Researchers find new way to shape tiny gold pieces for electronics

Staff Writer | April 3, 2023 | 

Gold nugget. (Reference image by Hans, Pixabay.)

Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have found a way to melt nano gold nuggets using highly charged ions.


In detail, the scientists bombarded extremely small pieces of gold, consisting of a few thousand atoms and with a diameter in the order of ten nanometers, with multiply-ionized xenon atoms. This made it possible to change the shape and size of these gold pieces in a targeted manner.

In a paper published in the journal Small, the scientists explain that up to 40 electrons were removed from the atoms, so they are highly electrically charged.

The highly charged ions then hit small gold islands placed on an insulating substrate—and then different things happened: The gold islands became flatter, they melted, or they evaporated.

“Depending on how highly our ions are electrically charged, we can trigger different effects,” Gabriel Szabo, first author of the paper, said in a media statement.

The highly charged ions hit the tiny gold nuggets at elevated speed—at around 500 kilometres per second. Nevertheless, it was not the force of the impact that changed the gold islands.

“If you shoot uncharged xenon atoms at the gold islands with the same kinetic energy, the gold islands remain practically unchanged,” Szabo said. “So the decisive factor was not the kinetic energy, but the electrical charge of the ions. This charge also carries energy, and it is deposited exactly at the point of impact.”

Throwing gold out of balance

As soon as the positively charged ions hit the nano gold pieces, they snatched electrons away from the gold. In a large piece of gold, this would have no significant effect: Gold is an excellent conductor, the electrons can move freely, and more electrons would be supplied from other areas of the gold nugget.

But the nano-gold structures are so small that they can no longer be regarded as an inexhaustible reservoir of electrons.

“The charged energy of the impacting ion is transferred to the gold, thus the electronic structure of the entire nano-gold object is thrown completely out of balance, the atoms start to move and the crystal structure of the gold is destroyed,” head researcher Richard Wilhelm explained. “Depending on how much energy you deposit, it may even happen that the entire nano-gold piece melts or is vaporized.”

The effects of the ion bombardment can then be studied in an atomic force microscope. Depending on the charge of the ions, the height of the gold pieces is reduced to a lesser or greater extent.

“Just as our models had also predicted, we can control the impact of the ions on the gold—and not by the speed we give our projectiles, but rather by their charge,” Szabo reported.

According to the team, improved control and a deeper understanding of such processes are important for making a wide variety of nanostructures.

“It’s a technique that allows you to selectively edit the geometry of particularly small structures. That’s just as interesting for the creation of microelectronic components as it is for so-called quantum dots—tiny structures that allow very specific tailor-made electronic or optical effects due to their quantum physical properties,” Wilhelm said.

Barrick Gold, PNG ink new deal to restart Porgera mine

Cecilia Jamasmie | March 31, 2023 |

The Porgera mine in Papua New Guinea. (Image courtesy of Barrick Gold.)

The Porgera gold mine in Papa New Guinea (PNG), halted since 2020, is closer to resuming operations as the country’s government, Barrick Gold’s local subsidiary and New Porgera have inked a new deal to speed up the mine restart.


Through the New Porgera Progress Agreement (NPPA), inked late Thursday, all parties have committed to push Porgera’s reopening forward, starting by filing for a special mining lease.

“It’s been a long journey but in the process we have secured the buy-in of all the stakeholders,” Barrick’s chief executive Mark Bristow said. “The reopening of the mine would represent another victory for our host-country partnership model which has been so successful in Tanzania and has now also been adopted for the new Reko Diq copper-gold project in Pakistan,” Bristow said.

Barrick and its partner China’s Zijin Mining became embroiled in a dispute with the government and locals in 2020 over benefits sharing while attempting to renew the mine’s license.

The standoff was resolved in April 2021 through two deals, which gave the PNG government a majority stake in Porgera. Barrick and Zijin agreed to halve their stakes.

New Porgera, as the mine is called now, is 51% owned by PNG stakeholders, including local landowners and the Enga provincial government.

Economic benefits will be shared 53% by the PNG stakeholders and 47% by Barrick Niugini Limited, the mine operator.

The vast gold mine is an open pit and underground operation in the Enga province of PNG, about 600 km (370 miles) northwest of Port Moresby.

It hosts an orebody with measured and indicated resources of 10 million ounces and inferred resources of 3.4 million ounces of gold.

