Lithium News

Zimbabwe has the potential to be a leading producer of lithium, which has so far attracted more interest than any other of its minerals, Zimbabwe’s new Minister of Mines and Mining Development Winston Chitando said on Tuesday.

He said he had last week reached a deal with a small listed company, which was expected to generate revenue of $1.4 billion over eight years from a lithium project.

Chitando took office after Emmerson Mnangagwa became president in November 2017 when the military took charge and Robert Mugabe resigned after 37 years in office.

To lure foreign investment into a mining sector that he says is under-capitalised and under-explored, Chitando has announced changes to mining laws, limiting indigenisation rules that mandate majority ownership for the state to just diamonds and platinum.

“Most of the enquiries have been about lithium,” he said on the sidelines of a mining conference in Cape Town. He added he could not give details of the deal signed last week until an official stock market announcement was made.

Lithium is in demand as a battery metal needed for the shift to electric vehicles and renewable power, although some analysts say the market could become oversupplied as the pipeline of projects builds up.

“Zimbabwe will become a very significant producer of lithium,” Chitando said. He added that he was not worried about oversupply of “the mineral of the future”.

Other minerals attracting interest are gold, as well as coal and coal-bed methane, which miners pursue as cheap sources of power, he added, noting that the biggest problem for mining is the lack of capital.

Zimbabwe’s economy is suffering acute shortages of cash dollars, increases in prices of basic goods, high unemployment and low levels of foreign investment but President Mnangagwa last month promised to safeguard all investments in the country.

On its website, Zimbabwe’s mining ministry says the country has “huge mineral potential characterised by about 60 economic minerals whose commercial profitability has been proven”.

Zimbabwe’s Great Dyke – a roughly 300 mile long rock formation which bisects the country from north to south – holds the world’s largest high-grade chrome resources and the world’s second largest resource of platinum group metals. Zimbabwe also has significant reserves of copper, nickel and lithium.

Many companies have said they are very interested in Zimbabwe and compare the country’s Great Dyke to South Africa’s mineral-rich Bushveld complex, but they are also waiting for policy certainty and say bureaucracy needs to be simplified.

Apart from meeting investors in Cape Town, Chitando said Zimbabwe, once one of Africa’s most promising economies, will host a mining conference at the end of this month.

Vice Chairman of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), Mr Kwame Jantuah, has urged the government to use the newly discovered mineral, Lithium, to develop the Volta Region.

Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of a training workshop organised by the Institute of Financial and Economic Journalists (IFEJ) and GIZ in Koforidua recently, he called on the government to ensure the new mineral was not exported in its raw state so the country could derive the maximum benefit from the resource.

“We shouldn’t take out and export. Any company that wants to come and mine, [the company should] open a small processing company in the area so that we create more jobs, build capacity and we make sure that the people in the community would benefit” he suggested.

According to Mr Jantuah, many areas in the Volta Region are covered by water, rendering the region relatively poor in terms of economic viability and high in unemployment.

He said the discovery of Lithium should be actively channelled into creating jobs and making the economy of the area better.

The PIAC Vice Chair further urged the government to put in place a comprehensive plan to extract the resource and not to repeat the mistakes made in the extraction of gold, bauxite, diamond and oil.

“With the discovery of lithium, we shouldn’t do it the way we have done our gold, our diamond and other minerals. If it has to stay in the ground till we develop the capacity of the people in the area so that they too can get jobs out of it, it would be best,” Mr Jantuah said.

Ghana announced the discovery of Lithium in commercial quantities in the Volta Region in January this year.

Chief Executive Officer of the Minerals Commission, Mr Kwaku Addai Antwi-Boasiako, disclosed the mineral was identified during a nationwide exploration exercise.

“The mining activities will start but we want to attract investments into the Volta Region. That is where we have the Lithium and all these rare minerals. These are the minerals of the future. Lithium is about green energy and renewable energy.

“So if you have Lithium and all these rare minerals in the Volta Region, you will want to expand the base of mineral production. The presence of these minerals is as important as having the money to mine them… for now, we know we have it,” he had said.

Mr Antwi-Boasiako assured Ghanaians the Minerals Commission will follow due process in issuing licenses to companies to mine the mineral, emphasizing it will consider electronic applications from interested investors to avoid issues of corruption.

Lithium, among the top 10 most expensive minerals in the world can be used for the manufacture of batteries, heat-resistant glass, and ceramics while Lithium stearate is mixed with oils to make all-purpose and high-temperature lubricants.

