Lithium is an essential component in Europe's green energy transition: electric car batteries rely on it!
At present most of it comes from China and Australia, but the EU is now eying up a new source: Serbia has enough Lithium to provide 90% of the EU's supply.
Most of this Lithium lies under the fertile banks of the Jadar river in the west of the country, and in recent weeks Serbs have turned out in their thousands to protest plans by Rio Tinto to open Europe's largest lithium mine. This site would span 220 hectares and extract 58 000 tonnes of lithium a year.
Rio Tinto have been buying up houses in the local area for years in anticipation of being granted a mining licence, and Serbia's president, Aleksander Vucic has recently done just this.
The problem with Lithium extraction is that it tends to poison local water supplies, aside from the aesthetic damage, so this almost certainly isn't in the interest of the local populations.
Serbia's media is controlled by the President and it is branding any protestors as fascisist or anarchists.
Western EU Hypocrites...?
This seems to be a case of the wealthy strong arming the poor, forcing them to bear the costs of the pollution to be cause by large scale mining.
Austria, for example, also has large reserves of Lithium, as does Portugal, but i guess it's a case of less authoritarian countries in which ordinary people have more power bringing more effective pressure to bear to prevent mining taking place in those countries.
It strikes me that if it's mainly the wealthy in Western Europe who are going to benefit from the raw material, they should damn well mine their own reserves first, and put more time and money into making sure the mining is done with as little environmental impact as possible.
I get that it's cheaper with economies of scale to set up in those areas where there is MORE lithium, so I guess we can justify this on those grounds, but, still, this really doesn't sit very well with me!