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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Coal and natural gas. The batteries' promise: the quality of life that fossil fuels have provided, minus the fossil fuels themselves. Lithium carbonate in the shipping warehouse at Silver Peak lithium mine in Silver Peak, Nev. on Oct. 6, 2022. Bridget Bennett for NPR hide caption toggle caption Bridget Bennett for NPR What this means for demand for minerals like lithium is almost hard to comprehend. "We'll hit the first million [metric tons] of demand within the next few years," says Cameron Perks, a lithium expert with Benchmark Minerals Intelligence. "And then thereafter every few years adding another 1 million [metric tons] ... every few years, which is staggering." That's an incredible pace of expansion. And it's already underway. Global lithium production has already doubled in just a few years. Now it needs to do it again. And again. And again ... Silver Peak had been quietly supplying about 5,000 of those metric tons per year, with no expectation for any big future growth. Now it's invested some $60 million in an expansion, and is on track to make 10,000 metric tons a year by 2024. As the name suggests, Silver Peak was once a silver mine — the kind where men tunneled into the earth to extract ore from rich veins. But more than 50 years ago, it kicked off a revolution in lithium mining by proving you could extract the mineral from liquid, not just from rock. A pump at a pool at Silver Peak lithium mine in Silver Peak, Nev. on Oct. 6, 2022. Bridget Bennett for NPR hide caption toggle caption Bridget Bennett for NPR Tubes enter a lithium brine evaporation pool at Silver Peak lithium mine in Silver Peak, Nev. on Oct. 6, 2022. Bridget Bennett for NPR hide caption toggle caption Bridget Bennett for NPR A lithium-rich ancient volcano sits below this dry lakebed. Workers drill down beneath the playa, pump up brine that's been soaking up that lithium, and spread it out underneath the hot sun. As water evaporates out, and salt precipitates down, the liquid that's left has a higher and higher concentration of lithium. After at least 18 months spent journeying through 23 separate, progressively smaller evaporation ponds, the brine is pumped out and treated with a chemical that reacts with the dissolved lithium to create lithium carbonate — a white powder that's loaded into sacks weighing more than a ton each, which are shipped off to customers. Not all of the lithium made here goes to batteries, but if it did, it could potentially meet demand for a few hundred thousand electric vehicles per year. That makes Silver Peak a relatively small player on world lithium markets; the global auto
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