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There’s gold in them there hills
Deep in the Cornish countryside lies a metal with the potential to make vast fortunes – and turn Britain into a powerful mining nation once again. Harry de Quetteville reports on the modern-day rush for ‘green gold’. Photography By Robert Darch
Can lithium make Cornwall rich again? By Harry de Quetteville
It is a vast but hidden world. On one side of a ridge the B3274 road traffic passes oblivious through green, rural Cornwall. On the other, as far as the eye can see, the land’s verdant skin has been cut away, revealing an entire valley’s milky white flesh, sliced and scarred by the blades of industrial surgeons.
Mining has moulded this landscape for millennia. Colour is critical. White means clay, the latest fruit of this rich earth. But the granite here bears the pigments of other ores too, reds and greens, just as the rock still bears the evidence of earlier digs. There amid the debris is a fragment of rail track. ‘We find them every so often,’ says geologist Martin Wheeler, looking around the pit. ‘From old copper and tin mining.’
That, of course, was the business that transformed this region’s fortunes in the 18th and 19th centuries, before fading in the 20th. Think Poldark. Today it is clay that is in decline, appetite for its paper-whitening qualities diminishing in our digital age. But fortune hunters are not done digging in this unique corner of the country. The land has a new treasure to give up: lithium.
‘We need this raw material for the green economy. It’s going to be very important’
‘I first came here in 2017,’ says Andrew Smith, 36, who was born into a mining family in Western Australia and has run projects in the Czech Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. ‘I picked up a rock on the side of the road and had it assayed. We had a hit and traced it back to the deposit.’
Barely a couple of miles away, Jeremy Wrathall tells a story of similar serendipity. ‘In 2017 a guy phoned me, a retired geologist. He said, “Did you realise there’s an old lithium mine in Trelavour, used in the Second World War?” We started to explore it, got more and more excited, and have recently finished a major drilling campaign.’
Modern diamond-tipped drills are able to recover smooth tubes of rock, the width of a saucer, going down kilometres. These cores reveal what deposits minerals lie where, how rich and how deep. In an industrial warehouse not far from his headquarters in the town of Roche, Smith shows off hundreds of metres of samples. Like Wrathall’s, they glint with mineral flakes. It is these that are the source of the men’s excitement, and of mining projects that they hope could transform Cornwall into the seat of a modern-day rush for the new ‘green gold’ on which mankind’s departure from the oil-age depends.
If they can pull it off, they will transform the region’s fortunes, and their own, and deliver Britain a critical strategic asset in an age of trade spats and resource wars. If they don’t, theirs will merely be the latest holes in a Cornish mining landscape already shot through with evidence of their predecessors’ dashed dreams.
Light and energy-dense, lithium is the critical ingredient in batteries and, as such, underpins the global energy transition from fossil fuels to electricity. Lithium allows us to store renewable energy to use when it is dark or cold and there is no wind to turn turbines. Lithium lights up our digital world too, with its batteries for laptops and mobile phones. Above all, bigger lithium batteries power humanity’s ever-growing fleets of the electric vehicles (EVS) that are replacing petrol and diesel models, sales of which will be outlawed in the UK from 2030. It is an energy transition on a scale the world has never seen before. ‘We need this raw material for the green economy,’ says Kathryn Goodenough of the British Geological Society (BGS). ‘In the coming decades it’s going to be very important.’
As such, demand is going off the charts. Forecasts suggest that it will increase seven-fold between today and the end of the decade, from about 300,000 tonnes per year to as much as 2,000,000 tonnes. According to Defra figures, Britain imported just over 2,000 tonnes of lithium in 2018, but the country’s requirements are estimated to hit 75,000 tonnes by 2035. Just three years from now, the global battery market is forecast to be worth around $60 billion a year.
‘We think we can do 10,000 tonnes a year,’ says Wrathall of his company, Cornish Lithium. ‘They think they can do 20,000,’ he adds, referring to neighbour and competitor British Lithium, run by Smith. ‘We’re going to need lots more.’ Indeed, respected analyst
Joe Lowry suggests that lithium producers are ‘in no position’ to keep up with this demand, and that lithium supply will be the ‘limiting factor’ in EV take-up. As such lithium may end up the source of geopolitical as well as electric power, or as Defra puts it: ‘Lithium has strong potential to become a critical raw material (CRM) in the near future.’ In particular, some worry that, as Wrathall puts it, Europe and North America, which produce little lithium, could become ‘hostage to China’. ‘Lithium is one hundred per cent a geopolitical resource,’ he says.
But even China itself is scrambling to secure supplies of lithium ore. Where Beijing excels is in processing – the often dirty business of turning deposits in rock into high-quality battery material for Teslas. It relies on long-distance supply chains – trucking millions of tonnes of concentrated lithium ore from mines, often in the Western Australian desert, to ports, to ship to process in China. From there the purified lithium heads around the world to so-called ‘gigafactories’ which produce the batteries to power our cars. Green gold, it turns out, is a very carbon-intensive metal to produce.
