How Australia Became the World's Largest Supplier of Lithium Hey Lovers of Engineering, my name is Gustavo Pereira and with the increasing demand for electric vehicles and clean energy storage, Australia is increasing lithium extraction to meet much of the world demand for lithium. While this helps reduce the need for fossil fuels, it raises another question: How can we sustainably source lithium? About three hours' drive south of Perth in Western Australia, off the South Western Highway and behind the historic mining town of Greenbushes, the land beyond the town's primary school crumbles away to reveal a deep, gray scar.
This is the site of an old tin mine known as the Cornwall Pit. About 265 meters deep, the shaft wall represents a century of work that began in 1888, when a pound of tin was taken from a nearby creek. When surface metal was removed from the landscape, methods changed, eventually giving way to open pit mining.
In 1980, another metal was found in Greenbushes that, at the time, didn't give the mine owners much time to think. Lithium, a silver-white reactive alkali metal, was considered a geological oddity. A small-scale mining operation began in 1983, extracting lithium for use in niche industrial operations such as glass, steel, castings, ceramics, lubricants and metal alloy manufacturing.
It wasn't until decades later, when the existential risk posed by climate change became widely understood, and governments started talking about replacing the estimated 1. 45 billion gasoline cars worldwide with electric vehicles, that reserves in Greenbushes began to be seen in a very different light. Today, Cornwall's tin pit is closed for business and Greenbushes has become the largest lithium mine in the world.
In less than two years, prices for Australian spodumene, which is a lithium-rich raw material that can be refined for use in batteries in laptops, phones and electric vehicles, have risen by just over tenfold. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, spodumene was sold for US$4,994 per ton in October 2022, well above the US$415 that was practiced in January 2021. By 2040, the International Energy Agency expects the demand for lithium to grow more than 40 times from current levels.
This sparked claims of a new lithium rush and Australia positioned itself to be the world's leading supplier. Which begs the question, as the world looks to this metal in an attempt to help with decarbonization, how sustainable is lithium mining? In 2021, the lithium mined at Greenbushes alone accounted for over a fifth of global production and is expected to grow further.
In 2019, the mine owners received permission to double the size of the site in a US$1. 2 billion expansion which, when completed, will cover an area 2. 6km long, 1km wide and 455m deep.
While Greenbushes is Australia's largest lithium mine, contributing 40% of the 55,000 tonnes of lithium mined in the country in 2021, there are several others close behind. In total there are four other hard rock lithium operations in Western Australia's legacy mining regions and the only lithium mine outside of Western Australia is an open pit mine near Darwin in the Northern Territory which started operating in the early October 2022. Two additional mines are in the pipeline with other proposals in various stages of development.
Their combined production allowed Australia to supply around half of the world's lithium in 2021. Its next biggest suppliers are Chile and China, which extract their lithium from brine wells. In the coming years, this is expected to change as the countries in South America's "lithium triangle" of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, which together hold most of the world's known lithium resource, increase their production.
Currently, Chile alone is responsible for a quarter of the world's production and holds more than 40% of the world's reserves. Next in terms of resources is Bolivia with 24% of the world's reserves, and Argentina with 21%, although neither yet contributes significantly to global production. With all these countries looking to develop their lithium industries, the world faces two very different choices about where to source the critical mineral: from hard rock, as in Australia, or from salt-rich groundwater, as in Chile.
Lithium is a very common mineral. It's found everywhere, but historically we haven't bothered to mine it. When it comes to the environmental impact of lithium mining in Australia, he says people often confuse the situation with what happens in South America.
But what are the impacts of this lithium mining? The difference starts with the underlying geology. In younger landscapes such as South America, lithium is found at the bottom of salt lakes at high altitudes.
Australia, however, is an older geology. Lithium -containing pegmatite deposits are found in pieces of landmass that collided over hundreds of millennia to form the continent of Australia. The refining process carries environmental risks as it is energy and chemically intensive The process of extracting lithium in Australia is not very different from other forms of metal mining.
When an economically viable resource is identified, the surface is cleared, the earth is scraped, the rock blasted and the rubble removed for processing into concentrate. In South America, the process is more like playing with a big, complicated chemistry set. Because lithium sits at the bottom of a salt lake, it's often mixed with a variety of other minerals.
Getting it out requires pumping brine from the bottom of a salt lake into a well and waiting for the water to evaporate in sunlight until lithium concentrations reach 6,000 parts per million. It's a process that requires around 1. 9 million liters of water to produce just one ton of lithium.
From there, the lithium in both regions must be processed further to make it useful. Lithium carbonate taken from Chilean salt flats needs more work to become lithium hydroxide, the material of choice for battery makers. Rock excavated from the ground in Australia must be crushed and roasted to produce spodumene.
This material, which contains about 6% lithium, is shipped from Australia to China, which refines 60% of the world's lithium and 80% of the world's lithium hydroxide, although that could be changing. As part of an effort to diversify the supply chain, the Western Australian state government is working to build local refining facilities close to its own lithium mines. There are three proposals for new lithium refining facilities under development in Australia.
These plants will bring their own environmental challenges. Roasting spodumene to create a concentrate requires significant amounts of energy and large amounts of sulfuric acid. In the end, the slag residues will also have to be disposed of and it is this process that will need to be monitored to avoid pollution.
The problems with lithium mining in Australia are not dissimilar to those faced in the industry more broadly: open pit mining leaves deep scars on the landscape, often within ecosystems that are already under stress. Dust from mining operations can be picked up where it can contaminate waterways or blown into cities where people can inhale it. Heavy rainfall can dislodge minerals and carry them into nearby rivers or cause them to seep into groundwater.
When a mine closes, rehabilitation work may not have been properly budgeted or operators may simply disappear into the night. Some estimates suggest that lithium mining will be responsible for 10 million tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2030, but refineries could be built close to the source of extraction rather than shipping offshore to reduce some of the transport emissions. Meanwhile, in Canada, a gold mine has shown that mining equipment can be electrified and renewable energy can be used to power its systems to reduce CO2 emissions.
Another way to further reduce these impacts is to decrease the demand for new lithium mines by increasing recycling rates. Today, Australia currently recycles only 10% of its lithium-ion battery waste. Recycling will become a matter of attention towards the end of the decade, when electric vehicle batteries start to reach the end of their useful life.
If we don't solve this, we will have, in the not too distant future, a big problem of battery waste and lithium battery stocks for electric vehicles. And you, what do you think about the increase in demand for mining and lithium? Do you think that the massive use of lithium will be the solution to our fossil fuel use problems?
Or will it be a bigger future problem? Leave it here in the comments that I want to know I'm going to leave two videos here on the side that you might also like and that complement the subject, so be sure to check it out. This is your moment to like the video, subscribe to the channel and turn on the notification bell.