It produced about 600,000 ounces of gold in 2019, before being put on care and maintenance.

After initial ramp up and optimisation of the Wangima pit, Porgera is forecast to produce an average of 700,000 ounces per year.

GOLD MAFIA

Zimbabwe to investigate gold-smuggling allegations

Cecilia Jamasmie | April 4, 2023 | 

Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa in 2018. (Image courtesy of The World Economic Forum.)

The government of Zimbabwe has broken the silence around allegations of gold smuggling and money laundering exposed in an Al-Jazeera documentary last month, saying on Tuesday that it will launch an inquiry into the claims.


In a four-part documentary released on March 23rd, the news network shows individuals allegedly affiliated with Zimbabwean government smuggling gold to evade western sanctions.

According to Al-Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit), the gold mafia is licensed to buy the precious metal from small producers that would otherwise have been smuggled out of the country. The group then exports the gold to Dubai, where the proceeds of the metal sales is transferred into bank accounts to make the transactions look legitimate.

“Government takes the allegations raised in the documentary seriously, and has directed relevant organs to institute investigations into the issues raised,” Information Minister and Publicity Minister Monica Mutsvangwa said in the statement. “Any person found to have engaged in acts of corruption, fraud or any form of crime will face the full wrath of the law.”

The broadcaster has also alleged the money laundering and gold-smuggling rings involve millionaires, one of whom was accused of almost bankrupting Kenya through a similar, corrupt scheme also involving gold.

“It is concerning that the documentary suggests that authorities do not complete sufficient due diligence into potential investors – including official gold traders,” Transparency International says.

“The revelations are a possible source of information to bust criminal networks that are actively engaging in gold smuggling and laundering money from Zimbabwe and other selected African countries,” the organization adds.

Uebert Angel, presidential envoy and ambassador-at-large to Europe and the Americas since March 2021, was secretly filmed saying how easy it was for him to move $1.2 billion, given his diplomatic immunity.

Other individuals filmed or named in the documentary as being part of smuggling rings include Zimbabwe Miners Federation President Henrietta Rushwaya – believed to be the niece of President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Gold accounts for almost half — over $2 billion — of the Zimbabwe’s exports. But the nation faces strict international sanctions that makes it harder for locals to export the precious metal through official channels, according to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.

Figures from the World Bank show that half of the country’s estimated 16 million people live in extreme poverty – on $30 or less monthly.

The first two episodes of “Gold Mafia” have triggered outrage in the landlocked country and generated quite the buzz on social media.

The last two episodes are expected to air this month.

Watch episode one of the documentary here:

 

High-quality concrete produced with coal fly ash

Staff Writer | March 31, 2023 | 

Heavy-metal-free coal fly ash improves cement strength and flexibility. (Image courtesy of the Tour lab/Rice University).

Researchers at Rice University are employing flash Joule heating to remove toxic heavy metals from fly ash, a powdery byproduct of coal-based electric power plants that is used frequently in concrete mixtures.


In a paper published in the journal Communications Engineering, the scientists explain that using purified coal fly ash reduces the amount of cement needed to produce concrete and improves the quality of the latter.

According to the experts, the production of cement accounts for roughly 8% of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. To address this issue, chemist James Tour experimented with replacing 30% of the cement used to make a batch of concrete with purified coal fly ash. The process improved the concrete’s strength and elasticity by 51% and 28%, respectively, while reducing greenhouse gas and heavy metal emissions by 30% and 41%, respectively.

“You can use less concrete if you use coal fly ash. However, fly ash contains heavy metals,” Tour said. “Often, we try to fix one thing and we mess something else up. In our effort to do something with this waste, namely coal fly ash, we were polluting our environment because the heavy metals were leaching out. Water carried it into our environment and contaminated our soil along roadways, etc.”

The researcher pointed out that roughly 750 million tons of coal fly ash are produced worldwide each year. The new flash Joule heating-based process, however, can remove up to 90% of the heavy metals in it using zero water and making it fitter for infrastructure use.

“Basically, we mix the fly ash with carbon black, because fly ash does not conduct electricity, and the carbon black makes the mixture conductive,” Bing Deng, lead author of the study, said. “Next, we place the mixture between two graphite or copper electrodes and use a capacitor to supply a short current pulse to the sample. This current input brings the sample temperature up to about 3,000 degrees Celsius. The high temperature makes the heavy metals evaporate into a volatile stream which is then captured.”

