Lithium News

The price of lithium has been on a roller coaster ride over the past few years. The metal is, of course, a crucial component in batteries.

Lithium prices shot up around 2021 as electric vehicle investments and sales took off. Then, last year, prices plunged as more supply came online and EV sales started to level off.

But despite the down market, mining giant Rio Tinto is buying a lithium company for $6.7 billion.

If the lithium market has been struggling so much, it’s fair to wonder why a big mining company decided to spend billions to increase its footprint in it.

“This is a countercyclical move on the part of Rio Tinto and pretty opportunistic,” said Chris Berry, president of House Mountain Partners.

Translation: Rio Tinto is following the first half of an old investing adage — buy low. Its expectation is that lithium’s a good bet in the long run.

“They’re looking out five, 10, 15 years from now and want to be a part of this shift, regardless of near-term fluctuations with respect to EV demand,” Berry said.

Because even though that demand has fallen well short of car companies’ very lofty expectations from a few years ago, it’s a technology that’s probably not going away, said Jessika Trancik at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“There are good reasons to expect that growth and demand for EVs to continue, and therefore a continued growth in demand for lithium,” Trancik said.

In the U.S., that demand growth could really start to climb again in the next decade, said Tom Moerenhout, a professor at Columbia University, because EV costs could keep falling, and “the other element is availability of charging infrastructure, and that is also improving.”

And lithium batteries will probably still be powering EVs five to 10 years from now, said Adam Megginson, a senior analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, because lithium is special.

“You kind of can’t get past that chemistry fundamental, which is how light it is versus how much energy it’s able to store, which is so important for EV applications where you’re carrying that weight around,” Megginson said.

And while it’s waiting for the price of lithium to rebound, Rio Tinto has other ways to make money, including iron ore and aluminum, Moerenhout said.

“That means that they can carry risk for a longer time. That means that they can wait for the lithium price to increase for a longer time,” Moerenhout said.

And eventually, if all goes to plan, they can complete the other half of that old investing adage and sell high.

Construction of Nevada’s next big mine is well underway near the town of Orovada in Humboldt County.

Lithium Americas is completing initial dirt work for a massive production facility at its Thacker Pass lithium mine at the southern end of the McDermitt Caldera, which lies about 60 miles northwest of Winnemucca. Construction of the processing facilities is expected to begin in earnest once Lithium Americas closes on a $2.26 billion loan from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program.

Total cost of the Thacker Pass mine – the majority of which is for the processing plant – is about $3 billion, said Tim Crowley, vice president of government and external affairs for Lithium Americas. The remainder of the project is being funded through contributions made by General Motors, which gives GM an exclusive 15-year offtake agreement.

General Motors already purchased $320 million of Lithium Americas’ common shares, which represents about half of the company’s financial commitment to the company, Crowley said. GM has committed to an additional $330 million, Crowley added.

“With that money, the Department of Energy loan, and our publicly traded shares, we will have all the money needed by the end of the year to build this project,” he said.

Thacker Pass and the McDermitt Caldera

Thacker Pass contains the largest measured and indicated lithium resource in North America, Crowley told NNBW during a tour of Lithium America’s Lithium Technical Development Center on Corporate Drive in Reno. The center contains a scaled-down model of the production facility that’s to be developed at Thacker Pass and has been instrumental in developing and fine-tuning the extraction processes that will be used to turn lithium clay into lithium carbonate, a refined mineral that’s critical to the production of batteries for electric vehicles.

Currently, China accounts for roughly 70 percent of lithium processing, but the Thacker Pass mine is expected to produce enough lithium carbonate for approximately 800,000 electric vehicles each year.

The McDermitt Caldera is the remnants of an ancient volcano that exploded approximately 16 million years ago. It became a dry lakebed in the ensuing eons, and when the water receded it left lithium deposits that are relatively close to the surface at a maximum depth of about 350 feet, Crowley told NNBW.

