The environmental impact of salars is controversial, and there’s concern that the brine extracted from underground is replaced by rainwater from the surface, causing droughts and impacting wildlife.
A new process in development could ease that situation in the future but is some way off being commercially viable. “It’s called direct lithium extraction [DLE],explains Rawles. “The lithium is extracted from the brine in real time, after which the brine is pumped back into the aquifers.
EVs will massively increase the global demand for minerals like lithium and cobalt, says Rawles: “Supply chains are scaling up but nowhere near where they need to be for the energy transition.” The expectation is that supply chains will need to increase from a few hundred thousand tonnes to, in the case of some minerals, millions of tonnes by the end of this decade.
However, mining and mineral production aren’t new. Far from it, as Rawles points out: “There are risks associated with any kind of mining, whether it’s land contamination, emissions or correct rehabilitation of land. All these things are true for lithium, steel, aluminium, copper, cobalt… Anything mined out of the ground that goes into ICE vehicles as well as EVs.”
More than half of the world’s lithium is mined in Australia, where mining is subject to strict environmental regulations.
Meanwhile, around 60% of the world’s cobalt comes from the DRC, where the mining of it has become controversial. “The challenge in the DRC is that just over half of the production is from industrial mines producing massive volumes of copper and cobalt,” says Rawles. Then there’s a smaller group of industrial mines and thirdly the small artisanal mines (ASMs). “Some ASMs have been mining illegally, because they don’t have permission to extract the materials. There have also been instances of child labour. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with small-scale mining by hand, and the livelihood of thousands of people depends on it; it just needs to be done safely and meet certain standards.”
The Congolese government has taken steps to regulate ASMs’ practices, for instance mandating the 2019 creation of the Enterprise Generale du Cobalt by the country’s biggest mining firm, Gecamines.