> Exar plans to start constructing a $400 million lithium-brine plant here next year. Eventually reaching [...] about $250 million annually, at today’s prices.
> By the time the plant is running, Exar will have paid about $250,000 to the indigenous groups. And after that, the six communities would share a total of about $178,000 each year.
> Many indigenous residents were unaware of the contracts, learning about them from Post reporters who were able to review the documents at the provincial mining office.
How much of the problem boils down to education and information asymmetry? -- (e.g fracking here in NA.) -- Terrible contracts signed by small under-educated communities who only later find out they're getting screwed.
I wonder are there organizations that help small communities understand their own bargaining power and long-term impact when structuring such deals?
That's fair, it's better than the usual business that surrounds resource extraction in indigenous communities. I'll concede that. But I won't concede that "a contract was signed" => "it was ethical". The asymmetry of information, the inadequate accounting of externalities, and the duress of poverty all can make something legal unethical.
In any case, I think you're wrong saying that the article is biased. One of the quotes in the article is even a remark that there is a good and bad side to mining. It's not incorrect for the article to say that "Native people are left poor as..." because resource extraction doesn't create lasting wealth. Once the lithium is gone, the communities will still be poor while the West benefits far more from the resource inputs into its industries on a long term scale.
It is not hard to construct an argument that resource extraction is fundamentally unethical on grounds like this. Whether or not one agrees with it is another matter. I don't think making this argument is more biased than the presumption that companies negotiating with communities with far fewer resources than them is ethical until proven otherwise because there's plenty of historical evidence that it's rarely the case.
> Western open pit mining operations will have environmental remediation plans that are likely bonded.
New pits opened within the last two decades probably .. but possibly in ways that can be dodged.
Older pits nearing the end of 50 or 70 year life spans .. unlikey.
These are often "sold" to cut out companies that have no real assets to speak of and soon go bankrupt .. leaving the former owners in the clear.
Eg:
Once the largest open pit lead-zinc mine in the world, Faro Mine is now the site of one of the most complex abandoned mine remediation projects in Canada. The 25 square kilometre mine site located in south-central Yukon on traditional territory of KaskaNations was abandoned in 1998 and has since been in care and maintenance.
In 2022, we were contracted by Public Services and Procurement Canada on behalf of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada to lead the team developing the remediation plan design and quality assurance support services.
ie. Private resource extraction and profits .. public (tax payer | indigenous communities) bears the cost of cleanup and toxins.
It's the same with offshore rigs in marine environs being abandoned for the public purse to deal with.
In theory it shouldn't be happening and bons should have been held in escrow, in practice many western countries (New Zealand, Australia, elsewhere .. ) are seeing projects ending with no remediation.
> no one will object to either near a mine or along tracks
> in place known for nothing but sand and oil fields
Errr, just as a reality check, almost all mines impact people in some form or another, often indigenous people who never adopted advanced western lifestyles that they are directly impacted by with mines, pipelines, climate effects, etc.
FWiW I'm making that statement as someone with decades as an exploration geophysicist, backend developer of
>> ...are attracting renewed attention as a buffer to rising political risks in the Democratic Republic of Congo...
So this economic resurgence is based on African politics? Not a very solid foundation imho. Canada has plenty of Cobalt. Canada has plenty of everything. It's a big place. But it isn't a poor and corrupt nation where permits may be purchased and safety standards disregarded. Its resources won't ever be the cheap option. One day Congo will get its act together and then Cobalt is back where it started.
FYI, Cobalt is no ghost town. Western Canada is littered with proper ghost towns that shut when their local mine or sawmill closed. Cobalt may be sleepy and poor but nowhere near deserving ghost status.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest a journalist's opinion that the jobs and small financial inducements offered might not be adequate compensation for local residents has more to do with the fact that lithium mining tends to pollute the local environment and causes water shortages than the assumption that newspapers are biased against hardware companies (whose products they all use) because Google hurts their ad revenue.
The "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" becomes relevant if one is convinced that mining companies are totally honest, reasonable negotiators who's primary concern is solving the local communities' problems and not extracting maximum resource at minimum cost. Personally, I don't believe that. YMMV.
> Mining is done with huge vehicles that are hard to electrify ..
Mining is done with huge vehicles that have had electric drive trains for decades - Haul Paks (100+ tonne trucks) have electric motors driven by onboard diesel engines, shovel loaders that move from face to face and fill Haul Paks are mostly stationary and are powered by fat electric cables that pressurize on board hydraulics.