The huge caldera encompasses roughly 475 square miles, or 304,000 acres. Lithium America’s mining operations are on 18,000 acres, though mining operations are expected to disturb less than 7,000 total acres of land.

Lithium Americas is permitted for a 40-year mine life at Thacker Pass. Mining operations during the first 20 years are expected to remain at that 350-foot depth, and descend to about 450 feet over the remaining 20 years, Crowley said.

Globally, lithium is typically mined from brine or hard rock, but lithium deposits in Nevada differ. Additional lithium clay mining projects in Nevada include Ioneer’s Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron project near Tonopah, and Century Lithium’s Angel Island project in the Clayton Valley region of Esmeralda County.

A project like no other

Building the facility is a tremendous undertaking – peak construction employment is expected to top 2,000 trade workers, Crowley said.

Lithium Americas partnered with North America’s Building Trades Unions to construct the processing facility at Thacker Pass.

“Bringing that many welders, crane operators, steel fabricators, pipefitters and other trades here without union help would be very difficult,” Crowley said. “We are very glad for that union partnership.”

Lithium Americas has contracted lithium mining operations to Sawtooth Mining of Plano, Texas. Sawtooth Mining is a subsidiary of North American Coal of Dallas.

“We went with a coal miner instead of a hard rock miner because the deposit at Thacker Pass is soft, like a lignite coal,” Crowley said. “North American Coal has been our partner for several years now and has designed our mine plan, a safety plan, and a reclamation plan.”

The mining plan will be slightly different from the massive open pit gold mines in Nevada. Sawtooth Mining will employ a process called “block mining” where it excavates sections of the pit and backfills at the same time, Crowley said.

“It’s concurrent reclamation,” he said. “They will go down 350 feet deep and across the width of the pit, and as soon as they have opened up enough space, they will start backfilling. The material that comes out of the pit that doesn’t contain lithium will go right back into it.

“At no point will the pit be more than 30 percent open,” he added.

Sawtooth Mining has already completed dirt work on approximately 1,000 acres to create pad spaces for the processing plant. The foundations are expected to be poured early next year, and Lithium Americas already has awarded a contract for an onsite concrete batch plant.

Vertical construction, meanwhile, is expected to consist of a series of different plants that will process the lithium clay and turn it into an end product of lithium carbonate.

Unique processing facility

Crowley said that mining is the easier part of the extraction process. The heavy lift is turning the lithium clay into lithium carbonate.

“We are basically building a chemical manufacturing plant,” he said. “It’s big. It’s not an off the shelf facility because nobody has ever mined lithium in a clay deposit.”

One of the most expensive components of the facility, Crowley said, is its onsite sulfuric acid plant. Sulfuric acid is instrumental in breaking down the molecular structure of the lithium clay.

There are multiple advantages of building the sulfuric acid plant, Crowley noted.

“Rather than importing sulfuric acid to the site, which has inherent dangers, we are going to import sulfur, which is benign,” he said. “It takes one truckload of sulfur to make three truckloads of sulfuric acid, so our transportation costs go down by two-thirds and the safety factor goes way up.”

Heat is generated when you make sulfuric acid, Crowley added, and capturing the heat used during the manufacturing process will generate about 40 percent of the power required at the site. A power plant will be bolted onto the sulfuric acid plant.

Lithium Americas is also building a rail yard on the western edge of Winnemucca not so much for shipping lithium carbonate but for all the materials that will be coming to the site for processing lithium ore, such as sulfur, lime and fuel. It’s leased land and will create a transloading spur that ties into the Union Pacific line.

Lithium carbonate will leave the site in super sacks and likely be shipped by truck to its final destination; however, it may also leave Nevada by rail.

“Because we will own that railyard, if it makes more sense to put our finished product on a train to get it to a cathode manufacturing plant then that’s what we will do,” Crowley said.

