white gold
A global race is on to unearth a somewhat magical element, lithium, that is fueling our post-oil future and leading to what many are calling a modern-day white gold rush.
Lithium is a mythical metal: alongside hydrogen and helium it was one of the three primordial elements created in the Big Bang, making it one of the oldest pieces of matter in the universe. Perhaps as a result of this no other metal is quite as good at storing energy. So light it floats in oil, so soft you can cut it with a knife, so reactive that it fizzes and bangs when it makes contact with water and air. Until recently, no-one outside of a lab paid much attention to lithium but it’s this reactivity that explains why the metal is now at the heart of our current world.
If we are to eliminate carbon emissions and phase out fossil fuels we have much to electrify. We need to build many more wind turbines, solar panels and hydroelectric dams but none of this will do the trick unless we have a way of storing that energy. We need to store it to deal with the inherent vagaries of renewable sources of energy such as sun and wind. And we need to store it so that EVs can get down the road without the age-old motion-lotion. Lithium is the link between lightness and storage.
The first engineer to use lithium in battery form was Thomas Edison who landed upon a complex, and highly volatile, mixture of nickel, iron, potassium and lithium hydroxide. Edison attempted to control the chemical reaction and channel the explosive energy into an electric current and in the process realised that no ingredient was more explosive than white gold. A further issue was highlighted by Esso employee Stanley Whittingham. Every time the battery was charged/discharged the chemical structure would change and they didn’t last long. He worked out how to overcome this by shuttling lithium atoms without causing any damage, a process he called intercalation, which lead to the world’s first rechargeable and relatively safe lithium battery.
The Japanese firm Sony created the first production-ready lithium-ion battery in 1992 and they gradually proliferated into all sorts of devices before finding their true calling with the advent of the iPhone. With them being used in everything from computers to cars, the demand for lithium has now begun to outstrip our ability to extract it from the earth. Blasting the metal out of hard rock, spodumene mining, or processing it from South America’s salt/salar lakes, is raising the question of are we just replacing one form of environmental disaster with another? Australia has recently overtaken Chile as the world’s largest lithium producer and all the spodumene mined rock is processed in China.
In much the same way as we talk today about petrostates such as Saudi Arabia or Russia, the battery age is creating a new breed of electrostates – Argentina, Chile, Australia and China – that will dominate the extraction and refining of these precious, albeit dark, materials. The 20th century was defined by those who controlled the production of ‘black gold’ and it appears highly likely this century is to be controlled by a new cast of unfamiliar players and characters.
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