Britain seeks to ramp up lithium production amid rising EV sales
[LONDON] Britain is making a big push to produce lithium – an important mineral needed to produce batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) – to meet the soaring demand from its fast-growing EV market.
Sales of EVs in the UK have risen steadily since 2019. Last year, they accounted for about a sixth – or 267,000 – of the total 1.6 million new car registrations, surpassing diesel vehicles for the first time. EVs are now second only to petrol vehicles.
Mike Hawes, the chief executive of the UK Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said that the UK’s EV sales will rise by 26 per cent to reach 337,000 this year, and go up to around 444,000 in 2024.
Three companies – British Lithium, Cornish Lithium and Northern Lithium – aim to produce a total of about 35,000 tonnes of the commodity by 2030. Even so, this is well below the projected domestic demand of 80,000 tonnes of lithium by the end of this decade, according to estimates by Cornish Lithium
Under its critical minerals policy, the UK government wants to back the domestic production of both lithium and EV batteries to reduce imports from China, a government official said recently.
In late June, French minerals group Imerys announced plans to mine lithium in the UK, and said that its mining site in Cornwall could supply as much as two-thirds of the batteries for Britain’s EVs by 2030. The aim is to produce around 20,000 tonnes a year of lithium carbonate at the site, in partnership with British Lithium.
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A spokesperson for British Lithium said this amount would be enough to equip 500,000 batteries for electric cars a year.
For this UK partnership, Imerys has an 80 per cent stake in the project, and will rely on British Lithium’s processing technology and existing pilot plant for battery-grade lithium.
The UK’s business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch said last month that the British Lithium-Imerys deal “will strengthen our domestic supply of critical minerals, which is vitally important as we seek to grow the UK’s advanced manufacturing industry and help create the jobs of the future”.
Northern Lithium, meanwhile, is working together with Cornish Lithium to produce between 5,000 and 10,000 tonnes of lithium by 2030.
Tees Valley Lithium (TVL), a leading producer of lithium hydroxide in Europe, is currently building the UK’s first – and Europe’s largest – lithium refinery. By 2030, the plant will be able to produce up to 96,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium per year, which will be equivalent to 15 per cent of the estimated demand in Europe.
“There is a major shortage of large-scale lithium production capacity in Europe”, a TVL spokesperson said. “Europe will have 700 GW of gigafactories by 2025 which will need over 325,000 tonnes of lithium per year.”
A gigafactory – a term first coined by Tesla – refers to factories that produce electric batteries at large scale, mainly for use in EVs.
Worldwide, lithium production in 2022 jumped by 21 per cent from 2021 levels to around 118,000 tonnes, indicated the latest US Geological Survey of commodities. The surge in production was in response to strong demand from the lithium-ion battery market and higher prices of the metal.
The global consumption of lithium last year was up by 41 per cent from 2021 levels to around 122,000 tonnes.
The demand for lithium around the world is estimated to increase by about 75 per cent between 2022 and 2025, largely due to governments and industrial companies ramping up efforts to secure a greater supply of battery materials as they actively promote the switch to EVs.
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