Decades-long journey

When lithium mining commences at Thacker Pass, it will mark the culmination of a decades-long journey.

Crowley told NNBW that Chevron was searching for uranium in the McDermitt Caldera in the 70s and found lithium, but at the time there was no real market for the commodity. Western Uranium, which rebranded as Western Lithium, began exploration drilling in the late 2000s. In 2015, Western Lithium merged with Lithium Americas.

Once mining commences, Lithium Americas will continue to run its test plant at the Lithium Technical Development Center in Reno to optimize mining processes.

“As you move through your ore body, it’s not the same,” Crowley said. “The clay is different as you move, so how you leach and process it changes.

“It’s really hard to do a project like this,” he added. “It’s expensive, it has to be done right, and there’s no set timelines on when you can go from one step to the next. It’s taken us well over a decade to get to where we are today, and we still have a three-year construction phase before we make our first dollar. We have been operating on borrowed money for a long time, and we are operating on public land, which requires a high level of public engagement and environmental stewardship.”

Tim Crowley, vice president of government and environmental affairs for Lithium Americas, told NNBW during a recent interview that perhaps the biggest hurdle of building the Thacker Pass lithium mine about 60 miles northwest of Winnemucca is getting workers to the jobsite each day and housing them at night.

To that end, Lithium Americas purchased land at the eastern end of Winnemucca for a prefabricated housing facility that has 1,997 individual rooms. The building was used as temporary housing in Ottawa before being disassembled in 755 interlocking modules and moved to Northern Nevada on several hundred semi-trucks.

Construction of the housing facility will begin once Lithium Americas secures nearly $2.3 billion in project funding from the Department of Energy, Crowley said.

“When we close on the DOE loan we will hit the ground hard on the housing component,” he said. “We bought the land and have done all the dirt work, and the building is there in pieces.”

Lithium Americas will contract with a bus company to drive workers an hour to the site for 10-hour work shifts, he added. An additional two hours will be added for transportation time.

“If you go to work on our project, you will have free room and board and free transportation to the site every day. You would get three free meals a day,” he said.

Breakfast will be provided at the housing facility, and workers will assemble their own grab-and-go lunches from a buffet line. A hot dinner will be waiting after shift. Crowley said the housing facility also will include a gym, gaming room, lounge and computer room.

Rio Tinto (RIO) recently announced its agreement to acquire Arcadian Lithium (ALTM) in a deal valued at $6.7 billion, positioning the company to become the world’s third-largest lithium miner. CRU Group vice president of base and battery metals Frank Nikolic joins to discuss his outlook on the lithium market.

Nikolic emphasizes that lithium is “a universal commodity,” noting that as the world moves away from fossil fuels, he predicts lithium will be “used extensively.” Despite current prices being down due to oversupply, Nikolic points out that “mining deals are always long-term commitments.” He suggests investors look at this from a 5-10-year perspective, projecting that demand will grow approximately fourfold during that period.

Explaining lithium’s critical importance, Nikolic states, “It is the right size, the right chemical characteristics, electrical chemical characteristics to be viable for this. It’s the best thing to do. The only next thing to consider is the sodium ion, but that’s a long way from being commercialized, so this is all we have, and it’s universally used across all the battery chemistries.”

GM is launching its new PowerBank home battery unit today, which slots right into the company’s lineup of residential energy management products. The battery lets homeowners collect energy at off-peak times from the grid or a solar panel system and then power the home when energy prices peak or when the lights go out without needing to keep an EV hooked up in the garage.

GM’s home energy company, GM Energy, launched in 2022 to compete in a growing home energy market with competitors like Tesla and its Powerwall and newcomers like EcoFlow and Anker. Home backup solutions are expensive, but they’ll also keep the freezer, CPAP machine, and water pumps running as increasingly severe weather wreaks havoc on the grid. Currently, over 3 million American households are without power after the one-two punch of hurricanes Milton and Helene.

