Mining lithium uses lots of water. Unfortunately most of the lithium in the US is not in a place where there’s lots of water (Nevada, Utah, etc). Plus it is a fairly dirty process, and US environmental standards make it much more expensive than a place with more lax regulations.
Lots of the lithium deposits are on Native American lands and would disproportionately affect them. There’s other reasons, such as environmental concerns and cost. It’s easier to convince people to pollute another country for lithium and U.S. labor is extremely expensive.
it’s usually cheaper or easier to mine in a different country. The US has much higher minimum wage and better safety standards than the countries where it’s being mined from (for the time being) which makes it much more cost effective to just buy lithium from someone else.
Aside from the hurdles of permits and environmental pushback it’s just cheaper to import it than it is to spend billions of dollars and many years to build the infrastructure to mine and process it, not to mention the much higher cost of labor to hire U.S. workers. You end up with expensive national lithium that’s identical to what you can buy elsewhere.
On the whole because it’s cheaper to import, and difficult to sell investors on the idea of spending massive amounts of money to set up the infrastructure needed to extract it.
Work is ongoing by Exxon Mobil in Arkansas but it’s a massive project estimated to be complete in 2030 iirc.
Lithium is very recyclable. The more lithium we can get into our country, the better, especially while we have an artificial trade surplus from the petrodollar. This obviously isn’t the only reason, but sending printed notes in exchange for lithium is a pretty good deal.
Because getting it out of the ground is hard, expensive, and not great environmentally
Cheaper to let other countries do all that for you, countries that pay their workers less, and have fewer environmental regulations (or ignore those regulations)
On top of what everyone else is saying, the US typically also likes to not blow through all their natural resources if they don’t have to.
As an example, if we could mine the oil under our feet or ship oil from across the globe and they end up roughly the same cost (lower cost of labor overseas, but add shipping costs), it’s generally preferred to get the oil from overseas now and have the oil below our feet as an emergency backup in the future. I’m sure the same is true for lithium
Cost. In asia the labor is cheaper, they don’t have the environmental restrictions (that drive up costs) so we buy it from there. We most certainly could produce the stuff here it would just cost a lot more. I will add for some other minerals like rare earths the U.S. along with allies decided this was enough of a national security issue that it would be produced in the west despite the higher cost.
Everything we do comes at a cost. I think they fall into 3 categories, Human, Environmental, and Monetary. Monetary being generated by the other two. In this example we trade off Human and Environmental for Monetary. I think you can apply this principal to just about any fiscal scenario and quickly arrive at the conclusion. Which is usually someone getting lots of money at the cost of human and environmental suffering.
The world’s top producers are Australia, Chile, and China. All three have cheaper labor, lower cost of production, easier access to deposits, and lax environmental regulations. This is classic free trade competitive advantage. Tariffs are the only way to make US production cost competitive and that means higher prices.
Because lithium needs to be extracted and refined. The oceans alone basically contain all the lithium we would need for hundreds of years. The trouble is extracting it and purifying it.
The US has big deposits that would be economical to extract. All that needs to happen is for the necessary infrastructure to be created. In turn, this takes money and time.
The trouble here is that the US has an aversion to forward thinking and planning so while other countries were putting policies and incentives into place to encourage the kinds of industry that would allow them to seize control of the raw materials that they thought would be key to the industries of tomorrow, the US was pulling out of climate accords, drill baby drilling, scrapping incentives, and turning anything to do with a future not dominated by fossil fuels into a political hot potato.
…end result is that America is desperately behind as other major powers have consolidated their control over key materials and the facilities to process them.
It’s harder to open mines in the U.S. because of the permitting process (getting the government to sign off on your mine), labor costs (American workers are expensive), and because we lack the ability to turn these minerals into something useful without exporting them somewhere else
Labor inside of a wealthy country is expensive. Mining in any country is extremely dirty. Wealthy countries don’t want that dirt, so they pay poor countries to deal with it on their behalf. It’s not great for the poor countries.
More info: And that is why a very hotly contested and wildly unpopular lithium mine is planned to open in Serbia, right in the middle of an enormous farming valley. The corrupt politicians there are supported by the EU because it helps them keep dirty work outside of EU borders. A lot of Serbians are super angry about this because it’s going to poison their land and water to benefit wealthy nations hungry for battery-powered cars.
Rio Tinto is an especially infamous mining company that’s known for both ecological AND cultural destruction. Lithium mining will never be fully clean, but it won’t get better if wealthy places like the United States or the EU keep exporting the bad labor so they can import the resources it gleans (a.k.a. colonialism).