Fully electric Haul Paks already exist in small numbers and are increasing in number, hydrogen powered Haul Paks are still in test (last time I checked).
> and also operate in a remote low-infrastructure area where there are a bunch of big vehicles moving around and ripping up the ground all over the place, making it expensive and difficult to run any direct powerlines or such.
Iron ore ares such as the Pilbara ship almost a billion tonne per annum of ore and move more than a billion tonnes of material per year; they factor building power stations adjacent to minesites into costs and have started buying entire adjacent cattle stations in order to build out solar farms for direct power and hydrogen creation.
Mining processing plants are mostly electric, and have been so for 50+ years - crushers, screens, ship loaders, conveyors, etc all run from local power stations. The power stations are the key to "greening" mineral resource extraction - these are already scoped to be replaced by solar farms and generated hydrogen for overnight 24/7/365 operations.
The Infinity Train project is current building (and still hiring) electric trains to recover power from transporting than near billion tonnes from 600m above sea level inland to the coastal ports.
You can chase up Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals on these projects.
In general, globally, pre mine arrival local communities get a crapshoot.
They might get jobs, they'll usually get environmental issues, they often get a dedicated "company town" built, they may or may not see money from miners spill over into their community.
They might see their town bulldozed and moved on, they might get flooded with "off peak" miners gambling, chasing women, starting fights.
Sometimes they'll get jobs, and money - but not always. Mining companies tend to feed and house their own workers on many mining projects.
1.5% of $64 billion is not 98.5% is it?
You may notice I use neutral language and the question you might like to ask yourself is why might your local community give away 98.5% of $64 billion to people who were allowed to hammer four sticks in the ground and file some paperwork.
Personally I'm for it, as an Australian I have shares in various transnational proposed mining projects and will get a good return from Australian mining companies extracting resources from US soil with little return to US citizens.
Rio Tinto is certainly talking up the benefits of this to local communities:
Governments often coordinate the share of natural resources between members of the same nation, and anytime the share isn't 100% going to the people that coincidentally happened to live upon a oil deposit or lithium deposit, then they'll complain that they are being shorted on the deal.
Yet most people question why a natural resource extraction should result in a windfall for 300-1000 people at most, and leave the rest of the nation without any immediate benefit.
We can question why X people get more and Y people get less, but that's really getting into the scope of the politics of a foreign nation which I bet none of us are really capable of discussing.
The article says a tenth of the entire country's inbound trade and 15% of the entire government budget was spend buying "computer chips". And that this has "fueled a yawning trade deficit and tallied with a sharp drop in the country’s foreign currency reserves."
Maybe they'll get a good return on "the $193 million spent on computer chips" plus whatever they spent to build hydro power plants to tap that "more or less entirely unused" resource? How much would you bet against the only real money ever made here ending up in the pockets of pork barrelling politicians and bureaucrats getting kickbacks from the mining rig vendors and hydro dams/powerplant construction contractors?
That is a really interesting response and I hadn't considered any of it. TIL.
Relating to this:
> so what's going on here is that local mining companies are fishing for government subsidies with rhetoric about sovereignty based on a completely imaginary phosphate shortage crisis
Is this kind of the same as the occasional panics about rare earths? My understanding is that they're not really that rare but the environmental impacts and costs of extraction are both high enough that in essence, nobody wants to bother for so long as it remains someone else's problem and the materials remain available.
> Right now, it's an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of a problem because the mining happens in poor countries. How many cobalt and lithium mines have been approved in the U.S?
Mainland USofA is relatively mineral poor wrt economic feasibilty.
There's a reason the bulk of US Cold War yellow cake came from Africa, Canada, etc and very little from the "weak tea" leach mines in the contiguous US.
( 'Relative' meaining exactly that, the US does of course have a 64 year prospect for copper (and other resources), it's just that other parts of the world have higher grades of most things that are cheaper to extract. )
Lithium you'll find is mostly mined in Australia - mining isn't the dirty part, it's the post processing of the spodumene concentrates - this currently takes place in China, Malaysia, and elsewhere.
The US is currently building at least three spodumene concentrates facilities - one in Texas for use by Tesla.
> No nickel or cobalt is another advantage, iron in plentiful.
Nickel is a problem but you might be surprised to know that cobalt is fairly plentiful. The issue is it doesn't have a whole lot of industry usage outside of batteries. That's why it's a human rights problem. Instead of mining it locally we use small time mining operations with cheap (often child) labor.
