soon be overloaded with lithium producers. Together, these producers will end up flooding the market; there will be too much lithium to go around, and all but the strongest companies will probably fail.
We at PopSci are not concerned with lithium as an investment, of course: We’re interested in what news like this means for the people who buy raw lithium, make it into batteries, and then put those batteries into electrified vehicles. For the junior mining companies in the audience, Anderson's presentation might have been bracing. For battery companies and carmakers, however, it means that there is no reason to be concerned about the availability or price of lithium, even as batteries—particularly electric-vehicle batteries—quickly come to consume the bulk of the world’s lithium supply.
To be sure, Anderson didn't even mention the words "Peak Lithium"—his was a business presentation focused on the next ten years. He's also far from the first person to argue that lithium is plentiful. (See .) But Anderson’s presentation this morning was a current and forceful argument that one vastly overhyped barrier to the near- and mid-term adoption of electrified vehicles simply doesn’t exist.
All this said, it’s worth keeping in mind that the majority of all this abundant lithium is extracted by three companies from a relatively tiny section of South American desert. There’s still a case to be made that diversifying the lithium supply is a good thing. Later in the conference we’ll hear Western Lithium, a company that controls a potentially massive lithium mine in northern Nevada, make that case.
Bottled Lightning is a blog series by Seth Fletcher, Senior Associate Editor at PopSci and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy, to be published in May 2011 by Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book is about lithium, the rechargeable lithium battery, and the technological transformations it has helped (or will help) make possible—the wireless revolution; the burgeoning electric-car revival; the coming spread of clean energy. Seth also posts off-the-cuff observations on these and other subjects on .
Why Afghanistan’s Lithium Is a Big Deal, Even If It Never Leaves the Ground
Lithium is cheap and widely available, so why do we care about a new resource in a war zone? Because it’s another counter to the irrational fear that the automobile’s lithium-powered electric future is doomed before it begins
Drowned in the noise, however, was a fascinating bit of news: that just this month a Pentagon team was hunting for minerals in Afghanistan’s dry lakes, and that early findings suggested that one site alone might contain more lithium than Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, which is believed to hold up to half the world’s known supply.
Why is this significant? Because even if Afghanistan’s lithium never leaves the ground, the sudden, black-swan appearance of a new and potentially massive resource helps further debunk the myth that the world is running out of lithium and that, as a result, an electric-car revival that relies on lithium-based batteries is doomed before it begins.
Too much of the coverage of lithium seems to be driven by the idea that it is slightly more rare than unicorn hide. It’s not. Extremely conservative estimates from the USGS peg world lithium reserves at 9.9 million metric tons, and the number is almost certainly much higher. By contrast, in 2008 (because of the recession, 2009 was an unrepresentative year) the world’s lithium mines produced 25,400 metric tons. Those mines will need to produce more in the coming years as lithium-ion batteries start going into cars, but that shouldn’t be a problem: more than 100 companies worldwide are moving into the market.
If lithium isn’t rare, however, it is unfamiliar and misunderstood. It is an exotic, intriguing element—the lightest metal in the periodic table, and therefore the ideal carrier ion for a battery. It has been called “the yeast in the dough” of the most advanced batteries we have today, the power packs that will drive the and the , both of which arrive later this year. Most of the blue-sky battery technologies in the lab now are designed to surpass lithium-ion batteries by jamming far more lithium atoms into their electrodes per unit volume and mass, thereby storing more usable electrons, so lithium will be an essential element in the construction of a clean-energy future. That’s a very good reason to pay close attention to the countries and the companies that produce it. But that doesn’t mean there’s not enough of the stuff to go around.
Here’s the backstory on the Afghanistan mineral findings. In 2007 the USGS published an estimate of Afghan mineral resources that showed that the country contained vast untouched deposits of iron, copper, rare-earth elements and other high-demand minerals. The report barely touched on lithium, simply mentioning that deposits of a rock known as pegmatite could yield “a variety of commodities,” including lithium.