It costs a lot of money and takes years to develop a mine, even without environmental regulations. The development can also include things like building railroads so you can transport the lithium cheaply.
Companies will invest in mines if it looks profitable, but if foreign producers have low operation costs and prices are low, it won’t be profitable to mine in a country with a high cost of labor. Also, raising lithium production tends to lower the price of lithium, unless the demand is also increasing rapidly.
Lithium prices are currently far below the pandemic-era levels of $80k per ton. It’s tricky because by the time you open the mine, the prices might be too low for the mine to be profitable with expensive US labor.
US Miners will expect US middle class wages, health insurance, etc, whereas miners in Chile and China will do the work very cheaply.
60min did an entire piece about this. 60min should be required watching for all Americans 12+ along with the daily show for actual news… Actually…gonna add the HBO one with that Brit guy also.
It is incredibly toxic and damaging to the environment,workers, and people in area. The US is content to leave mining to poorer countries and let the damage affect people there instead.
There’s a strategic element to importing resources instead of harvesting your own. In the future they may become more rare or you may have a breakdown on relationships. Best to get what you can from international markets now and fall back on your home reserved when the prices go up or they become more difficult to attain.
Lithium is a cheap commodity. Take a look at lithium prices. Prices are down 88% from highs. There are reserves all over the world, only the easiest to extract are used.
It’s not just policy restrictions, it is definitely a cost vs return on investment situation too. They’d have to set up multiple levels of refinement, they’d have to set up the manufacturing plants to make the batteries which don’t just require lithium but a slew of other ingredients and materials which cost money and require their own refinement processes which means more infrastructure being invested into.
At the end of the day, investors know that lithium isn’t the end all be all, and that’s why they don’t want to spend the money on building out the infrastructure. They know that power supply and energy generation and storage is a market that is constantly being bombarded by new meta materials and new techniques, and those materials and techniques are a lot more efficient and better to “monopolize” via building out the infrastructure to mass-produce and distribute than Lithium is in America.
That’s what it comes down to. It’s not that nobody else had thought about “star-link” it’s that the people who had thought of it found it to be economically and technologically inefficient. Google has developed a global node tech that will be able to provide the same coverage all over the world but have stations that are terrestrially bound. As a civilization, we’re at a point where “Mars” even if it is a possibility, will require 100 years of development in order to house humanity in any significant number. We cannot be generating so much e-waste, and we need to protect the home that we’ve already got in terms of its standards of livability for us. We can’t just ignore that and operate on some sycophantic level about becoming galaxy explorers, and throw money at a problem whose true solution hasn’t been fully discovered yet.
The process of extracting lithium is … chemically nasty. It ruins a lot of land. If someone discovers it in your backyard, you will fight having them mine it, or you will move somewhere else. If it is found in a state park in your state, do you want to ruin the state park? Do you want to contaminate the water that flows downstream from that point?
Don’t worry though – the new administration is on it. Pretty soon we will be extracting lithium and all sorts of other goodies from neighborhoods all over the US, and anyone who doesn’t like it will be a terrorist. Make sure you have enough assets to be able to move.
To add on to what everyone else is saying, from what I’ve read the US also has smaller lithium reserves than other countries. And we’ve gone looking for it with numerous surveys and have only found a small amount within our borders compared to other countries. It’s possible there’s some undiscovered mountain of lithium buried out there, if so we don’t know where it is.
As a result, the the decision comes down to a) buy lithium from a country where it’s essentially lying around on the ground and easy to pick up (Chile) b) buy from a country where it’s abundant but close to the surface and relatively easy to get (China, Canada) or c) dig up the small amount we have that also requires drilling through mountains to get (the US). Clearly, everyone is taking option A and B. And it’s not just the US, it’s every country that needs to it to fill their supply chains for whatever they’re building.
If we get to the point where lithium becomes hard to mine and the drilling through the mountain option becomes comparatively more feasible, we’ll definitely do that. Similar to how the US didn’t frack for oil until the global supply started to go down and getting consistent access to oil made it economically viable.
US, exporting toxic dangerous jobs to third world countries. We have a history of exporting other countries to get cheap goods for our markets. Nothing new here. Even with greenland talk, it is the same idea.
