There’s lithium in them thar hills
This certainly seems like good news:
The USGS is saying that Appalachia contains an estimated 2.3 million metric tons of undiscovered, economically recoverable lithium, enough to replace 328 years of U.S. imports at last year’s level. …
As lithium demand is projected to grow more than 48-fold by 2040, driven by electric vehicles and energy storage technologies, securing new domestic sources has become increasingly critical.
USDS Director Ned Mamula notes that the US was the dominant world producer of lithium three decades ago. The newly published lithium resource estimates are preliminary, and much more work is needed to fully realize our current mineral capacity.
Spodumene in pegmatites
$65B lithium mother lode hidden beneath Appalachian Mountains could supply US with power for centuries
https://nypost.com/2026/04/29/science/65-billion-lithium-haul-could-power-us-for-328-years/
$65 bil doesn’t sound like much compared to mining for gold or silver. It’s a key element for the processes inside a battery, but it doesn’t take much lithium to do so.
It won’t be trivial to get the permits to mine lithium in Appalachia.
When Solid State batteries arrive, we won’t need quite so much lithium.
“ Spodumene in pegmatites”
I was going to lookup what heck that means but I decided guessing would be more fun.
Something about potato patties?
Star Trek transporter accident?
Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed,
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was shootin’ at some food,
And up through the ground come a silvery flood.
Lithium, that is. Metal salts. High voltage.
Well, the first thing you know old Jed’s a billionaire,
The EV folks said, “Jed, move thy self up there!”
Said, “California is the place you ought to be,”
So they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly.
Hills, that is. Charging stations. Movie stars.
(Thanks to Google Gemini)
Lithium mining tends to produce toxic dust and contaminated water supplies. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t do it, but I wonder if people will care a little less about safety concerns because it’s set to happen in Appalachia. (At least J.D. Vance could finally have a good topic for a “Hillbilly Elegy” sequel.)
[Spodumene in pegmatites] It wasn’t a snarky comment; actually science. (I looked it up.)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0032591022010233
I’m assuming that modern mining techniques will be able to handle dust and water contamination. I hope so.
Although I rather liked the potato patties.
Kate:
You go “girl”!
TR:
Based on what, practices in China or the third world?
The mineral that contains the lithium (spodumene). The type of rock that has the mineral (pegmatites, veins with large crystals).
Hard rock mining most likely will be preferred. Some Appalachian states have long long histories of mining. Some Appalachian states even allow fracking and mining!
Resources mostly get extracted from the ground, unless you are speaking of taxes, or unnatural resources (perpetual motion batteries of the future (sarc)).
Lots of regulations on state and federal level govern how you can mine and what you have to do when the mine is played out.
The red/green bastards first goal is to stop any natural resource extraction. We can live on unicorn spoor/farts after all.
@TR: … if people will care a little less about safety concerns because it’s set to happen in Appalachia.
The people of Appalachia have had mixed experiences with coal mining. They live there, they care and they vote in those states. Plus the environmental movement and regulations give them plenty of ammunition.
Lithium mining can be done but it will likely take years to work out the details.
Natural resources NOT extracted from the ground include evaporite minerals from saline brines or seawater, and deuterium (heavy water) extracted from seawater (Norway in the 1930s early 1940s, before the UK and Norwegian resistance blew up the hydroelectric extraction plant).
I’m not counting wind and solar power, as they consume more than produce, anything useful IMO.
I also read somewhere that lithium can be extracted from coal mine tailings, which might be a terrific way to clean up and reclaim old mining sites and leave them improved.
Lithium mining tends to produce toxic dust and contaminated water supplies.
Musk is doing it in Texas with a new process, alkaline based, cleaner, and recycles the water, IIRC. It works with the same spodumene ore as found in the Appalachians. The Scottish highlands and the Atlas mountains are part of the same ancient mountain chain as the Appalachians, so I wonder if lithium ore might be found there as well.
Some notes.
“Pegmatites are extreme igneous rocks that form during the final stage of a magma’s crystallization. They are extreme because they contain exceptionally large crystals and they sometimes contain minerals that are rarely found in other types of rocks.”