Deng noted that by using this method, it is possible to eliminate the heavy metals from coal fly ash with high efficiency. For different heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, nickel and lead, the removal efficiency registered was up to 70% to 90% in just one second.

Flash Joule heating was also shown to work on different coal fly ash compositions resulting from the combustion of coal extracted from various geographical locations.

“There are two main classes of fly ash with different inorganic compositions, Class C and Class F,” Deng said. “We found that our method works for both kinds of coal fly ash. It also works for other hazardous wastes like red mud or bauxite residue. This shows that the process can become a generalized approach for large-scale industrial solid waste decontamination.”
Civil engineers happy

Following the positive results in the chemistry lab, the new concrete was tested by civil engineers. They found that by replacing 30% of the cement in a concrete mixture with the purified coal fly ash, the compressive strength and the elastic modulus of the composite increased significantly.

“This is very meaningful for structural engineering and the construction industry because stronger structures can be built with less cement,” Wei Meng, co-lead author of the study, said “That is why this research is valuable to civil engineers.”

The Tour lab’s process also allows for the evaporated heavy metals to be collected in a vacuum chamber rather than released into the environment. Moreover, the energy consumed during the process is relatively low.

“We calculated that energy consumption is about 532 kilowatts per ton,” Meng said. “If we convert this to Texas electricity prices it comes out at about $21 per ton. The life cycle analysis shows we can actually extract value from these waste materials.”

Factbox: Automakers accelerate the drive to secure battery raw materials

Reuters | April 3, 2023 |

The first Tesla Model S. (Image by Steve Jurvetson, Flickr).

Rising demand for electric vehicles (EV) around the world is encouraging automakers such as Tesla Inc, Volkswagen and Stellantis NV to step up efforts to secure raw materials needed for making batteries.


Following are some of the deals major automakers have announced with suppliers and miners:

TESLA

26-Aug-2022 – Panasonic Holdings Corp, a supplier to Tesla, is in talks to build an additional EV battery plant in the United States at a cost of about $4 billion.

01-Mar-2022 – Australia’s Core Lithium will supply up to 110,000 dry metric tonnes of Spodumene concentrate, a chief source of lithium, over four years starting in the second half of 2023.

01-Nov-2021 – China’s Ganfeng Lithium will supply undisclosed volumes of battery-grade lithium for three years starting 2022.

22-July-2021 – Australia’s BHP Group will supply nickel from its plants in Western Australia. Quantities, timing not disclosed.

VOLKSWAGEN

26-Sept-2022 – Volkswagen announced a $2.9 billion battery parts joint venture with Belgian materials firm Umicore, becoming the latest European automaker to bring battery supplies closer to home in the shift towards electric vehicles.

23-Aug-2022 – Volkswagen intensified efforts to secure access to key battery materials lithium, nickel and cobalt by striking a cooperation agreement with top supplier Canada. No financial details were disclosed.

08-Dec-2021 – Vulcan Energy Resources will provide lithium hydroxide for five years starting 2026. Vulcan extracts lithium from geothermal sources in Germany’s Upper Rhine Valley region.

08-Dec-2021 – Belgium’s Umicore will supply cathode materials for Volkswagen’s European battery cell factories under a joint venture. It will start production in 2025 with 20 gigawatt hours for the carmaker’s plant in Salzgitter, Germany.

STELLANTIS

10-Oct-2022 – Carmaker Stellantis has signed a non-binding preliminary agreement with GME Resources to secure supplies of nickel and cobalt sulphate for electric vehicle batteries.

24-June-2022 – Stellantis will invest 50 million euros ($50.3 million) to buy an 8% stake in German-Australian start-up miner Vulcan, becoming its second largest shareholder and extending a lithium supply agreement to 10 years.

2-June-2022 – Controlled Thermal Resources will supply up to 25,000 metric tons per year of lithium hydroxide over 10 years from a project in California.

29-Nov-2021 – Preliminary deal with Vulcan for lithium produced using geothermal energy from Germany. Over five years starting in 2026, Vulcan will supply 81,000-99,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium hydroxide.

RENAULT

1-June-2022 – Moroccan miner Managem will supply 5,000 tonnes of low carbon cobalt sulphate under a seven-year deal starting from 2025.