Getting permits is very costly and people can object forcing delays or stopping the project. Lots of the lithium, being a water soluble salt, is at the bottom of dry lake beds below the sea level, the lithium never made it to the ocean. Now think, who will let you drill wells to inject chemicals so one can pump them out to recover the lithium? Not many. The oil industry can do it because they have bought and paid for our government leaders and that money that flows to these government leaders help paid for their reelection. The lithium industry, necessary for green economy, lacks the size and resources to pay off congress to get enough votes to allow exploitation without adequate environment oversite. This recovery method is very new and has not been studied and reviewed for negative impacts on ground water supplies, especially in deserts environments, some of this ground water has been there for thousands of years, no microplastics and the recharge rates are very slow due to lack of high rain levels.
The infrastructure for exacting the lithium isn’t built to the scale it’s built in other places. It’s less expensive to import from a place that has an established lithium mine than to invest in building a lithium mine in the US.
Because we don’t want the scars of strip mining all over the United States. Lithium currently cannot be recycled after its depleted so the strip mining is an ongoing process for a finite material. They jumped on the EV bandwagon too soon, should’ve focused on developing ways to reuse lithium after depletion
Current top comment lists water resources, but that’s a cop out. The salton sea brines have enough lithium for at least 250 million vehicles and are already liquid. Western Maine contains billions of dollars worth of lithium and has no water constraints.
The issue is a blanket ban on new mining. Maine in particular hasn’t opened a new mine in my lifetime because the environmental conditions are literally designed to be impossible. There’s some talk of exempting lithium from some of it, but no movement towards any kind of exploitation of the deposits.
To re-iterate what others have said while adding a bit of my own commentary: Companies will use whatever inputs are cheapest to make their goods. If US companies can get lithium sourced elsewhere for cheaper than digging it out of the ground next door, that’s what they’ll do.
It’s a similar concept to how in finance, not all debt is bad debt. If you can loan money from someone else for a cheaper “cost” than using your own, you take the loan and invest your own money in something else that pays the interest on the loan + gains more money on top of that.
If there’s a finite supply of resources and you have a lot of capital. Wouldn’t you rather pay other people to do the hard work and sell you theirs before you have to do the hard work and get it yourself?
Mainly because the US has extremely strong property rights. If you have lithium under your land, you can tell the feds to go fuck themselves, they’re not allowed to touch it unless they eminent domain your land and pay market rates for it (which just went up because there’s now valuable lithium under it), and in a lot of cases that land is more valuable than the lithium under it because land which is being worked has ongoing value, unlike land that once you remove the lithium is trashed and generally can’t be used for anything else.
A lot lithium is under Native American land, which is generally excluded from eminent domain actions because native American land is supposed to be sovereign. A lot is under national parks and other protected land in the US.
But the long and short of it is that mining is not very productive to do. You don’t make a lot of money doing it. Mining companies don’t care about national resource independence, etc. Thats what the government cares about and the government doesn’t run mines. So if you need lithium and you have a labor shortage (like the US has) why would you seek to take people off the job of designing batteries to have them dig in the dirt? Just pay the Chinese laborers to dig in the dirt and keep Americans doing the more productive work.
Ideally, you would do both, but doing both requires finding more workers, which requires immigration, and we fucking hate immigration. So either we get over that, or we throw taxpayer dollars at mine operators to chase the lithium we want domestic for national security purposes. We leave lithium in the ground because capitalism.
To open a lithium mine you have to close something else to free the labour.
You could open a lithium mine and a car factory or open two car factories, export some cars and import lithium used in car production. The latter is more profitable otherwise US would mine own lithium.
It’s money. That’s it, that’s the whole reason. Companies don’t care about 300-400 years into the future. It’s all about profit margins.
If it cost 40 dollars to extract a kilo of lithium from the ground, it will cost 10-20 dollar to just import it (exaggerated pricing)
Because not only is the manpower more expensive, environmental regulation and cleanup also raises its price. And then there’s the initial infrastructure investment. All of them $$$.
Because mining/processing lithium (and other rare earths) is dirty/destructive. If we’re going to knowingly fuck up an environment, we’d rather do it else where.
One of the largest deposits of spodumene (the rock that lithium is made from) is right here in North Carolina. There are very few places on earth that it is found and they are pit mined, which most people do not want in their back yard. Check out Albemarle Kings Mountain to see how they are reopening the Kings Mountain mine.
All rare metals are extracted from the earth in most crude way – by digging a giant hole in the ground and sifting through lot of useless material which is then dumped into a giant mounds nearby.
In short – it turns that region into a hellscape where nothing lives and pollutes air and everything nearby. So richer countries “outsource” their potential pollution to the poorer countries. That’s all basically.
a chunk of the reason why the US outsourced some resource and manufacturing (outside of cost/profit) was environmental and health issues. It’s part of the reason why the US doesn’t want all the jobs back on US soil, as there are a lot of existing regulation to make it costly/less viable.