For $12,700, you get the full system with the charger, inverter, home hub computer, and the PowerBank. GM makes two PowerBank sizes, 10.6kWh and 17.7kWh, and if you combine two of the larger ones, you get a 35.4kWh stack that GM says can power the average American home for up to 20 hours.

GM’s system includes a bidirectional EV “PowerShift” charger that lets you power your home with certain GM electric vehicles, such as the Chevy Silverado EV.

GM Energy is now operating in all 50 states. Interested customers can connect with specialists on the GM Energy Live page for an “immersive digital experience” and to learn more about the products. GM doesn’t directly handle solar energy solutions but will refer interested customers to its preferred installer, Qmerit, to set that up.

Batteries power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, with their performance hinging on the critical interface between the electrode and electrolyte. Penn State and industry researchers have developed a method to observe this interface at a higher resolution, which could potentially reveal new ways to improve battery efficiency and lifespan.

They published their results in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

An electrode is a conductor, like a metal rod or plate, that acts as a kind of gateway allowing electricity to enter and leave the battery. There are two types in a battery: Anodes, which are negative electrodes, and cathodes, which are positive ones. Electrolytes are the liquid medium that conducts ions between the anode and cathode, enabling the flow of electrical current.

The electrode–electrolyte interface is the boundary where the solid electrode and liquid electrolyte meet. This interface plays a critical role in the performance of batteries by influencing how ions and solvent molecules accumulate, deplete and transfer charges.

Understanding the behavior of this interface, particularly the electric double layer (EDL), is essential for designing more efficient and durable batteries, according to Jianwei Lai, graduate research assistant in energy and mineral engineering and first author on the study.

“The EDL governs the ion migration and electron transfer that enable electrochemical reactions in batteries,” Lai said. “That’s why studying the double layer is a top priority—it can directly impact battery performance.”

The challenge, however, is that this electrode–electrolyte double layer exists at an ultra-tiny scale and is highly dynamic, changing structure depending on the applied voltage. As the voltage changes, the arrangement of ions and molecules in the layer shifts.

Shifts in the electrode–electrolyte layer can make a battery less efficient, reduce its energy storage and shorten its life, such as when ions get stuck in the wrong spots slowing down the smooth flow of electricity, similar to how traffic jams slow down cars on a highway.

“The EDL is around the nanometer scale, so it’s very hard to characterize,” Lai explained. “And the structure is not static—it’s highly dependent on the applied charge, which makes it very challenging to study directly.”

In the past, scientists have used theoretical models to understand the structure of the EDL. Conventional measurement methods, like voltammetry, traditional electrocapillarity and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, can provide indirect—but imprecise—clues. This is especially problematic, Lai said, for the more complicated systems in today’s batteries, which include complex salt solutions to help the battery store and release more energy.

To overcome these obstacles, Lai and the team developed a new, improved version of electrocapillarity. This technique measures how the surface tension of the interface changes when a voltage is applied.

The researchers’ new approach uses advanced sensors and equipment to capture rapid changes at the electrode–electrolyte interface. They also developed new analytical methods to assess not just overall interfacial tension but also the specific distribution of ions and potential variations at the interface, providing a clearer and more detailed understanding of the battery performance.

With these measurements, Lai said, they can map the double layer structure and potential profile with unprecedented detail.

“Compared to traditional methods, our high-resolution approach improves the data resolution 50 to 100 times,” Lai said. “We can map out how the double layer looks at each individual voltage or potential. This dynamic nature is something traditional methods just couldn’t capture.”

The researchers used their advanced technique to explore zinc battery electrolytes, an increasingly popular choice for battery production because they are safe and inexpensive. However, figuring out how the surface of the electrolyte interacts with the electrode—and how ions move across this surface—has been difficult, Lai said.

The way ions move at the surface affects how efficiently the battery operates, so understanding this interaction could provide insight into developing better batteries. With their new technique, the team found that more zinc ions gather in the double layer, leading to batteries charging faster and more efficiently.

