The lithium dilemma

 Steve Miller:

A Chinese-dominated mining company has procured millions of dollars in American subsidies to extract lithium in the United States – but, given a dearth of U.S. processing capacity, the mineral is likely to be sent to China with no guarantee that the end product would return as batteries to power President Biden's envisioned green economy.

Critics say the scenario would increase U.S. energy dependence on a hostile power – one accused of using forced labor in the manufacture of both lithium batteries and solar panels – and undercuts the Biden administration's emphasis on domestic sourcing of green energy.

"We need the finished product here," said Glenn Miller, a retired professor of environmental science at the University of Nevada, Reno, who has spent decades in mining chemistry. “I would hope there is an advantage to taking that lithium and shipping it 200 miles south to process it [rather] than shipping it around the world. We should all be troubled by China’s control of [minerals]. Why can’t we do this?”

While the United States has ample supplies of lithium, it currently falls short on the capacity to process it into a usable form, meaning that the $7 billion in taxpayer money invested in the nation’s battery supply chain will have to include a foreign component. That is almost certain to include China, which produces 79% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries.

Lithium has taken the spotlight in Biden’s energy plan, since it is a key element needed to produce batteries for electric vehicles and solar panel storage. The administration acknowledges the lithium processing challenge – tacitly – in a June 2021 report produced by the U.S. Department of Energy. “The nation would benefit greatly from development and growth of cost-competitive domestic materials processing for lithium-battery materials,” the report reads.
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Despite the high strategic priority placed on lithium by the Biden administration, Beijing’s continued push for mineral dominance in the world means that “China will continue to dominate lithium chemical production for the foreseeable future,” according to a projection from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a London-based price-reporting agency.

Reliance on Chinese processing of lithium would again put the Biden administration in the politically uncomfortable position of overlooking humanitarian abuses and trade violations by China.
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 China is believed to be using slave labor to process lithium which gives it a competitive advantage to overcome the cost of two-way shipping apparently. Apparently, no US company can process lithium into batteries at a reasonable price.  That makes the price of domestic production prohibitive for a necessary part of an electric vehicle which is still very expensive compared to car's fuels by gas engines.