21-Nov-2021 – Vulcan will supply 26,000-32,000 metric tonnes of battery-grade lithium chemicals for initial six years starting 2026.

08-Oct-2021 – MoU with Finnish nickel and cobalt miner Terrafame to supply nickel sulphate. Quantities and timeline not disclosed.

MERCEDES BENZ

23-Aug-2022 – Mercedes-Benz strikes cooperation agreement with Canada to secure access to lithium, nickel and cobalt. It will explore a strategic partnership with Rock Tech Lithium (RCK.V) which would supply the carmaker and its battery partners with up to 10,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide a year from 2026.

BMW

5-Aug-2022 – BMW signs a non-binding memorandum of understanding with European Lithium Ltd for the supply of lithium hydroxide.

7-June-2022 – U.S. startup Lilac Solutions, backed by BMW, was competing for mining partnerships in Bolivia to tap into the world’s largest resources of lithium.

TOYOTA

1-Aug-2022 – A joint venture of Toyota and Panasonic will buy lithium from ioneer Ltd’s Rhyolite Ridge mining project in Nevada to build EV batteries in the United States.

04-Oct-2021 – BHP Group will supply nickel sulphate from Western Australia to Toyota and Panasonic’s joint venture. Details were not disclosed.

GENERAL MOTORS

3-Aug-2022 – GM makes prepayment of $198 million to Livent Corp for a guaranteed six-year supply of lithium from 2025 at a contractual price per tonne. Volume not disclosed.

02-July-2021 – GM will make a “multimillion-dollar investment” in and help develop Controlled Thermal Resources Ltd’s Hell’s Kitchen geothermal brine project near California’s Salton Sea. The project could be producing 60,000 tonnes of lithium – enough to make roughly 6 million EVs – by mid-2024.

12-April-2022 – Miner Glencore will supply cobalt, secured from its Murrin Murrin operation in Australia, to be used in GM’s Ultium battery cathodes. Details were not disclosed.

FORD

22-July-2022 – Ioneer Ltd signs binding offtake agreement with Ford to supply lithium from Rhyolite Ridge in Nevada.

14-July-2022 – Ford Motor, SK On and SK Battery America create joint venture to build and operate an EV battery plant in Tennessee and two plants in Kentucky.

29-June-2022 – Australia’s Liontown Resources will supply up to 150,000 dry metric tonnes per year of spodumene concentrate, a source of lithium, from its Kathleen Valley project in Western Australia for five years starting 2024.

11-Apr-2022 – Ford signs preliminary deal to purchase 25,000 tonnes of lithium annually from Lake Resources’ Kachi project in northern Argentina.

22-Sept-2021 – Ford partners with startup Redwood Materials to form a “closed loop” or circular supply chain for electric vehicle batteries, from raw materials to recycling.

($1 = 0.9939 euros)

(By Bartosz Dabrowski, Ina Kreutz, Agnieszka Gosciak, Tristan Chabba, Dagmarah Mackos, Anastasiia Kozlova, Nilanjana Basu, Yuvraj Malik and Kannaki Deka; Editing by Susan Fenton and Bernadette Baum)

Mine waste finds new life as source of rare earths

Reuters | April 4, 2023 | 

Image: Phoenix Tailings

Sweden, South Africa and Australia are at the forefront of a push to transform piles of mine waste and by-products into rare earths vital for the green energy revolution, hoping to substantially cut dependence on Chinese supply.


Prices of the minerals used in products from electric cars to wind turbines have been strong, and a rush to meet net-zero carbon targets is expected to further boost demand.

Europe and the US are scrambling to wean themselves off rare earths from China, which account for 90% of global refined output.

Six advanced projects outside China, including one operated by Swedish iron ore miner LKAB, are now being developed to extract the materials from mining debris or by-products.

Australia’s RMIT University estimates there are 16.2 million tonnes of unexploited rare earths in 325 mineral sands deposits worldwide, while the US Idaho National Laboratory said 100,000 tonnes of rare earths each year end up in waste from producing phosphoric acid alone.

The six projects, processing material from mineral sands, fertiliser and iron ore operations, are targeting output of over 10,000 tonnes of key elements neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) oxide by 2027, analysis by Reuters and consultants Adamas Intelligence showed.

