Saturday's Energy Absurdity: The Looming Lithium Supply Trainwreck Accelerates

Saturday's Absurdity of the Day: EVs cannot displace internal combustion engine autos without lithium. The EV industry has irrevocably tied itself to lithium-ion technology for its batteries - without plentiful and affordable supplies of lithium, the industry will fail.

Here’s an excerpt from the story above:

Thousands of demonstrators blocked major roads across Serbia on Saturday as anger swelled over a government-backed plan to allow mining company Rio Tinto to extract lithium.

In the capital, Belgrade, protesters swarmed a major highway and bridge linking the city to outlying suburbs as the crowd chanted anti-government slogans while some held signs criticising the mining project.

Smaller protests were held in other Serbian cities, with small scuffles between demonstrators and counter-protesters in Belgrade and the northern city of Novi Sad, according to local media reports.

“They allowed foreign companies to do whatever they want on our land. They put us on a platter for everyone who can just come and take whatever they want,” said Vladislava Cvoric, a 56-year-old economist, during the protest.

…

Rio Tinto discovered lithium reserves in the Loznica region in 2006.

The company intends to invest $2.4bn (€2.12bn) in the project, according to Vesna Prodanovic, director of Rio Sava, Rio Tinto’s sister company in Serbia.

Critics have accused president Aleksandar Vučić’s government of setting the stage for illegal land appropriations and ignoring environmental concerns.

The demonstrations come months ahead of likely national elections in 2022, with critics of the protests accusing organisers of stirring controversy to undermine Vučić before the polls.

[End]

I spent much of 2021 writing about the looming train wreck the world will be facing in the coming years where lithium supply is concerned, and critics and lobbyists for EVs and renewables - which are also currently tied to lithium-ion tech for the paltry battery backup that exists in the power gen sector today - scoffed.

But during the course of 2021, the price for lithium skyrocketed by 477%, making the 50% jump in gasoline prices seem like a comparative pittance, and governments in the U.S. and other western democracies made no substantive moves to liberate their supply chains for this critical mineral from China, which dominates more than 90% of the global market. Nor have those western democracies done anything to speed the permitting of mining for their own resources, again content to allow China, Russia and Australia to dominate that sector globally.

Protests like the one seen in Serbia that is likely to kill this major mining project are the result of an utterly ignorant public that has not been educated to make the connection between the need to mine for lithium and the ability of their country to meet its EV goals. People want energy - they just don’t want the impacts of obtaining it in their backyards. It is a global phenomenon.

As a result, the lithium supply trainwreck I had anticipated would not set in in earnest until late 2024-early 2025 has now accelerated. We can now expect a major disruption in the EV and renewables industries due to lack of lithium supplies to set in late in 2022 or early 2023 at the latest.

The societal and economic disruptions that will inevitably result is the price the world will pay for trying to force a braindead "energy transition" that never had any basis in real-world science and technology in the first place.

Oh, and if you're going to buy an EV, make it a Tesla, since Elon Musk is the only EV CEO visionary enough to have secured his company's supplies of lithium a decade in advance. Ford and GM, by contrast, have chosen to tie their fortunes to rent-seeking the largesse of the federal government. Good luck with that.

#energytransition #lithium #EVs #renewables #mining #power #technology