Their analysis revealed that the zinc ions are guided to the right position by chloride ions, which stick closely to the electrode’s surface, helping guide more zinc ions to the right spot.

“This strategy speeds up charging and makes batteries more efficient by helping zinc ions move faster during charging and discharging,” Lai said. “We can now see how unique this arrangement is and how it improves the overall performance, making the batteries more effective and reliable.”

According to Lai, by having a clearer view of how these parts of the battery work together, scientists can better measure and capture the tiny interactions between the electrode and the electrolyte—allowing them to understand why certain electrolyte components or ion designs might improve battery performance.

Essentially, the technique can serve as a universal platform to understand why the electrolyte works better, which can guide the design of more efficient batteries in the future.

“Understanding this critical interface is essential to help us design better, more efficient and reliable electrolytes for energy storage,” Lai said. “If we know both the individual ion constitution and the interfacial potential profile, then we can really understand how the interface is structured. This is something that was never possible with traditional techniques.”

Armed with this unprecedented level of insight, Lai said he believes they can drive significant advances in electrolyte engineering and, in turn, develop the improved batteries future clean energy-driven technology will demand.

“The modernization of electrocapillarity represents a significant leap forward in the field of electrochemistry,” Lai said. “By providing a direct and precise method to study the electrode–electrolyte interface, this technique will enable researchers to better understand and optimize the critical processes that occur within batteries.

“As the demand for high-performance batteries continues to grow, this research will play a crucial role in driving innovation and improving the energy storage solutions of the future.”

Chinese lithium producers are flooding the global market with the critical metal and causing a “predatory” price drop as they seek to eliminate competing projects, a senior US official said on a visit to Portugal that has ample lithium reserves.

Jose Fernandez, under secretary for economic growth, energy and the environment at the US Department of State, told a briefing late on Monday that China was producing much more lithium “than the world needs today, by far”.

“That is an intentional response by the People’s Republic of China to what we are trying to do” with the Inflation Reduction Act – the largest climate and energy investment package in US history valued at over $400 billion, Fernandez said, adding:

“They engage in predatory pricing… (they) lower the price until competition disappears. That is what is happening.”

China accounts for about two-thirds of the world’s lithium chemical output, which is mainly used in battery technologies including for electric cars. Prices of lithium have fallen more than 80% in the past year largely due to overproduction from China and a drop in demand for electric vehicles.

However, the price collapse is also affecting China as it has forced Chinese companies like battery giant CATL to suspend production at certain mines.

Job cuts
Europe aims to reduce its dependence on imports from China and other countries of lithium and other materials essential to the green transition.

Fernandez said the low price “constrains our ability to diversify our supply chains on a broad, global scale” and also hurts countries such as Portugal that need investment to develop these industries.

Falling prices have forced many global lithium producers to scale back production and cut jobs.

Portugal, with some 60,000 tons of known reserves, is already Europe’s biggest producer of lithium, traditionally mined for ceramics.

Along with neighbouring Spain, the country wants to take advantage of local lithium deposits, aiming to cover the entire value chain from mining and refining to cell and battery manufacturing to battery recycling.

Several mining companies in Portugal have been looking for financing, customers and suppliers to crank up projects.

“We want to help them, and we think we can… lithium mining companies, everywhere, have to survive this difficult phase that was created by predatory pricing,” Fernandez said.

China’s Premier Li Qiang in June used his address at a World Economic Forum meeting in Dalian to hit back at accusations from the United States and EU that Chinese firms benefit from unfair subsidies and are poised to flood their markets with cheap green technologies.

Trade tensions intensified last Friday when the European Union said it would press ahead with hefty tariffs on China-made electric vehicles to counter what it sees as unfair Chinese subsidies, after a year-long anti-subsidy investigation. China on Tuesday imposed temporary anti-dumping measures on imports of brandy from the EU.