In other words, the amounts needed to meet global demand are below the demand needed to setup industrial cobalt mining operations.
This is why iron phosphate are both great key materials. Both are highly plentiful AND highly useful outside of battery production (thus, already have industrial mining/recycling systems setup)
There was recently discussion about opening old cobalt mines in idaho (my home state). [1]
Mining booms don’t tend to have longevity, leaving behind a broken town and damaged environment.
And With an international mining company, The wealth isn’t staying local or even likely in America.
And as tax payers, the public is getting shafted too. If the lease actually had American tax payers seeing a fair share in return for their land being damaged and the wealth used up, and there was also an amenable compromise with the native Americans for whom that site is sacred, then yeah it could be okay even if it would be temporary jobs.
Rio Tinto is always extorting the Québec government for preferential rates on power to make aluminum. I don't understand why governments let companies hardball them like that. The c-suite and the trademarks can leave, the factory, the expertise and the market will still mostly be there, governments could invest and rebuild something they/the people actually have ownership of.
Good for you, I just went straight from working on a minesite as a teenager (late 1970s) into geophysical coding for global exploration surveys after writing fleet optimisation and pit design software with a segue between in multichannel marine seismic aquisition | processing .. and then worked on the backend of the pre S&P version of
> For every advanced, safe, automated mine like you describe there is another that's exactly the opposite.
Sure, by number, in fact I'd say there's more than one - shitty mines outnumber 'good' mines.
Now, how's that go by mining volume and percentage contribution to the global resource demand?
The Rio Tinto and other Anglo Australian iron ore mines in Western Australia alone put out some 800 million tonnes per annum - other mine sites for iron ore on that scale are few but equally modern - they don't hit that scale by having grubby faced children walk material out via hessian sacks across their backs.
Even the high volume coal mines are open cuts with Bagger 288 scale machines.
When you look at the bulk volume of global scale resource supply would you say that a large percentage of that material comes from "modern mines" or from mines such as Brazil's Serra Pelada [1] ?
> easily' indeed. The problems are the very large electricity demands, difficulty in storage and moving from place to place.
You might be interested in reading up on Fortescue Metals | Futures current plans and projects in action.
I linked to a National Press Club lecture by their CEO above.
They're already addressing your points by buying several large cattle stations (ie bigger than Texas ranches) that are mine adjacent to produce in situ - tackling large electricity demands via mega care solar farms and transport by being local). Raw PV materials are coming from mines they own and processing plants they hold shares in.
The amonnia fuel they use in mining can be supplemented by recovered energy from "lowering" half a billion tonnes per annum 600m from mesa to sea level (see: Infinity train).
This has been in the works for some time and they thought to hire a few talented engineers along the way.
> rock phosphate is a finite resource and the biggest supplies are mined in politically unstable places
A similarity with oil? I think it's a forgone conclusion that politically unstable places are ripe for becoming stable under whatever guise a mining nation chooses. The profits must flow.
Canadian mining companies are basically the worst of the worst. Completely psychopathic behavior, at least from what I know about their operations in the African continent. Not that canadians care, because it's far away and we just don't like talking about resource extraction in general. That our entire economy is extremely heavily dependant on oil and mining (here and abroad) might ruin the illusion for most of us here.
> It could be as simple as just forcing companies to source responsibly and only work with suppliers that have some really strict policies against using child labor.
They are already doing that.
The problem you have is that it is impossible to figure out where an atom came from.
The waste majority of cobalt is mined in traditional large operations. Only a small part of cobalt comes from small mines and only a small part of that is done with child labor.
The major cobalt buyers already work only with the big traditional mining companies. However there is a simply demand for cobalt and somebody will the smaller artistically mined stuff. There are many buyers who don't care.
Cutting out the whole mining sector outside of the large producers would also not be very ethical. There are programs underway to validate and certify some of these smaller mines but there are far to many to seriously do that from the outside.
> By the time the plant is running, Exar will have paid about $250,000 to the indigenous groups. And after that, the six communities would share a total of about $178,000 each year.
> Many indigenous residents were unaware of the contracts, learning about them from Post reporters who were able to review the documents at the provincial mining office.
How much of the problem boils down to education and information asymmetry? -- (e.g fracking here in NA.) -- Terrible contracts signed by small under-educated communities who only later find out they're getting screwed.
I wonder are there organizations that help small communities understand their own bargaining power and long-term impact when structuring such deals?
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