Mining and processing everything locally
‘We’re in the window of opportunity now, where the market’s hot, there’s a need’
in Britain, then, is an attractive alternative. And Britain is rich in natural resources. ‘The Romans didn’t come for the wine and the weather,’ jokes Goodenough. ‘They came for the mining.’ The tin and gold in the astonishing 3,000-year-old map of the heavens known as the Nebra sky disk, which was found in 1999 in Germany, originated in Cornwall. Such minerals, says Smith, are the fruit of the collision 380 million years ago between Britain and the European continent, creating the south-west’s granite hills which over time became rich in deposits. It was understanding that geological history that first led him to Cornwall, to run ‘a big project where we digitised old historical [mining] maps’, seeing if he could zero in on lithiumrich granite. Eventually he followed the trail to the spot where he picked up the rock on the side of the road. From there it was literally a stone’s throw to the deposit that British Lithium hopes to turn into a major mine, whose location he insists we don’t reveal.
Cornish Lithium’s own site, at Trelavour,
is next to an old clay mine whose huge white spoil heaps are two peaks in what are still known as the ‘Cornish Alps’. It is there that Wrathall’s Second World War tip led him. ‘They probably needed the lithium for scrubbing the carbon dioxide in submarines,’ Wrathall suggests. Cornish Lithium also relied on old maps in its exploration. But they pointed the company away from so-called ‘hard rock’ deposits (in granite), and towards geothermal springs an hour’s drive further south. The hot waters beneath the tin and copper mines on United Downs, near the town of Redruth, turned out to be, as one 19th-century map notes, ‘rich in lithia’. It was the chemist William Miller who first identified the waters as ‘of unusual interest and importance’ in 1864. ‘It may prove of great commercial value,’ he wrote. Time may have finally proved him correct. In the shadow of a 19th-century mining ruin on United Downs, local waters have been pumped to the surface and found to have lithium levels of 250-260mg per litre – higher than anywhere else in the world.
Yet accessing such undoubted underground riches is far from easy. For a start, both British and Cornish Lithium have had to negotiate to secure mineral rights from local landowners, including Lord Falmouth. ‘It’s modern detective work, establishing who owns what,’ says Cornish Lithium’s Neil Eliot. Then there’s the stigma. ‘Historically we’ve had a lot of mines,’ says Goodenough, ‘but today mining has become a dirty word and the planning system is difficult across the UK.’
But things seem different in Cornwall. The county wears its scars from tin, copper and clay mining proudly. And precisely because of that history, the infrastructure modern mining requires – rail links, deep-water ports, power lines – is already in place. ‘In Africa or the Australian desert, if I was doing a similar thing, I’d have to build an airport, a camp with a gym, a road, fly in and out,’ says Smith. ‘Here people can drive to work, we can buy renewable power off the grid. On cost competitiveness we’ve got a real advantage over these other countries, because lithium, like all commodities, is an infrastructure game.’ When it comes to planning, he says, ‘the council has been quite favourable’.
Still, mining projects are notoriously prone to collapse. Lithium, despite soaring demand, is no different. Success depends on establishing how much of a mineral deposit is available, how much it will cost to extract, and then raising the money – between £200 million and 300 million for the Cornish hard-rock lithium mines – to begin extraction. The process may take a
‘Most people are a bit risk averse. You have to be like Elon Musk to pull off the impossible’
decade. Cornwall’s nascent lithium industry is perhaps only halfway through that period. ‘If we look at the market at large, the last few years have been more about securing financing for new projects than about technological challenges,’ says Lucasz Bednarski, author of the new book Lithium, The Global Race for Battery Dominance and the New Energy Revolution. Smith happily admits that ‘commercially it’s extremely risky’.
Yet when it comes to lithium in Cornwall, the challenges will be both financial and technological. Few doubt there is a lot of lithium underground. But the particular mineral that contains it – lepidolite – is unusual. Untried processing techniques will be needed to extract the lithium. ‘It may all work,’ says Goodenough, ‘but it’s all new.’ Even the technology to extract lithium directly from geothermal springs, she says, is quite new. ‘When you look at all that, the idea that Cornwall will be delivering all our lithium by 2030, say, looks optimistic.’
If it is a race to get up and running, then, it seems to be an obstacle course. Cornwall’s two lithium miners are pursuing very different tactics. From exploring to digging to processing, British Lithium is aiming to do everything in-house, while Cornish Lithium is licensing outside expertise. Each company has a – surprisingly small – laboratory filled with glass funnels and flasks, like a bumper chemistry set, where they are testing the crucial processing techniques. In British Lithium’s lab, specialist Sam de Swarte explains that her refinement recipe has 11 steps. ‘The hardest is the baking,’ she says, referring to one sequence where the mined and crushed lithium mineral has to be heated to 1,000C.
Over at Cornish Lithium’s boreholes, geochemist Becky Paisley explains the two basic methods for extracting lithium from the geothermal waters: either filtering it out, using some sort of membrane, or deploying ‘sorbents’ – materials that absorb the lithium and from which you can later recover it. Outside in the car park sit dozens of squat, square plastic tubs containing 1,000 litres of lithium-rich spring water. ‘Each one of those is a battery for your phone or electronic device,’ says Paisley.