A great read on the issue is a book titled: The War Below: Copper and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives by Ernest Scheyder
It mostly talks about copper mines, but there are a couple of Lithium mining projects he covers as well. But, most importantly it talks about tug of war between the need to transition to green energy and the environmental and cultural damage of mines.
You are at a family dinner. First you fill your plate with lots of chicken wings, then you eat from the common platter and save those in your plate for later. When the platter’s empty you still have a lot – and they are much more valuable now because of their scarcity.
Car maker has to meet a cost target of $39,999 sticker price because they feel this is the highest price the market will bear at their production capacity.
Chinese lithium batteries cost the maker $1400.
US lithium batteries, due to higher wages being paid the miners/processors/workers, due to more regulation/cleanup, insurance, etc cost the maker $3900.
Car maker picks the $1400 battery and pockets $2500 in additional profit on every car made.
So nobody buys the US made ones, causing US production to never get off the ground.
Why pay for expensive extraction that pollutes locally when you can bully someone else to sell it to you on the cheap, then leave them with the cleanup bill?
Mining for Lithium is environmentally hazardous, thus prohibited (technically two reasons)
Lithium mining is a health hazard to workers
Building a lithium mine would cost more money short term than importation
Need to create/shift infrastructure from the import to the local source, very complicated
Many sources have relationships with their exporters which would be betrayed by sourcing locally. It would be a slightly harder sell, which means less profit.
For the same reason that trump is imposing tariffs. Its so much cheaper for companies to buy from a country that uses exploited labor, so we don’t bother to give jobs to US workers and extract our own resources because nobody would buy it and we wouldn’t be able to compete, essentially making it useless.
Because people in other countries are willing to give us their lithium in exchange for worthless pieces of paper that our government creates with keystrokes. It’s a great deal! Why mine our own when we can get it from other people? It’s an environmentally disastrous industry in general, so we get to avoid polluting our own land.
I think a big factor is that building something like that displaces other economic uses for the land. So it’s not just about whether you can do it cheaper or not, it’s also about all the other potential land-uses for that land which get destroyed. Those other uses are just a lot more well-developed in a place like the USA.
Someone can build a big and destructive lithium mine in a place like the Congo, a nation wracked by civil wars, where land value utilization is very low compared to the potential profits, and they can pay workers next to nothing, and there’s a very weak central authority so almost no environmental or labor standards. The profits from that mine will be used to pay off or force subsistence farmers off their land, and if the remaining farmer’s land is poisoned: they have no power to do anything about it.
Now if you compare that to the USA, you might want to mine for lithium in a farmland region, but there are a lot of profitable uses of the land already happening. You’ll have to buy the land you need, based on its market value, but you also have the impacts on everyone else around you. If you do it at all economically, there’s going to be environmental destruction, so now you’re hurting the profits of many other people around you.
Comments
Mining lithium uses lots of water. Unfortunately most of the lithium in the US is not in a place where there’s lots of water (Nevada, Utah, etc). Plus it is a fairly dirty process, and US environmental standards make it much more expensive than a place with more lax regulations.
Because it’s cheaper.
We have chickens in switzerland. The chicken nuggets were i work come from brazil.
Lots of the lithium deposits are on Native American lands and would disproportionately affect them. There’s other reasons, such as environmental concerns and cost. It’s easier to convince people to pollute another country for lithium and U.S. labor is extremely expensive.
Because domestic labor is expensive. Cheaper to pay someone else peanuts to dig it out for us.
it’s usually cheaper or easier to mine in a different country. The US has much higher minimum wage and better safety standards than the countries where it’s being mined from (for the time being) which makes it much more cost effective to just buy lithium from someone else.
Aside from the hurdles of permits and environmental pushback it’s just cheaper to import it than it is to spend billions of dollars and many years to build the infrastructure to mine and process it, not to mention the much higher cost of labor to hire U.S. workers. You end up with expensive national lithium that’s identical to what you can buy elsewhere.
On the whole because it’s cheaper to import, and difficult to sell investors on the idea of spending massive amounts of money to set up the infrastructure needed to extract it.
Work is ongoing by Exxon Mobil in Arkansas but it’s a massive project estimated to be complete in 2030 iirc.
Why pay more for our lithium when we can get it from somewhere else for less and also keep our reserves?