Particularly in Australia companies do mine pegmatite for lithium, but digging and blasting that hard rock out of the ground and breaking it down into usable lithium is expensive, at least compared with lithium production from brines. In certain geologically anomalous spots around the world, there are large salt flats that are saturated with water rich in lithium and other minerals. Extracting lithium from the right kind of salt flat is a cheap and low-impact matter of pumping lithium-rich water from the flat into a series of evaporation ponds, where it bakes in the sun until it is concentrated into an oily yellow solution of 6 percent lithium. Currently, two of the three largest lithium producers in the world get their supply from a single salt flat in northern Chile, the Salar de Atacama. Across the border in Bolivia is the much larger Salar de Uyuni, which is loaded with lithium but which, for political and technical reasons, is still at least a few years from sending lithium to the market.
The penultimate paragraph of the Times story suggested that Afghanistan might have one dry salt lake richer than either of these. And that’s a major point that never appeared in a public USGS report.
Neither the Pentagon nor the USGS will elaborate on the mention in the Times story of a salt-lake lithium source. In an otherwise candid conversation, Jack Medlin of the USGS declined to provide any more details on the subject. Major Shawn Turner, a Pentagon spokesperson, said he had nothing to add.
According to Jack Shroder, a geologist at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies, a high-altitude plain that’s about a 70-mile drive northwest of the city of Ghazni known as the Dasht-i-Nawar is the obvious candidate for the mysterious Afghan mother lode. Shroder said he didn’t know for certain that this was the spot, but “if the lithium source is in a dry lake and it is near Ghazni, then it is probably the place.” (An alternative, he said, is another dry lake farther to the south called Ab-i-Istada.)
The salt flats of the “Lithium Triangle”—the high desert region where Chile, Argentina and Bolivia intersect which is currently home to the most productive lithium sources in the world—and the Dasht-i-Nawar have several uncanny similarities. They are all arid to semi-arid high-altitude salt flats where flamingos like to breed; that’s the superficial part. They all sit in high-altitude contact zones between tectonic plates, zones where ancient volcanism left behind mineral-rich igneous rocks. Most important, all three are basins surrounded by old volcanoes. (Shroder says that the Dasht-i-Nawar is what remains of the crater of a stratovolcano that erupted 2.2 million years ago.) Over the millennia, as the ice and snow melts off the surrounding mountains and volcanoes every year and seeps down to the basin below, that water leaches minerals from the volcanic rock it encounters along the way and deposits them at the bottom of the basin. In time, the water in the center of the basin grows richer in minerals like potassium, magnesium, boron and lithium.
At the second annual Lithium Supply and Markets conference in January, Afghanistan didn’t come up once in two days of presentations by mining-company executives, geologists and industry analysts. At the next such conference, it will probably be mentioned frequently as a curiosity, because it’s unlikely that Afghan lithium will have any effect on the market for decades. Mining companies aren’t necessarily scared of sketchy countries—I’ve seen North Korea mentioned as a new frontier in minerals exploration in mining trade publications—but at the moment, lithium is cheap (the market leader, SQM, cut its lithium carbonate prices by 20 percent last year) and widely available (at the moment, SQM is actually pumping excess lithium back into the Salar de Atacama because the company harvests more lithium as a by-product of potassium production than it can find a market for). There’s no reason to go lithium prospecting in a war zone.
“As far as Afghanistan is concerned, who cares?” Jon Hykawy, a mining analyst with Byron Capital Markets in Toronto, wrote in an e-mail. “I am not going to be the one leading a team into Taliban territory to try and process lithium.” He drew an analogy between Afghanistan and Colombia. Colombia has potentially excellent oil reserves, just like neighboring Venezuela, but “there has been a low-grade civil war going on in Colombia for the last couple of decades. No one is crazy enough to try and get oil out of the ground in Colombia, and no one is going to go try and get lithium out of the ground in Afghanistan until the thugs are out of the government and the Taliban stop killing anything that moves that is not allied with them.”