The goal is to prove everything works at lab level, then build pilot plants and draft feasibility studies, until full-scale mining and processing plants can be built in and
alongside the old clay pits where the companies have found their lithium deposits.
Smith gives himself three years to make it all work. ‘If we don’t have traction by 2024, we won’t,’ he says. ‘We’re in the window of opportunity now, where the market’s hot, there’s a need. But if we dawdle I think we’ll miss out, and Britain will forever import its crucial commodities.’ Wrathall is more confident. ‘Ninety per cent confident,’ he says, though he admits to ‘sleepless nights’.
Helping hands may be coming from on high. ‘With lithium and batteries the Western world is starting late in the game compared to China and Australia and South Korea and Japan,’ says Bednarski. ‘But now politicians and business leaders see the need to change that.’ Both companies in Cornwall, for example, have received several million pounds in state research funding. Boris Johnson was even due to visit British Lithium before the G7 summit. ‘We painted the building, put stickers on the hard hats, all that,’ says Smith ruefully. ‘Then the Canadian delegation arrived early.’ Johnson was diverted.
It is easy to understand, however, the appeal of such buccaneering projects to No 10. ‘It is a bit Wild West, frontier stuff,’ says Smith. ‘Most people are a bit risk averse. You have to be a bit like Elon Musk to pull off the impossible.’
The price of failure is not inconsiderable. The House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee declared itself ‘astonished by the optimism of Ministers that the UK could retain its position in the automotive sector’, for example, given future challenges with lithium and battery supply, and recommended actively exploiting Cornish lithium. Little wonder. Currently the UK automotive sector is worth around £80 billion a year.
If getting mines built can be a struggle, though, the rewards can be immense. Since founding Ganfeng Lithium in 2000, China’s Li Liangbin has risen from an unassuming industrialist in cardigans and frameless glasses to become one of the world’s richest men, worth $1.4 billion in 2020. His company’s modest origins lie, says Bednarski, in the acquisition of a lithium smelter for just $120,000. Today, with stakes in lithium plants all over the world, the company is worth more than $33 billion.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific Ocean from China, lies Chile, which by geological chance has become another powerhouse of the lithium industry. There, the leading company is SQM, and it is run by Julio Ponce Lerou – former son-in-law of late military dictator Augusto Pinochet. According to Forbes, Ponce Lerou’s 30 per cent stake in SMQ means he is worth $4.3billion. Bednarksi describes him as ‘the éminence grise of the lithium world’. But there is another way of putting it. These are the modern oil barons, the green Rockefellers, vying for control of the substance that will power us into a new electric age.
For the ultimate point of lithium is to help, not harm, the environment. Yet the very act of mining carries risks. Drinking from his ‘Surfers against sewage’ coffee cup, Ben Wilson, 26, an exploration geologist with British Lithium, reckons that rather than raising finance, it is ‘the eco campaign that will be the big battle,’ in getting Cornwall’s lithium mines built.
‘Wheal Vor, there’s lots of opposition to that tin mine there,’ he says, referring to a project to resurrect an old tin mine nearby, in Breage. ‘The Hermedon [tungsten] mine has given everyone a really bad reputation,’ he adds, mentioning a project that was blamed for constant dust and noise which, residents complained, made it ‘hard to sleep. Literally everything in the house would rattle.’ Both lithium-mining companies insist that their own 20-year projects, set within existing mines, will leave the landscape in better shape than they found it.
At the Wheal Martyn Clay Works Museum, volunteer Malcolm Gould, himself a veteran of a 47-year career in mining, freely admits that historically ‘pollution has been very bad’. Clay-mine spoil was washed into local watercourses. ‘It was called “going to country”, and the rivers would run white,’ he says. The filth was such, he says, that Par, where coal from Wales was offloaded on one side of the harbour, and clay loaded up on the other, ‘was known as the black and white port’.
Only in the 1970s, he adds, did regulation begin to get to grips with such ‘devastation’. But he does not lament the past. Not for a minute. ‘A lot of people from outside might complain who’ve never had to rely on mining,’ he says. ‘If you do, you put up with the dirt, you don’t bite the hand that feeds. In Cornwall you grow up with mining, it’s a way of life.’
It is easy to forget, with constant reports of booming property prices for second homes, that Cornwall is among the poorest parts of Britain. ‘I hope to God lithium makes a go of it,’ says Gould.
Perhaps that is why Smith says his company has been ‘welcomed by locals’. ‘The mining history in Cornwall really helps,’ says Goodenough at the BGS. ‘The local people say, “We want this, we want the jobs.”’
There is a pleasing circularity to it all. After the end of the Victorian mining boom, many Cornish families left to follow the industry elsewhere, in America and Australia. ‘Every mine in Australia has a Cornishman at the bottom of the pit, that’s the old joke,’ says Smith, in his Aussie accent. ‘Now it’s all coming home.’
Lithium has been welcomed by locals who say, ‘We want this, we want the jobs’