The main house would require considerable renovation, but the rest was exactly as they had imagined. Inacio and his partner, Milko Prinsze, had identified the perfect spot, an abandoned farmstead set in 47 acres of grassy wilderness in central Portugal. After three decades living in Amsterdam, Mario Inacio, a 50-year-old professional dancer, recently returned to his home in Portugal with plans to build a yoga retreat deep in the countryside – somewhere bucolic and isolated where guests could wake to the sound of birdsong. N ot everyone shares Cassote’s enthusiasm for lithium mining. He just wants to be back on his earthmover. It will also create a quarry like an open wound in the mountainside. If approved, the company is promising to invest $109m in the project. Savannah is waiting for the final green light from the Portuguese government for its lithium mine. The prospecting phase ended earlier this year, and his expensive new machinery is standing idle in his farmyard. In the tiny hamlet of Muro in Trás-os-Montes, Cassote has concerns of his own. “Everyone having an electric vehicle means an enormous amount of mining, refining and all the polluting activities that come with it.” “There’s a fundamental question behind all this about the model of consumption and production that we now have, which is simply not sustainable,” said Riofrancos. But because they are helping to drive down emissions, the mining companies have EU environmental policy on their side. The urgency in getting a lithium supply has unleashed a mining boom, and the race for “white oil” threatens to cause damage to the natural environment wherever it is found. (And that was before the trade row between China and Australia.) Whatever worries EU policymakers might have had before the pandemic, she said, “now they must be a million times higher”. Dr Thea Riofrancos, a political economist at Providence College in Rhode Island, pointed to growing trade protectionism and the recent US-China trade spat. It also promises Europe security of supply – an issue given greater urgency by the coronavirus pandemic’s disruption of global trade.Įven before the pandemic, alarm was mounting about sourcing lithium. Sourcing lithium in its own back yard not only offers Europe simpler logistics and lower prices, but fewer transport-related emissions. The Portuguese government is preparing to offer licences for lithium mining to international companies in a bid to exploit its “white oil” reserves. Lithium deposits have been discovered in Austria, Serbia and Finland, but it is in Portugal that Europe’s largest lithium hopes lie. Other principal suppliers, such as Chile (23%), China (10%) and Argentina (8%), are equally far-flung. More than half (55%) of global lithium production last year originated in just one country: Australia. At present, almost every ounce of battery-grade lithium is imported. (They are also used in smartphones and laptops.) But Europe has a problem. Lithium-ion batteries are used to power electric cars, as well as to store grid-scale electricity. Lithium is key to this energy transition. It is predicted that there will be 40m electric cars in Europe by 2030. After less than 12 months on the company’s books, Cassote had made what he would usually earn in five or six years on the farm. Cassote got in touch with Savannah’s local office, and the mining firm duly contracted him to supply water to their test drilling site. Initial calculations indicated that they could contain more than 280,000 tonnes of lithium, a silver-white alkali metal – enough for 10 years’ production. The exploration team of the UK-based mining company Savannah Resources had spent months poring over geological maps and surveys of the hills that ripple out from Cassote’s farm. He bought a John Deere tractor, an earthmover and a portable water-storage tank. So, in 2017, when he heard of a British company prospecting for lithium in the region of Trás-os-Montes, Cassote called his bank and asked for a €200,000 loan. Of his close childhood friends, he was the only one who hadn’t gone overseas in search of work. Living off the land in his mountainous part of northern Portugal was a grind. E ven before the new mine became the main topic of village conversation, João Cassote, a 44-year-old livestock farmer, was thinking about making a change.
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