Companies don’t like risk and lack of security, and Afghanistan, well—“it will be probably the worst place to go to,” says Gal Luft, the executive director of the energy-focused D.C. think tank the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.” Security concerns aside, Luft points out that it took years for Chile to build the rail and road infrastructure that gets its huge copper mines running, and before Afghanistan can become a serious mining country, it will need the same infrastructure.
The most likely candidate to build that infrastructure is probably the country that seems most interested in securing Afghan mineral rights, despite the war: China. Last year, using a comprehensive package of humanitarian aid and (allegedly) bribes, a state-run mining company won the rights to the Aynak copper mine south of Kabul. Today the Chinese (the distinction between industry and the government is blurry) are fighting for rights to mine the Hajiguk Pass north of Kabul, home to 1.8 billion metric tons of iron ore—the largest iron deposit in Asia. Shroder says it’s likely that a Chinese firm could win the rights to Hajiguk, build the roads and railway necessary to ship iron ore south to the the Pakistani port of Gwadar (which Chinese concerns also built), and years from now use that existing, paid-for infrastructure to start extracting the lithium from a source like the Dasht-i-Nawar, which is about 100 miles to the south of Hajiguk.
Say this scenario actually happens. Would it have any practical effect on the price or availability of lithium? Not anytime soon. “I don’t think it has a lot of implication for the market in the first half of the 21st century,” Luft says. “This is a story for the 22nd century.”
What the story does now is help show that it is absurd to start talking about an impending shortage of a mineral that the mining industry really only started taking seriously after the spread of lithium-ion batteries in laptops and cell phones in the 1990s. When the Afghanistan news broke, a friend at a mining-industry publication confessed to never having heard of Afghanistan as a potential lithium source. But he also said he wasn’t surprised, because lithium is not rare. What other countries have high-altitude salt lakes that we’ve never paid attention to? As Luft says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if half a dozen other places get thrown around as the 'Saudi Arabia of lithium’” in the years ahead.
U.S. Geologists Uncover Staggering $1 Trillion Cache of Unmined Mineral Resources in Afghanistan (Updated)
With huge quantities of rare-earth elements valuable to high-tech industries like lithium-ion battery production, will Afghanistan become the "Saudi Arabia" of the future?
Yesterday, the that American geologists have discovered an estimated $1 trillion worth of untapped geological resources there, including vast reserves of rare earth metals and lithium, which are becoming increasingly sought-after for high-tech manufacturing. The cache is large enough to have profound geopolitical implications. But judging by the state of play at another remote, developing-world mineral stash—the lithium deposits of Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, which I recently visited—it’s not easy to go from desolation to natural-resource riches. Updated.
It's truly a bonanza: Those essential for building motors for hybrid and electric cars that China thought they had cornered? Afghanistan may be sitting on $7.4 billion worth. That’s not counting niobium, another rare and essential metal--the war-torn, deeply impoverished country may have $81.2 billion of the stuff. As for lithium, the essential battery-building mineral that has led so many to suggest that lithium-rich Bolivia may be the center of the world in —there’s a chance that Afghanistan may have even more. (We have yet to find much detail about what kind of lithium resources we’re looking at—the geologists we’ve contacted haven’t yet responded—but according to the New York Times, an internal Pentagon document said that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of Lithium,” a nickname that’s also been applied to Bolivia and Chile in the past couple of years.) Then there’s the big money, the meat-and-potatoes. $420.9 billion worth of iron. $274 billion in copper. $50.8 billion in cobalt.