That, Adamas says, is equivalent to some 8% of expected demand for the two rare earths, vital for making permanent magnets to power EV and wind turbine motors.

Potentially they will cut the expected deficit in the materials by upwards of 50%, data from Adamas and the Reuters analysis showed.

“These projects are the low-hanging fruit in the supply chain at the moment,” said Ryan Castilloux, managing director at Adamas.

“There’s more demand growth coming in the near to medium term than production, so there’s an opportunity for these readily accessible sources of supply.”
Quicker than new mines

Recovering rare earths from waste is much quicker than setting up new projects from scratch. A new mine that state-owned LKAB is planning to develop at Europe’s largest known deposit of rare earth oxides could take up to 15 years to launch.

In contrast, its project to isolate rare earths from byproducts from two existing iron ore mines in northern Sweden is due to kick off in four.

Material from an initial stage of iron ore processing, which is currently deposited in a tailings dam, will be retained and go through further treatment stages.

“We want to make sure we extract as much value as possible, and when we come to the critical minerals, we have those in our ores already,” said David Hognelid, LKAB’s chief strategy officer for special products.

The company will extract phosphorus for fertiliser, fluorine and gypsum in addition to rare earths.

In South Africa, Rainbow Minerals is also planning to process stacks of waste from years of phosphate mining.

But the biggest such project is in Australia, where mineral sands producer Iluka is gearing up to process 1 million tonnes of stockpiled by-products that have been building up at its Eneabba site since the 1990s.

It is building a rare earths refinery due to open in 2025 that together with related infrastructure is expected to cost between A$1 billion ($677.1 million) and A$1.2 billion, helped by a government loan.

New technology

A key element to making new projects viable is technology developed to separate the rare earths.

Rainbow Minerals will use a new process developed by US company K-Technologies based on ion chromatography, which is common in the pharmaceutical industry and other sectors.

LKAB will be sending its material for separation to Norway’s REEtec, in which it is the biggest shareholder.

Commodity trader Mercuria also bought a stake in REEtec for a new division that targets metals needed for the energy transition.

“REEtec fits the narrative of building processing capacity for rare earths in the part of the supply chain where we think there’s a bottleneck,” said Guillaume de Dardel, head of energy transition metals at Mercuria.

“The company’s technology has a lower environmental footprint compared to the legacy solvent extraction process essentially used for rare earths separation in China.”

In the US, Phoenix Tailings, funded mainly by venture capital funds, is using new technology developed by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“There’s zero waste, zero emissions and we’re also doing it competitive with Chinese prices. We’re not going to rely on government to fund us,” said Chief Executive Nick Myers.

Prices of rare earths have climbed in recent years, making new projects more viable. Those of NdPr alloy in China, while down from a peak seen last year, have nearly doubled over the past three years.

($1 = 1.4769 Australian dollars)

(By Eric Onstad; Editing by Veronica Brown and Jan Harvey)

US-based researchers push for more realistic battery science

Staff Writer | April 4, 2023 |

Prius Li-ion battery. (Reference image by Duncan Rawlinson, Flickr.)

Battery researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are proposing the idea of fundamental science taking into account the way industry works when it comes to developing EV components.


In an article published in the journal Nature Energy, the scientists wrote that, for instance, the way materials behave in a small laboratory sample is very different from the way they work in a thousand-litre drum.

“Usually when we do fundamental research we do not care too much about cost,” Jie Xiao, lead author of the study, said in a media statement. “But for industrial manufacturing, both the materials and processing need to be cost-efficient. For example, our tendency in the laboratory is to work with the purest raw materials we can obtain, to get the battery materials with the best possible performance. The question we need to be asking now is, ‘what is the tolerance of our system to different levels of impurities?’ It’s a different mindset.”

Xiao added that in the future, researchers might think about designing experiments that look at the effects of different kinds of impurities and different amounts of impurities to define the tolerance level and reduce manufacturing costs.

They can even start thinking about ways to take advantage of certain impurities to enhance material performance while reducing industry manufacturing costs.

“These are pressing questions that require a shift in research priorities, and a collaborative mindset to work across the cultures of academia and industry,” Xiao said.

To reduce the cost of manufacturing, industry seeks high production rates and high efficiency. But these two factors—speed and high volume—can trigger quality control issues.