Lithium hydroxide is used to absorb carbon dioxide in space vehicles and it is alloyed with aluminium, copper, manganese, and cadmium to make high-performance alloys for aircraft.

Lithium metal has the highest specific heat of any solid element and it is sometimes used as battery anode material electrochemical potential).

Lithium-based compounds such as lithium carbonate are used as drugs to treat manic-depressive disorders.

Lithium captured the consciousness of most Czechs when it exploded as an issue in last October’s parliamentary elections. For the first time many became aware that the Czech Republic has the biggest lithium reserves in Europe with the price for the metal soaring as it is sought for batteries in electric cars and storage facilities for renewable energy.

ANO leader Andrej Babiš accused his Social Democrat rivals of paving the way for Czechs to be ‘robbed’ by the Australian-based company European Metals Limited. It was an accusation that probably struck home given the past Czech scandals surrounding the privatisation of coal mining companies.

The ANO leader was joined in the outcry by the communist party and by Freedom and Direct Democracy Party (SPD) of Tomio Okamura. A debate was convened in parliament which eventually called for the memorandum, which outlined cooperation between the company and state over extraction and processing, to be torn up.

Newly installed minister for industry and trade, Tomáš Hüner, appeared to patch things up in a personal meeting with bosses of the Australian company in Prague last week when the two sides proposed to sign an addendum to the previous memorandum. The exact format was not revealed.

Minister Hüner this week tabled his addendum for Cabinet approval but instead found a very angry prime minister Babiš standing in the way. The ANO leader made clear going into Wednesday’s meeting that he believed that his minister had not followed instructions:

ʺHe had clear instructions to carry out an analysis of lithium. The memorandum is not valid and does not make sense. The minister decided to do it his way and from what has appeared in the media it has not at all come out well.ʺ

The ANO leader has repeated his demand that state mining company Diamo, previously focussed on mining uranium, should take the lead in mapping the Czech lithium reserves and possibly have a role in exploiting them.

The Cabinet eventually tasked minister Hüner with ensuring that the memorandum does not bind the state to anything and prime minister Babiš restated the resolution that it should be scrapped.

SAN FRANCISCO — If you didn’t already know that Tesla desperately wants you to go solar, there’s a good bet you will soon.

Tesla is opening small kiosks staffed by uniformed employees inside Home Depot stores in order to pitch its solar panels and Powerwall electricity storage devices to customers of the nation’s largest home improvement chain.

Powerwall is designed to store electricity that is either collected by a home’s solar panels or purchased from the grid during off-peak hours. For owners of Tesla automobiles, a Powerwall can act as a fill-up station for the vehicle. The unit also can be used to supply power to a home in the case of an outage.

Some Home Depot stores in Southern California already have the kiosks, while Las Vegas and Orlando get them next week. All 800 U.S. Home Depot locations should come on line later this year.

South Australia’s state premier Jay Weatherill announced a plan on Sunday to create a network of 50,000 home solar systems backed by Tesla Powerwall batteries, ahead of a state election in March.

“We lead the world in renewable energy with the world’s largest battery, the world’s largest solar thermal plant and now the world’s largest virtual power plant,” he said in a televised interview from the state capital of Adelaide.

“The size of it is the reason why it’s going to be a success.”

The project would begin with a trial on 1,100 public housing homes, the government said on its website.

The 5kW solar panel system and 13.5kWh Tesla Powerwall 2 batteries would be installed at no charge to participating households, but would be funded through the sale of electricity and by taxpayers through a A$2 million ($1.6-million) government grant and a A$30-million loan from the state-government-funded Renewable Technology Fund.

The South Australian Labor party which has governed the state since 2002 previously engaged entrepreneur Elon Musk to build the world’s biggest lithium ion battery which went into operation on December 1, in time to feed the state’s shaky power grid for the first day of summer.

Supporters say the battery will help stabilise the grid after the state, which gets more than 40 percent of its electricity from wind energy, suffered a string of blackouts and soaring energy prices.

The solar announcement was made on the same day that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull launched the election campaign of state opposition leader Steven Marshall from the conservative Liberal Party.

Marshall will try to oust the more left-wing state Labor government in the March 17 election.

At the televised campaign launch, Turnbull took a crack at South Australia’s energy policy, calling it a “reckless energy experiment” that had created the highest electricity prices in the developed world.

“They overlooked the minor detail, minor to them, that the wind doesn’t blow every day,” he said.