According to the , the Afghan treasure hunt began in 2004, when American geologists working on the reconstruction effort found geological charts that the Soviets had assembled in the 1980s, when they occupied the country. Soon they began conducting flyover surveys of 70 percent of the country, using “advanced gravity and measuring equipment” to collect preliminary data. In 2007 they conducted even more detailed aerial measurements, and the numbers were “astonishing.” In October 2007 the USGS published a preliminary assessment of the country’s mineral resources that claimed there were “abundant” resources present. Two and a half years later, those preliminary measures became today’s bombshell news. “There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus , commander of the United States Central Command, told the Times. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.“
Afghanistan is a massive, geologically diverse country whose soil has historically been used for little other than growing opium poppies, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that it is home to vast mineral riches. But the numbers in this recent report are still pretty astounding*. One trillion dollars is the kind of number that people use when they pitch blue-sky themes for mining asteroids, or the dark side of the moon, and the new Pentagon report claims that the total estimated reserves could be worth close to that, $908 billion. Afghanistan’s current GDP, by contrast, is $12 billion. This is enough to make Afghanistan one of the world's most important mining centers.
Yet these resources probably won’t to be easy to get out of the ground. It’s not a perfect analogy, but Bolivia, home to what until yesterday was widely acknowledged as the world’s largest stash of lithium, offers some perspective. The Bolivian government has had tremendous difficulty getting its lithium-mining initiative up and running. The country has decided to go it alone, to develop the massive lithium deposits of the Salar de Uyuni without the involvement of multinational mining companies. But because of the Bolivian government’s lack of experience with lithium mining, and because of the remoteness of the resource and the lack of infrastructure in the area, the project is now seriously behind schedule. Even the scope of the project is miniscule compared to the massive lithium operations of companies like SQM and Chemetall just across the border in Chile. Bolivia, keep in mind, has a centuries-long history as a minerals producer. (Much of that production was done in an incredibly exploitative manner, but that’s another discussion.)
On the other hand, Afghanistan has “no mining culture,” a USGS geologist told the Times. Afghanistan will almost certainly use multinational mining companies, who have the expertise and the money to get it done, to tap their mineral resources, but Afghanistan is also a war zone, and now, a staggeringly valuable prize for the victor. This is a story we’ll be watching closely, and updating as we hear back from geologists who are familiar with the terrain.
* UPDATE: After talking to Jack Medlin, an Afghanistan expert at the USGS, a clarification is in order. There actually is no single “recent report” that triggered the Times story. This from 2007 is the USGS’s most recent official statement on the matter, and Medlin says that the next phase of the report probably won’t be completed until late 2011. He also points out that in 2007, the USGS released a brief report on Afghanistan’s mineral reserves and held a press conference to generate interest, but that it was nothing more than a “one-day news cycle.” So what occasioned this Times piece, which the blogosphere is absolutely devouring? Medlin doesn’t claim to know. “We’ve know about [Afghani mineral deposits] for a couple of years,” he said. However, “We’re glad” about the huge audience this latest story is receiving, he told me, “because it should focus interest from international investors.” We’ll stay out of the politics and stick to the scientific and technological issues involved, but if you want to read the political theories, Andrew Sullivan has a good compendium .
Still, there is news in the Times story, most notably the bit about Afghanistan containing vast reserves of lithium. The 2007 report mentions lithium only briefly: “Pegmatite fields, principally in northeastern Afghanistan, contain a variety of commodities, such as lithium, beryllium, quartz, feldspars, mica, gemstones, tantalum, niobium, and cesium. Exploitation of these pegmatite deposits could support local glass, chemical, or artisanal industries.” That’s very different than talking about dry salt lakes where, according to the Times story, preliminary research conducted “just this month” indicated “the potential for lithium deposits as large as those of Bolivia ... .” Medlin confirmed to me that the USGS has found lithium in the brines of dry salt lakes—the same sweet, relatively easy-to-extract source material found in Bolivia and Chile—but wouldn’t say more about lithium.
We’re waiting to get video of a press conference that the Department of Defense just held on this matter, but the public affairs office says they’re having technical problems. More soon.
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