To increase manufacturing speed, it is important to understand the root causes of production line limits. This is why Xiao and his co-authors reviewed four different methods to detect detrimental metal impurities in battery components that can cause battery failure. In addition, they investigated why production line sensors limit production speed. And they discussed how the combination of online diagnostics and artificial intelligence can enable smart manufacturing.

These and several other research opportunities outlined in the study point the way to bridging the often-difficult gap between laboratory research and commercialization success.

“National Laboratories can help industry to identify the scientific problems in manufacturing first by using their unique scientific tools and facilities, address them at the industry-relevant scale, and help lower the risk and cost manufacturers face in scaling up,” Xiao said.

“We see this article as a service to the scientific and industrial research communities, so they can find ways to come together and revisit what it means to do fundamental research collaboratively in a different way.”

Europe’s lone lithium refinery prepares for new wave of rivals

Bloomberg News | March 31, 2023 |

Credit: Rock Tech Lithium

For 47 years, a chemicals producer in London’s commuter belt has been running a small lithium refinery that’s the only one of its kind in Europe. Now Leverton Lithium is expanding as the rush to secure supplies of the key battery metal intensifies.


The pivotal role of lithium-ion batteries in the electric-vehicle revolution is driving the construction of about half a dozen refinery projects across Europe. At the same time, the strategic importance of those developments has been underlined by the European Union’s initiative to cut its dependence on China for critical raw materials.

Lithium prices surged last year as electric-vehicle demand took off, creating bonanza margins for miners and refiners. While prices have fallen sharply over the past few months, European refinery executives are confident the boom in demand will create a lucrative market that’s big enough to accommodate all of the projects under construction.

“Every Western automaker has a lot of interest in our product,” Dirk Harbeke, chief executive officer of Rock Tech Lithium, said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “We assume that by the end of this decade we will need around 10 converters of the size that we are currently building.”

On Monday, Rock Tech Lithium broke ground on its refinery in Brandenburg, Germany, which is set to come online in 2025. About 115 miles (185 kilometers) away in Bitterfeld, AMG Advanced Metallurgical Group NV said it will begin producing lithium hydroxide in the fourth quarter of this year, initially with an annual output that’s enough for 500,000 electric vehicle batteries. That would make it the first lithium refinery in mainland Europe.

“Everyone is now trying to get hold of these materials,” said Heinz Schimmelbusch, AMG’s CEO.

At an industrial port in the northeast of the UK, Tees Valley Lithium and Green Lithium are planning to build two separate refineries within a few miles of each other. In Finland — a critical industrial hub in Europe’s nascent battery supply chain — South African miner Sibanye Stillwater Ltd. is building a €588 million ($616 million) refinery.

Back in Basingstoke — a small town southwest of London — Leverton has teamed up with German chemicals giant HELM AG to fund a massive expansion of its own. That investment of several hundred million euros could include new plants in Europe.

Still, the barriers for new entrants is high, with feedstock costs alone set to exceed a $1 billion a year for large plants, according to Martin Kuzaj, an executive board member of HELM and a director of Leverton.

“You need to have deep pockets,” he said. “Everyone is saying they will build, but you need to look at how many are actually building,” he said by phone.

The EU is looking to boost production by speeding up permitting and opening up new sources of funding under landmark legislation introduced this month. Brussels is negotiating a deal with Washington in a bid to reduce their dependence on China for critical minerals. In return the US may offer EU companies greater access to some of the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies and tax credits.

The US wants to create a club of like-minded countries that agree to reduce their reliance on China for key green metals like lithium, cobalt and nickel. With demand for lithium projected to jump 17-fold by 2050, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is aware of the challenge.

“We know this is an era where we rely on one single supplier — China,” von der Leyen said in a speech on Thursday. “We will need more independence and diversity when it come to the key inputs needed for our competitiveness.”

Ultimately, the plants will need more than government backing to thrive, and the focus in Europe’s embryonic lithium industry is on shoring up supplies to feed the plants and striking deals with car-makers who were caught short by last year’s supply squeeze. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during last year’s boom that lithium refining is a “license to print money,” but the steep decline in prices seen since then offers a reminder of the commercial risks involved.

While some of the refiners are building mines to lock in some of their raw materials, others will be buying purely from the open market, in a strategy that could leave them exposed if there’s another supply squeeze.