Lithium is very recyclable. The more lithium we can get into our country, the better, especially while we have an artificial trade surplus from the petrodollar. This obviously isn’t the only reason, but sending printed notes in exchange for lithium is a pretty good deal.
Because getting it out of the ground is hard, expensive, and not great environmentally
Cheaper to let other countries do all that for you, countries that pay their workers less, and have fewer environmental regulations (or ignore those regulations)
TL;DR – Money
On top of what everyone else is saying, the US typically also likes to not blow through all their natural resources if they don’t have to.
As an example, if we could mine the oil under our feet or ship oil from across the globe and they end up roughly the same cost (lower cost of labor overseas, but add shipping costs), it’s generally preferred to get the oil from overseas now and have the oil below our feet as an emergency backup in the future. I’m sure the same is true for lithium
Cost. In asia the labor is cheaper, they don’t have the environmental restrictions (that drive up costs) so we buy it from there. We most certainly could produce the stuff here it would just cost a lot more. I will add for some other minerals like rare earths the U.S. along with allies decided this was enough of a national security issue that it would be produced in the west despite the higher cost.
Everything we do comes at a cost. I think they fall into 3 categories, Human, Environmental, and Monetary. Monetary being generated by the other two. In this example we trade off Human and Environmental for Monetary. I think you can apply this principal to just about any fiscal scenario and quickly arrive at the conclusion. Which is usually someone getting lots of money at the cost of human and environmental suffering.
The world’s top producers are Australia, Chile, and China. All three have cheaper labor, lower cost of production, easier access to deposits, and lax environmental regulations. This is classic free trade competitive advantage. Tariffs are the only way to make US production cost competitive and that means higher prices.
Mostly cost, but if we can get China to exhaust its reserves before we tap ours, that’s a strategic win.
It is significantly cheaper, easier and faster to import lithium
Because lithium needs to be extracted and refined. The oceans alone basically contain all the lithium we would need for hundreds of years. The trouble is extracting it and purifying it.
The US has big deposits that would be economical to extract. All that needs to happen is for the necessary infrastructure to be created. In turn, this takes money and time.
The trouble here is that the US has an aversion to forward thinking and planning so while other countries were putting policies and incentives into place to encourage the kinds of industry that would allow them to seize control of the raw materials that they thought would be key to the industries of tomorrow, the US was pulling out of climate accords, drill baby drilling, scrapping incentives, and turning anything to do with a future not dominated by fossil fuels into a political hot potato.
…end result is that America is desperately behind as other major powers have consolidated their control over key materials and the facilities to process them.
It’s harder to open mines in the U.S. because of the permitting process (getting the government to sign off on your mine), labor costs (American workers are expensive), and because we lack the ability to turn these minerals into something useful without exporting them somewhere else
Labor inside of a wealthy country is expensive. Mining in any country is extremely dirty. Wealthy countries don’t want that dirt, so they pay poor countries to deal with it on their behalf. It’s not great for the poor countries.
More info: And that is why a very hotly contested and wildly unpopular lithium mine is planned to open in Serbia, right in the middle of an enormous farming valley. The corrupt politicians there are supported by the EU because it helps them keep dirty work outside of EU borders. A lot of Serbians are super angry about this because it’s going to poison their land and water to benefit wealthy nations hungry for battery-powered cars.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cged9qgwrvyo
Rio Tinto is an especially infamous mining company that’s known for both ecological AND cultural destruction. Lithium mining will never be fully clean, but it won’t get better if wealthy places like the United States or the EU keep exporting the bad labor so they can import the resources it gleans (a.k.a. colonialism).
can only do slavery in prisons in the US to they outsource the exploitation to somehwere else
It costs a lot of money and takes years to develop a mine, even without environmental regulations. The development can also include things like building railroads so you can transport the lithium cheaply.
Companies will invest in mines if it looks profitable, but if foreign producers have low operation costs and prices are low, it won’t be profitable to mine in a country with a high cost of labor. Also, raising lithium production tends to lower the price of lithium, unless the demand is also increasing rapidly.
Lithium prices are currently far below the pandemic-era levels of $80k per ton. It’s tricky because by the time you open the mine, the prices might be too low for the mine to be profitable with expensive US labor.
US Miners will expect US middle class wages, health insurance, etc, whereas miners in Chile and China will do the work very cheaply.
60min did an entire piece about this. 60min should be required watching for all Americans 12+ along with the daily show for actual news… Actually…gonna add the HBO one with that Brit guy also.
It is incredibly toxic and damaging to the environment,workers, and people in area. The US is content to leave mining to poorer countries and let the damage affect people there instead.
