Someone on reddit pointed out that this deposit is useless without facilities to process it into usable lithium, and currently almost all of that capacity exists outside of the US. They are in the middle of building a massive facility in California, but even after that is built, it won’t be big enough to process even half of US need for lithium processing. So this headline is yet another US win that will be turned into a loss by the Trump administration.
Discovering a huge deposit of easily accessible lithium is the kind of event that could make this kind of factory appear.
And regardless the kind of resource being mined, environment regulations are useful to limit environmental damage. As long as it’s sensible and enforced fairly, and not crafted specifically to manage renewables energy sector.
Could, yes. In the current economic climate, with Trump going back and forth by diktat? No company is going to take on the capex in the hopes that everything goes according to plan.
