Over 85% of lithium is produced by just 2 international corporations with large scale mines complying with multiple international regulation requirements.
If I search google for this string, your post is the only one that comes up. How did you arrive at this figure?
In the history of industry, when has it ever been a positive indication that only two players control the majority of the supply?
Do these companies directly own the mines or are there partnerships and subsidiaries involved? What countries are they operating in? How long is the supply chain from the mine to the product?
How are water rights being managed? Is there correct oversight? Are any governments trading long term environmental damage for short term profits? What happens when the mines are depleted?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Over+85%25+of+lithium+is+produced+...
It wouldn't surprise me if there are no sources that you respect.
Albermarle - a Aussie company does about 1/3 of the worlds lithium mining.
SQM - a company out of Chile.
China - does the rest.
Each is responsible for ~ 1/3 of the worlds lithium production. Although SQM is on the downfall due to the referendum recently. And China is on the rise as companies like BYD are trying to really take over much of the larger lithium battery market, especially with EV cars but even laptops etc.
Most of this came from my own research for investment reasons.
Albemarle Corporation is an American specialty chemicals manufacturing company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. It operates 3 divisions: lithium (68.4% of 2022 revenues), bromine specialties (19.3% of 2022 revenues) and catalysts (12.3% of 2022 revenues).
It holds significant part ownership of Australian located Lithium mines (and mines in Chile):
> Talison Minerals Pty Ltd was a mining company based in Australia. It was split into Talison Lithium (as of 2020 a 51:49 jv between Tianqi Lithium and Albemarle Corporation)
and:
> Tianqi Lithium Corp is a Chinese mining and manufacturing company based in Sichuan.
Ero: mining of concentrates is carried on Australian (and Chilean) soil and subject to Australian mining regulations (some of the highest in the world ATM) with the refinment of concentrates being carried in Malaysia (high standards), Australia (high standards), some in China (various standards).
The point being that mineral resource ownership and regulation is a complicated layered business and your inference is sketchy at best.
If you're interested in learning more you can either study more on your own or subscribe to a mineral intelligence database, eg:
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
Some have more regulations than others.
Chile has been looking to socialize its mining ops. So the international interests in their sources has waned a bit.
China does it cheaper but with far less concern about safety, environmental friendliness etc.
Overall these companies account for the lions share of raw lithium materials in the world. But what specific percentage and who is buying from who are totally different topics. For example why would a company like BYD look outside of China for lithium for its batteries?
BYD is a big supplier of batteries for companies like Dell, Lenovo and others. And they make car batteries for EVs in China and SE Asia.
I added 2022 Revenue for the top three:
1. Albemarle Corporation - Australia (USD $7.32 Billion)
2. Jiangxi Ganfeng Lithium - China ( USD $5.8 Billion )
3. Tianqi Lithium - China - ( USD $3.8 Billion )
4. Mineral Resources Limited - USA
5. Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile S.A. - Chile
6. Sichuan Yahua Industrial Group - China
7. Livent Corporation - USA
8. Lithium Americas Corp - USA
9. Pilbara Minerals - Australia
10. Allkem - Australia
11. Baconara Lithium - Mexico
12. Savannah Resources - UK
13. Piedmont Lithium Inc - USA
14. Grupo Mota - Portugal
We only know what people tell us or show us (unless you are fortunate to be able to boots on the ground investigation yourself). Companies and profitting parties in the lithium supply chain want us to believe that mining is ecologically sound and not abusing people. The first hand accounts and investigations of numerous investigators tell a different story in many areas of world.
If you read up on what lithium mining actually entails (in many areas it is not really mining per se)... you'll realize it is an ecological disaster. Big mining operations are big ecological disasters and small operations are small disasters. The same can be said for oil sands and other resource gathering endeavors, so I'm not trying to paint lithium mining as particularly bad. But it is not good.
The EV and battery industries are very interested in white-washing the lithium supply chain... but it is very, very dirty. I'm not an ecologist but from what I've read it appears to me that is much worse than fracking in many operations around the world.
If the Salton Sea, California, lithium mining operation really gets underway... we'll get a chance to see what "best practice" lithium recovery looks like, which will probably have much lower ecological damage per unit lithium. The Salton Sea area is already pretty messed up, anyhow.
is that taking co2 into account?
also doesn't fracking cause earth quakes?
I don't believe this is inherently true. Theoretical designs exist that solve a lot of nuclear power's problems: this issue is that it got caught in a death spiral due to Chernobyl. That ended investment and R&D, so nuclear power plants didn't improve while other sources of energy did, so they got even less investment and R&D.
Nuclear (fission) power's unprofitability predates Chernobyl to the very first reactors and continuing up to this day. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station was the first commercial reactor to come online, and it was a small reactor, cost $78M to construct in 1958. Decommissioning and cleanup 30 years later cost about $100M. Considering the plant and the resulting mess were small, I really don't think it broke even, but I can't find any economic analysis that includes all the things.
A study in 2019 found that nuclear power has not been profitable anywhere in the world.[1] The study also found nuclear power has never been financially viable, that most plants have been built while heavily subsidised by governments, often motivated by military purposes, and that nuclear power is not a good approach to tackling climate change. It found, after reviewing trends in nuclear power plant construction since 1951, that the average 1,000MW nuclear power plant would incur an average economic loss of about $8B.
