It’s sort of neat that the north east of the UK might get some source of jobs back, and this is definitely the right time to invest in green technologies if you don’t want to, you know, die from the climate crisis.

Having said that with labour and the conservatives backing away from green pledges and the UK not having any mines of its own, and it having comparatively low car production compared to Europe along with Brexit making it hard to export to Europes big car producing countries, it’s hard to see how this will be a commercial success.

I wish Green Lithium luck with this, but I struggle to see why the UK is the place to build this.

The focus on the UK and not the company in this is suspicious. The UK is building? No it’s not, a company called Green Lithium is building it. Reads to me like a press briefing from the conservatives to generate a bit of positive press after rishi promising to increase fossil fuel extraction, and the protests at his house. A story like this let’s them play the “business will do the right thing, look here is evidence, no more regulations needed here” card, and offer an alternative to labour on how to approach the climate crisis

Green Lithium says it plans to reduce the carbon footprint of lithium refining by using low-energy processes, renewable electricity, hydrogen gas, and carbon capture technology to achieve an 80 per cent lower carbon footprint than traditional refineries.

“So the small price you pay for shipping the material to the UK is completely outweighed by the benefits of the decarbonised process we use in the UK,” said Sargent.

Unless these low-energy, low-carbon footprint batteries are regulated, I don’t see any of these promises actually coming to fruition. They still need to compete with every other country, and all of this sounds quite expensive.

I’m all for regulating the carbon coat of batteries, but I don’t think that will happen. So I guess its more likely that these are promises made to be broken. Though even then importing raw rock from Australia is never gonna be able to beat Chinese companies mining their own lithium and processing it without shipping the rocks to the other side of the planet.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

As well as providing batteries for the rising numbers of EVs, the plant expects to cut lithium’s current carbon footprint by 80 per cent.

The UK is building Europe’s first and largest lithium refinery to produce the much-sought-after material.

Demand for the ore metal has skyrocketed in recent years as the world doubles down on the transition to renewables.

However, the boom in EV car building means manufacturers are reliant on East Asia, including China, where 89 per cent of the world’s lithium is currently refined.

“It’s the growth in battery materials that’s required to power the electric revolution, the fact that we need electric vehicles, the fact that we need grid storage and domestic storage is producing a huge demand in battery chemicals in Europe and we think by 2030 we’re going to need about 800,000 tonnes per annum,” said Sean Sargent, Green Lithium’s CEO.

“So, straight away we start with a huge dividend in carbon reduction, but we’re also producing our chemicals sustainably,” he added.

I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Why not just make cars illegal? Less batteries are better for the environment. If they invested that money into more busses we would see less use of IC and lithium battery cars.

How many is that in bicycles?

How will it help local municipalities fund transit systems? Poor people ride transit, rich people drive EVs. The UK doesn’t care about poor people?

Yes. That’s exactly what the world needs, more stuff. If we all buy something green like an electric car that spends energy moving those 2 tons everywhere we go, I’m sure we will save the planet. We just have to buy more ecological stuff. Buy more green stuff! I’m sure we can all buy our way out of this. No need to change anything as long as we buy green to save the planet, and the economy too.