(https://geology.com/rocks/pegmatite.shtml)
Spodumene is a mineral found in pegmatites, but it’s rare. Its formula is LiAl(SiO3)2, so it can be mined for lithium. Pegmatites are rare, and spodumene is rare in pegmatites. It’s a hard target for mining, nothing like oil or coal. The USGS report that’s making so much news is more about politics than science. It doesn’t contain any new geological information, and the maps I’ve seen are extremely misleading. The maps suggest that there are huge lodes of lithium spread out over the Appalachian Mountains. Getting the lithium out of the mountains is more akin to finding an Easter egg that my mother hid on the moon seventy years ago. Having said that, I’m a strong supporter of reviving hard-rock mining in the US, whether it’s for spodumene or something else.
Finally, a personal note. I was once doing some fieldwork in the mountains of New Mexico. As part of the trip, we went to an old spodumene mine that was little more than some interconnected holes in the ground. Claustrophobic. After quite a bit of hammering, I was lucky enough to find a spodumene crystal as big as my fist. Sadly lost in one of my many moves.
Maybe the enviros can be stopped by declaring it a national emergency
What little I know about investing in Lithium production:
Copilot Search
Sociedad Química y Minera (SQM) Overview
Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile S.A. (SQM) is a Chilean multinational chemical and mining company headquartered in Santiago, Chile, specializing in the production of specialty plant nutrients, iodine, lithium, and industrial chemicals Wikipedia+1.
Core Business & Products
SQM operates in the chemicals and mining sector, with a strong focus on:
Lithium – lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide for electric vehicle batteries, energy storage, and industrial applications Yahoo Finance+1.
Potassium-based products – potassium chloride, potassium nitrate, and specialty fertilizers for agriculture Yahoo Finance.
Iodine and derivatives – used in pharmaceuticals, food, industrial chemicals, and electronics Yahoo Finance.
Industrial nitrates – sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate, and specialty blends for glass, explosives, metal processing, and more Yahoo Finance.
Its production facilities are primarily located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, including the Salar de Atacama and Salar del Carmen.
Apparently, the Atacama desert is very lithium rich and it sounds like easy pickings. Processing water could be a problem.
“Gold is where you find it.”
Lithium isn’t gold but market price determines if it is worth the costs of exploration, permitting, mining, processing, and remediation. Economic geology.
Politics (permitting, economic stability, political stability) is very important as mining projects can be very expensive, have long lead times, and risky. Investors have to risk their capital usually.
— Huxley
No kidding!
Coal mining is the economic lifeblood of many towns and areas of Appalachia. In some cases it has also been an environmental catastrophe. In some places entire mountain tops have been sheared off and the rubble dumped into the rivers.
I can’t fault the locals for having mixed feelings.
So now we wait to see who has already bought land, mineral rights, or options in the areas included in the “New” discoveries.
Bolivia has extensive lithium reserves—an estimated 20% of world reserves— but its hopes of becoming a big producer have a long history of not being realized. While Bolivia’s lithium production has stagnated, neighboring Chile and Argentina have increased their production to many multiples of Bolivia’s production. (Given the Bolivian attitude towards those neighbors, this is a pill that is difficult to swallow. )
With its decline in natural gas production—-thanks, Evo—there is hope of increased revenue from increased lithium production, but those hopes are more hopes than actuality. The article says that lithium prices have crashed, from $90k/ton to $10-20k /ton.
https://boliviabrief.substack.com/p/lithium-bolivia-is-losing-a-race
Gringo:
Thanks for the link to the very informative article in “The Bolivia Brief” substack.
For those who might be curious, it’s worth noting that the Bolivian deposits are utterly different from those recently described in the USGS report on the Appalachian reserves.
In Bolivia, lithium is found in brine under the surface of salt flats. The brine is pumped out, and the lithium extracted. The substack article provides a detailed description of the political obstacles to this seemingly simple process.
Litigation will tie up extracting any of it for years to come. Treehuggers will sue to stop it,.
“Litigation will tie up extracting any of it for years to come. Treehuggers will sue to stop it,”
The tree huggers will drive their electric vehicles to the protests that aim to shut down the production of the batteries for the cars they want us all to drive.