And R&D in fission is complete. We know pretty much all there is to know regarding it, and reducing cost simply is not viable through more investment in R&D. We've been working on this in earnest since the late 1940's, so it's no surprise we have figured everything out other than how to do it cheaply enough to achieve economic viability. There are some nuclear power applications where economic viability don't matter, such as nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, and I expect we won't stop building those, but commercial nuclear power just can't work because of the money, and nothing else is needed to say "no," and if it was economically viable, no other objections, such as environmental, would stop it.
[1] https://www.mr-sustainability.com/stories/2020/nuclear-power...
It would take a huge capital investment to get a program like this off the ground, so it's too risky for the market. The invisible hand's rejection is not the same as impossibility.
This is a bizarre comparison. The US invested about $1.5T total in developing nuclear power. Almost nothing was invested in developing PV. If only 1% of the money wasted on developing nuclear power had instead been invested in PV, nuclear power would have been dead by 1970. A recently passed bill earmarks $6B to keep nuclear plants open. Compare to recent DoE announcement to spend $82M on PV manufacturing. Even with this nearly two orders of magnitude imbalance of spending, PV is going to beat the pants off nuclear by making tons of money compared to nuclear power losing mind-boggling amounts of it.
R&D can not make nuclear energy cheaper. It is simply commercially unviable. If you can figure out a way to make it profitable, you can have all the nuclear energy you want, but a lot of smart and capable people spanning 4 generations have already tried and failed.
They also like to post a photo of an open pit gold mine in Australia and claim that it is a lithium mine while complaining about the massive environmental impact. they never respond when I post a link with proper attribution showing that it is not a lithium mine.
the problem is the brine. which is cleanable with a lot of energy.
Sure, international corporations violate human rights, but unless you provide proof these lithium corporations are, then we can just assume they aren't.
Minerals and Resources rules for exchange listing are pretty tight with respect filing third party independant reports that assess mineral volumes and estimates, economic feasibility, environmental impact, and human rights etc.
While it's possible that some things are covered up in these relatively modern capital projects (eg: like conditions mining copper in PNG in days of yore leaving substantial impacts today) it's unlikely due to modern communications and the known fact that everything gets out and doesn't remain hidden - more so today than back when PNG was literally and figuratively obscured by clouds.
Austrlia is keeping clean, and you can knock yourself out looking into
and report anything you find to the TSX.
Given the history of Canadian mining companies, I wouldn't trust any Canadian mining company listed on the TSX to give to shits about human rights.
Giving a shit about the environment, child exploitation, etc. by larger investment funds has increased in recent decades , there's been a rise in "ethical investment".
Ergo TSX companies care more when third party reports about bad practices are filed at the exchange.
Because it's absurd to think otherwise?
I mean, using OPs logic of "Because we all know international corporations never violate human rights?" you could say that about anything.
If you're a teacher you're probably a child molester because "Because we all know teachers never molest children, right?"
Apparently the law is “absurd”
Based on your comment, the legal presumptions of innocence is "absurd".
Codified systems are mutually exclusive with any amount of "agency". Agency is required for beliefs to exist.
Ipso facto blah blah blah you're just gonna keep believing some self-serving bullshit so whatever.
Sounds like you can't defend the point.
TBH you write like a bot trained on debatebro teenagers.
You don't even have to look overseas. PG&E has caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage due to wildfires caused by cost cutting; they don't want to do the maintenance they're legally required to do. Entire communities are left homeless and people are killed. And the company gets a tiny fine and the executives get bonuses.
It's actually amazing to me that corporations don't do it more often. It pays to be a piece of shit company.
When the big ones do they are very careful about it, so they can claim to be in a grey area. Tire companies know there is child labor, but they are buying from the parents, and they make sure outside of harvest those kids get a great education (when the kids grow up their either leave, or work the plantation as medical or management staff and not labor). You can still say they are in the wrong, but they have made a place where you can understand the grey
That's a convenient way to dismiss ruthless exploitation of 3rd world populations, nations, and the natural environment.
And if you don't consider the police violence against the indigenous populations of Bolivia following their democratic elections then what are your qualifications exactly? "Lithium mining" is not the problem, of course, but the political interventions of Lithium interests has robbed millions of people of freedom.
This is a false choice really. It’s not lithium that’s causing this but the broken political system. I’m half Brazilian and just the other day I heard a mining dam break that led to a mass cancer in surrounding populations. This was Vale one of the largest companies in Brazil.
It doesn’t matter what’s being used, virtually everything that comes from developing countries causes gigantic crimes that are unimaginable to first world.
You’re selecting one specific product but it’s not logical to do so. They all cause this. And what’s the other option? Not buying products from developing countries?
Really? Please cite which regs apply in North Korea.
I am an actual miner. We have State and national regulators who visit and have authority to stop work. I have neither seen nor heard of international regulators.
How is that meant to be re-assuring?
As far as I know Chevron hasn't yet paid the money it is due to pay to the Ecuador state for past environmental damages inflicted on the ecosystem there, I'm positive they were branding their work to their stakeholders back-home as respecting "international regulation requirements".