It’s simple, we are the United States of NOT IN MY BACKYARD OF America.
So we can poison other people’s children instead of our own.
There’s a strategic element to importing resources instead of harvesting your own. In the future they may become more rare or you may have a breakdown on relationships. Best to get what you can from international markets now and fall back on your home reserved when the prices go up or they become more difficult to attain.
Lithium is a cheap commodity. Take a look at lithium prices. Prices are down 88% from highs. There are reserves all over the world, only the easiest to extract are used.
It’s a very dirty polluting process. Countries like China have large areas they don’t care about destroying.
Rare Earth Minerals are not really rare; it’s a very misleading term
Why destroy our own environment when we can destroy someone else’s environment?
Environmental mining permits are extremely expensive so it’s cheaper to just let someone else extract the lithium elsewhere and then import it.
Why use up your own when you can take from others?
It’s not just policy restrictions, it is definitely a cost vs return on investment situation too. They’d have to set up multiple levels of refinement, they’d have to set up the manufacturing plants to make the batteries which don’t just require lithium but a slew of other ingredients and materials which cost money and require their own refinement processes which means more infrastructure being invested into.
At the end of the day, investors know that lithium isn’t the end all be all, and that’s why they don’t want to spend the money on building out the infrastructure. They know that power supply and energy generation and storage is a market that is constantly being bombarded by new meta materials and new techniques, and those materials and techniques are a lot more efficient and better to “monopolize” via building out the infrastructure to mass-produce and distribute than Lithium is in America.
That’s what it comes down to. It’s not that nobody else had thought about “star-link” it’s that the people who had thought of it found it to be economically and technologically inefficient. Google has developed a global node tech that will be able to provide the same coverage all over the world but have stations that are terrestrially bound. As a civilization, we’re at a point where “Mars” even if it is a possibility, will require 100 years of development in order to house humanity in any significant number. We cannot be generating so much e-waste, and we need to protect the home that we’ve already got in terms of its standards of livability for us. We can’t just ignore that and operate on some sycophantic level about becoming galaxy explorers, and throw money at a problem whose true solution hasn’t been fully discovered yet.
The process of extracting lithium is … chemically nasty. It ruins a lot of land. If someone discovers it in your backyard, you will fight having them mine it, or you will move somewhere else. If it is found in a state park in your state, do you want to ruin the state park? Do you want to contaminate the water that flows downstream from that point?
Don’t worry though – the new administration is on it. Pretty soon we will be extracting lithium and all sorts of other goodies from neighborhoods all over the US, and anyone who doesn’t like it will be a terrorist. Make sure you have enough assets to be able to move.
Also, it takes years to go from first drill in the ground to a producing mine.
simple: cost.
It’s cheaper to import than to develop the resource domestically.
To add on to what everyone else is saying, from what I’ve read the US also has smaller lithium reserves than other countries. And we’ve gone looking for it with numerous surveys and have only found a small amount within our borders compared to other countries. It’s possible there’s some undiscovered mountain of lithium buried out there, if so we don’t know where it is.
As a result, the the decision comes down to a) buy lithium from a country where it’s essentially lying around on the ground and easy to pick up (Chile) b) buy from a country where it’s abundant but close to the surface and relatively easy to get (China, Canada) or c) dig up the small amount we have that also requires drilling through mountains to get (the US). Clearly, everyone is taking option A and B. And it’s not just the US, it’s every country that needs to it to fill their supply chains for whatever they’re building.
If we get to the point where lithium becomes hard to mine and the drilling through the mountain option becomes comparatively more feasible, we’ll definitely do that. Similar to how the US didn’t frack for oil until the global supply started to go down and getting consistent access to oil made it economically viable.
US, exporting toxic dangerous jobs to third world countries. We have a history of exporting other countries to get cheap goods for our markets. Nothing new here. Even with greenland talk, it is the same idea.
Getting permits is very costly and people can object forcing delays or stopping the project. Lots of the lithium, being a water soluble salt, is at the bottom of dry lake beds below the sea level, the lithium never made it to the ocean. Now think, who will let you drill wells to inject chemicals so one can pump them out to recover the lithium? Not many. The oil industry can do it because they have bought and paid for our government leaders and that money that flows to these government leaders help paid for their reelection. The lithium industry, necessary for green economy, lacks the size and resources to pay off congress to get enough votes to allow exploitation without adequate environment oversite. This recovery method is very new and has not been studied and reviewed for negative impacts on ground water supplies, especially in deserts environments, some of this ground water has been there for thousands of years, no microplastics and the recharge rates are very slow due to lack of high rain levels.