Refiners’ profits can quickly wither if the cost of raw materials rises faster than the price of the lithium chemicals they sell, in a trend that started to play out toward the end of last year’s boom. That serves as a reminder that the plants — and the entire electric-vehicle supply chain — are at the mercy of the miners and their ability to bring on new production quickly enough to meet spiraling demand.

“You need to think about who can finance these projects, and who has the backup as a company,” said Kuzaj. “You need to have the right partners with you.”

(By Mark Burton, Oliver Crook, Carolynn Look and Petra Sorge, with assistance from Bryce Baschuk)

Australia sees lithium exports matching thermal coal by 2028

Bloomberg News | April 2, 2023 

Greenbushes lithium mine in Western Australia. (Image by Calistemon, Wikimedia Commons.)

Australia sees its booming lithium sector matching thermal coal’s importance within five years as the world increasingly shifts from fossil fuels to clean energy.


Exports of the battery metal are seen at A$19 billion ($13 billion) in the year to June 2028, matching the record seen for the current financial year, according to government projections released Monday. Meanwhile, the value of power station coal shipments will drop 71% in the period.

Australia has benefited from the global shock to commodities markets following post-Covid supply bottlenecks and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February last year. Mineral exports are set to reach a record A$464 billion in the year through June 2023, despite a recent cooling of prices, before plunging to A$289 billion by 2027-28, nearer levels from a decade earlier.

The data show the growing role the metals vital to global electrification, such as lithium and copper, are set to play in Australia, one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel exporters. Mining and energy accounts for almost 14% of the economy in the nation, which is currently the biggest shipper of lithium and the second-biggest provider of thermal coal.

While lithium prices are unlikely to return the records set last year, partly a result of global carmakers competing over limited supply to meet ambitious electric vehicle targets, increased output should see the battery metal match thermal coal as the fifth-biggest export. Along with copper it is the only one of the 12 biggest energy and metal exports that will hold or increase its value, according to the report.

Earnings from shipping copper are set to rise to A$15 billion in 2027-28 from A$13 billion this year. Demand for the red metal, which is used in electrical wiring and is vital in most clean energy technologies, will as much as double over the next decade, according to S&P Global.

Australia has no existing industry that could fill the gaps left by the declining values of fossil fuels, which are expected to drop as the world moves to carbon-free energy, and of iron ore, which is set to see demand plateau over the next decade as China’s growth slows.

Green hydrogen is the only industry that could match fossil fuel export earnings, according to a government report released in January. But while many massive-scale projects have been proposed, none has begun construction and a wide market for the zero-carbon fuel doesn’t yet exist.

(By James Fernyhough)

South Africa pushes to delay coal plant closures
Bloomberg News | March 31, 2023 \

Dragline in the open pit of Isibonelo coal mine in South Africa. Credit: Anglo American

South Africa has told rich countries backing its $8.5 billion energy transition deal that it wants to delay the closure of some units at its coal-fired power plants, people familiar with the situation said.


Years of mismanagement and corruption have decimated South Africa’s coal-dependent power sector but connecting the renewable energy units envisaged under its Just Energy Transition Partnership will take longer than expected.


With blackouts often exceeding 10 hours a day, the government is under pressure to hold on to whatever generation capacity it has.

The government has yet to make a decision and no formal request has been submitted to its JETP partners, but they are likely to take a pragmatic attitude given the power crisis and political constraints, the people said. They asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the talks.

Unveiled at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, the JETP is meant to help South Africa end its dependence on coal and meet its target of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Under the agreement, which was formally signed last year, a mix of loans, grants and debt guarantees from Germany, France, the US, UK and the European Union will help South Africa build out renewable alternatives.

Troubled state power utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. closed the dilapidated Komati plant last year and is due to close another 5 of its 14 remaining coal-fired plants by 2030.

Vikesh Rajpaul, who runs the Just Energy Transition office at Eskom, said life extensions are not being considered for the aging plants but some units may have to be kept open longer than planned to address the electricity crisis.

“There is an understanding and appreciation for the energy shortage that we have,” he said of talks with JETP partners.

Vincent Magwenya, a spokesman for the South African presidency, didn’t immediately respond to a text message or answer his phone. The funding partners all said they remain committed to the JETP, without commenting on the possibility of delays.

(By Antony Sguazzin and Paul Burkhardt)