Metals needed to power electric cars may be right under our noses
Lithium, nickel and cobalt for green energy use being explored in South West and County Durham
Cornwall and the North East could become hotspots in Britain’s race to secure critical metals to power the green industrial transition. China dominates the supply for batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and green energy infrastructure, including lithium, nickel and cobalt, and the rare earths that power wind turbines.
In Cornwall, two companies are exploring for lithium in geothermal waters and centuries-old china clay mines, in a possible gold rush for metals that could be worth billions.
A third company, Northern Lithium, is hoping to extract the minerals from hot saline brines within the Weardale Granite of County Durham.
A site on the Humber has been proposed for the UK’s first rare earths processing plant, which could feed into a new hub of green industry, building batteries and wind turbines.
The South West lies on lithiumenriched granite, which forms the outcrops of Dartmoor, Bodmin and St Austell, stretching to the Isles of Scilly.
“If you look at Cornwall on Google Earth, it looks like a lunar landscape around St Austell, because of the china clay industry,” said Lucy Crane, the senior geologist at Cornish Lithium.
“Some of these existing open pits have the most potential for lithium.”
The lithium market is expected to grow 16 per cent every year until 2027, due to demand for electric vehicles. And from 2024, British-made car batteries will need to be manufactured domestically, or risk a 10 per cent tariff to access the EU market. To produce 3million EVs a year the UK will need 154,000 tonnes of lithium per annum, nearly 40 per cent of the 2020 global market, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (BMI).
Some 25 per cent of the UK’s needs could be met from British supplies, according to BMI. But it is unlikely to ever be economically competitive with China’s state-sponsored supply chains.
“National security always comes at a slight cost,” said Alexander Stafford MP, co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on critical metals.
Cornish Lithium also promises to be more environmentally friendly than other mining methods, which have been linked to water and soil contamination, since it relies on existing pits and geothermal waters.
This could prove valuable as makers look to clean up supply chains, with talks under way on creating a UK “trust mark” for clean metals. “Lithium mining could be the Achilles heel in the environmental credentials of EVs,” said Paul Anderson, of the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials.
The UK is being urged to develop facilities to recycle and process used batteries and rare earth magnets, 80 per cent of which are currently exported. Such facilities can be developed quicker than domestic mines, and support the industry by developing the processing part of the supply chain, says the University of Birmingham’s Policy Commission.
Two projects spun out of the university have received government backing, including a patented way to recycle rare earth metals.
“The secondary market’s a huge opportunity for the UK,” said Prof Allan Walton, of HyProMag, which is developing a process to recycle magnets from computer hard drives.
Securing the primary material is only part of it, and must be matched with investment in processing plants and battery gigafactories to maintain control over the process.