Permitting to mine is a very long drawn out process
There’s this project started in the past few years that will extract lithium from California’s Salton Sea
https://www.cthermal.com/projects
It’s a VERY dirty and polluting process. Better to let someone else destroy their environment while keeping our clean.
The infrastructure for exacting the lithium isn’t built to the scale it’s built in other places. It’s less expensive to import from a place that has an established lithium mine than to invest in building a lithium mine in the US.
answer: i worked in the e-waste industry for over a decade. everything ‘green’ = brown in a brown skinned country
It’s very much a “not in my back yard” proposition. Lithium mining is a ugly, polluting process (as is all open mining to be honest).
If you can get it cheaper elsewhere you do. US labor is expensive. Us restrictions on pollution are much stricter.
Because we don’t want the scars of strip mining all over the United States. Lithium currently cannot be recycled after its depleted so the strip mining is an ongoing process for a finite material. They jumped on the EV bandwagon too soon, should’ve focused on developing ways to reuse lithium after depletion
ELi5:
Why use ours when we can use theirs and save ours for later when they’re all out and the price skyrockets?
Also its really messy and uses a lot of water to refine, we can also let them pollute up somewhere NOT HERE, and still have it all in the long run.
The “Not in My Back Yard”igans.
Current top comment lists water resources, but that’s a cop out. The salton sea brines have enough lithium for at least 250 million vehicles and are already liquid. Western Maine contains billions of dollars worth of lithium and has no water constraints.
The issue is a blanket ban on new mining. Maine in particular hasn’t opened a new mine in my lifetime because the environmental conditions are literally designed to be impossible. There’s some talk of exempting lithium from some of it, but no movement towards any kind of exploitation of the deposits.
To re-iterate what others have said while adding a bit of my own commentary: Companies will use whatever inputs are cheapest to make their goods. If US companies can get lithium sourced elsewhere for cheaper than digging it out of the ground next door, that’s what they’ll do.
It’s a similar concept to how in finance, not all debt is bad debt. If you can loan money from someone else for a cheaper “cost” than using your own, you take the loan and invest your own money in something else that pays the interest on the loan + gains more money on top of that.
Environmental regulations make it too costly to mine here. This is a really good discussion for folks on trade policy and regulations.
If there’s a finite supply of resources and you have a lot of capital. Wouldn’t you rather pay other people to do the hard work and sell you theirs before you have to do the hard work and get it yourself?
Mainly because the US has extremely strong property rights. If you have lithium under your land, you can tell the feds to go fuck themselves, they’re not allowed to touch it unless they eminent domain your land and pay market rates for it (which just went up because there’s now valuable lithium under it), and in a lot of cases that land is more valuable than the lithium under it because land which is being worked has ongoing value, unlike land that once you remove the lithium is trashed and generally can’t be used for anything else.
A lot lithium is under Native American land, which is generally excluded from eminent domain actions because native American land is supposed to be sovereign. A lot is under national parks and other protected land in the US.
But the long and short of it is that mining is not very productive to do. You don’t make a lot of money doing it. Mining companies don’t care about national resource independence, etc. Thats what the government cares about and the government doesn’t run mines. So if you need lithium and you have a labor shortage (like the US has) why would you seek to take people off the job of designing batteries to have them dig in the dirt? Just pay the Chinese laborers to dig in the dirt and keep Americans doing the more productive work.
Ideally, you would do both, but doing both requires finding more workers, which requires immigration, and we fucking hate immigration. So either we get over that, or we throw taxpayer dollars at mine operators to chase the lithium we want domestic for national security purposes. We leave lithium in the ground because capitalism.
To open a lithium mine you have to close something else to free the labour.
You could open a lithium mine and a car factory or open two car factories, export some cars and import lithium used in car production. The latter is more profitable otherwise US would mine own lithium.
It’s money. That’s it, that’s the whole reason. Companies don’t care about 300-400 years into the future. It’s all about profit margins.
If it cost 40 dollars to extract a kilo of lithium from the ground, it will cost 10-20 dollar to just import it (exaggerated pricing)
Because not only is the manpower more expensive, environmental regulation and cleanup also raises its price. And then there’s the initial infrastructure investment. All of them $$$.
It’s cheaper when the people who dig it out of the ground get paid less
Because mining/processing lithium (and other rare earths) is dirty/destructive. If we’re going to knowingly fuck up an environment, we’d rather do it else where.
One of the largest deposits of spodumene (the rock that lithium is made from) is right here in North Carolina. There are very few places on earth that it is found and they are pit mined, which most people do not want in their back yard. Check out Albemarle Kings Mountain to see how they are reopening the Kings Mountain mine.
Because we put in mining laws NOT to mine it to protect wildlife any other natural resources.
All rare metals are extracted from the earth in most crude way – by digging a giant hole in the ground and sifting through lot of useless material which is then dumped into a giant mounds nearby.
In short – it turns that region into a hellscape where nothing lives and pollutes air and everything nearby. So richer countries “outsource” their potential pollution to the poorer countries. That’s all basically.
a chunk of the reason why the US outsourced some resource and manufacturing (outside of cost/profit) was environmental and health issues. It’s part of the reason why the US doesn’t want all the jobs back on US soil, as there are a lot of existing regulation to make it costly/less viable.
Hey. The more we import now, the more we’ll have to recycle when Lithium is all out of the ground.
A great read on the issue is a book titled: The War Below: Copper and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives by Ernest Scheyder
It mostly talks about copper mines, but there are a couple of Lithium mining projects he covers as well. But, most importantly it talks about tug of war between the need to transition to green energy and the environmental and cultural damage of mines.
why would you take food out from your fridge when you can buy all of your brothers fridge
Because we’d rather sit on our resources and use others’ while we can just print $$$ and get those resources for free. This jig will be up eventually
You are at a family dinner. First you fill your plate with lots of chicken wings, then you eat from the common platter and save those in your plate for later. When the platter’s empty you still have a lot – and they are much more valuable now because of their scarcity.
It’s like Starcraft.
If you can mine the minerals on THEIR side, once they’re gone you can keep building armies with the minerals on YOUR side.
It’s cheaper to import it from somewhere else than to mine it up here.
Car maker has to meet a cost target of $39,999 sticker price because they feel this is the highest price the market will bear at their production capacity.
Chinese lithium batteries cost the maker $1400.
US lithium batteries, due to higher wages being paid the miners/processors/workers, due to more regulation/cleanup, insurance, etc cost the maker $3900.
Car maker picks the $1400 battery and pockets $2500 in additional profit on every car made.
So nobody buys the US made ones, causing US production to never get off the ground.
It’s easy to preach about going green when the processes of that are polluting another country instead of your own.
Why pay for expensive extraction that pollutes locally when you can bully someone else to sell it to you on the cheap, then leave them with the cleanup bill?
Because lithium in the ground is not the processes, refined, and manufactured lithium in batteries.
The processing and refining and manufacturing are extremely energy intensive industries that are also quite toxic and create a lot of pulltion.
US environmental regulations either prevent or make it prohibitively expensive for companies to do that domestically here in the US.
Meanwhile China has no EPA, no labor regulations, no penalties for polluting the environment or poisoning the next town over, etc…
So the vast majority of processing refining and manufacturing happens in China where it can be done significantly cheaper than here
For the same reason that trump is imposing tariffs. Its so much cheaper for companies to buy from a country that uses exploited labor, so we don’t bother to give jobs to US workers and extract our own resources because nobody would buy it and we wouldn’t be able to compete, essentially making it useless.
Because people in other countries are willing to give us their lithium in exchange for worthless pieces of paper that our government creates with keystrokes. It’s a great deal! Why mine our own when we can get it from other people? It’s an environmentally disastrous industry in general, so we get to avoid polluting our own land.
Once their lithium runs out, we still have ours.
I think a big factor is that building something like that displaces other economic uses for the land. So it’s not just about whether you can do it cheaper or not, it’s also about all the other potential land-uses for that land which get destroyed. Those other uses are just a lot more well-developed in a place like the USA.
Someone can build a big and destructive lithium mine in a place like the Congo, a nation wracked by civil wars, where land value utilization is very low compared to the potential profits, and they can pay workers next to nothing, and there’s a very weak central authority so almost no environmental or labor standards. The profits from that mine will be used to pay off or force subsistence farmers off their land, and if the remaining farmer’s land is poisoned: they have no power to do anything about it.
Now if you compare that to the USA, you might want to mine for lithium in a farmland region, but there are a lot of profitable uses of the land already happening. You’ll have to buy the land you need, based on its market value, but you also have the impacts on everyone else around you. If you do it at all economically, there’s going to be environmental destruction, so now you’re hurting the profits of many other people around you.
why spend your own natural non-renewable resources when you can spend someone elses and keep yours for whenever nobody else has?