The Lithium War Next Door

“And all this, when they start mining, will disappear.”Beneath these rolling hills lies what many investors now call “white gold.” And just beyond Harper’s tree line, the mining startup Piedmont Lithium wants to dig up to four 500-foot-deep pits to pull out the lithium reserves that once made Gaston County the world’s top source of the soft metal now used to make batteries for cellphones and electric vehicles. Projects to mine copper, nickel and rare earth minerals — all critical ingredients to a post-fossil future — have faced similar complaints across Western states.With the roughly 3,200 acres of land it now controls, Piedmont vowed to make this county — which in the 1950s was the epicenter of global lithium production — the home of “the world’s most sustainable lithium project.” The company is spending millions on infrastructure and equipment that it said will set a new standard for reducing air pollution and noise from a mine of any kind. It has pledged to treat and recycle water, help neighbors whose water wells run dry as a result of the mining, and pay local employees salaries about 50% higher than the county average.“You couldn’t possibly design our project in a more environmentally friendly way — our team is smart, experienced and cognizant of what the rules are,” said Keith Phillips, 62, Piedmont’s chief executive and a former mining banker on Wall Street. But others worry that if a state-of-the-art mine can’t move forward in a place with a history of lithium production at a time when political and market demand is this high, then the chances of seriously slashing fossil fuel use in the world’s largest economy look slim.“Right now, the battery plants that are there in the U.S. are dependent on imports,” said Caspar Rawles, an analyst at the British-based battery supply chain research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Back in the 1970s, when miners set off dynamite to break up rocks at the now-defunct Hallman-Beam lithium mine in Bessemer City, the windows would rattle in Dean Crocker’s home.“Those blasts could be heard for miles and miles,” said Crocker, now in his 80s, a cattle farmer whose family has lived in Gaston County for seven generations.At peak capacity, Piedmont could set off multiple explosions per day as it mines deeper into the ground. But Harper, who runs Stine Gear & Machine Co. from his barn, said even a single routine blast would make it impossible for him to run his business, which relies on highly sensitive machines calibrated to carve precise grooves into metal cogs.The number of explosions will depend on where the miners are in the ore body, Phillips said, noting that local ordinances would bar Piedmont from blasting “when it’s dark, weekends or holidays.” He insisted the company has every incentive to blast as little as possible because it’s a difficult and time-consuming process.“Ideally you blast just enough so the team can move it from the processing area,” the chief executive said. In March, the firm began holding public meetings about restarting production at a shuttered lithium mine in Kings Mountain, just south of Gaston County.Livent Corp., the modern spinoff of the mining company that once owned the Hallman-Beam mine, still operates a lithium refining business in Bessemer City, where in 2019 it said it would spend $18 million to increase its output of the metal.A spokesman for Livent said the company stopped all hard-rock mining in North Carolina in 1996 and sold Hallman-Beam in 1998. While I could not find any studies or reports that independently verified locals’ claims about avian deaths, federal studies have documented the deadly effect arsenic has on animals, and examples abound of migratory birds dying after landing in arsenic-contaminated ponds.The Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation, a local environmental group focused on the region’s water systems, said modern mining techniques generally produce fewer tailings, or leftover materials, than in the 1950s, so the risk of similar arsenic contamination from Piedmont’s project is lower.But the county’s natural waterways could suffer, the nonprofit said. It may not be a popular option, either: Households on wells do not pay for water, and the company said in the application that it would not pay people’s water bills once they’re hooked up to a municipal supply.Piedmont said it “may also” supply neighbors who lose their wells with water tanks and short-term deliveries that “meet the minimum water volume used or needed by the resident prior to the groundwater level decline.” If all else fails, the company said it will “negotiate in good faith” to buy the property.“We know that there’s different depths of where some of the aquifers are. He said Risinger “left on his own accord.”)Piedmont’s opponents, Klanecky said, think “we’re going to drain all the water in Gaston County and this is going to be a desert in five years. “That’s the gold standard for the industry.”The company would, in fact, have a “different setback for different things,” Phillips said, adding that for “our pits, we’re expecting [the setback] to be 100 feet.”Piedmont Lithium got its start six years ago, when Taso Arima, an Australian investor who works on mining startups, joined forces with Lamont Leatherman, a geologist who grew up in Lincolnton, near the end of the Tin-Spodumene Belt. Crocker said he suspected Piedmont “thought Gaston County was an ignorant county, and they thought they could hoodwink us.” Harper said his first impression of the company was “gentlemen coming down from New York, thinking we were dumb hicks.”Even newer residents felt the company’s representatives had talked down to them. The processed materials then go to battery manufacturers in China, Europe, South Korea or the U.S., where automakers are increasingly sourcing their electric vehicle components.“We think our project is, from an environmental perspective, going to be a world leader, located in an area where it can be closer to important customers, car companies and battery companies,” Phillips said.At some point in the next decade, Piedmont plans to dig a second pit, also as deep as the length of two football fields. The plan is to eventually leave the final pit open as a quarry.“You build one, mine one, then mine another and backfill the waste rock,” he said.Despite years of buying up properties and studying the mining potential of the area, Piedmont did not approach the Gaston County Board of Commissioners until April 2020. Phillips said mining projects take years to fully conceive, and a local adviser had told him to wait until the company had finalized its proposal to avoid any kind of confusion over Piedmont’s plans in the county.The firm only made its first public appearance at a hearing last July. “I’m a dreamer, and I see the potential of a project like this, so I’m going to embrace it.”In response to the criticism, Phillips — dressed in a sleek, dark suit and fashionable clear-framed glasses — said at the hearing: “We haven’t spent a lot of time on community relations or government relations.”In August, Reuters reported that Piedmont indefinitely postponed its first shipments of spodumene ore to Tesla as it waited to get its permits in order, though in a public filing the company described the move as a “mutual agreement” to “extend” the “initial delivery dates.”“They might have put the cart before the horse a little bit with that deal,” said Gavin Montgomery, a battery raw materials analyst at the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.Shortly afterward, shareholders filed two class action lawsuits accusing the company of giving investors and regulators a false picture of the project being ready to go and widely supported in the area. Well, I beg to differ.”Klanecky said Piedmont would create jobs for generations of workers in Gaston County, and not just in mining.“We think property values are going to increase once this operation is out here because you’re going to be attracting people making $90,000-plus a year,” he said. A new bill from Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is trying once again to add mining royalties and new protections, though critics have said it does little to require companies to seek input from communities near the projects.When Piedmont started buying property here, Klanecky said the county had no ordinances in place to regulate mining. I think people will look back and come to the realization that this worked out an awful lot better than they thought.”But so-called flow batteries, which use external tanks of electrolyte fluids that pump through the device, will more likely “serve a part of the market that barely exists today for energy storage that can last for eight hours or more, while lithium-ion batteries will continue to be the leaders in shorter-duration storage, electric vehicles and consumer electronics,” a researcher from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado told Inside Climate News.Analysts say lithium demand is highly unlikely to drop off anytime soon — if anything, the rate of growth has exceeded projections. The high-nickel car-battery chemistry that yields longer range — a desirable trait in the U.S., where suburban sprawl means drivers face longer commute times than in other developed nations — tends to use more lithium hydroxide.Ideally, the U.S. could temper surging demand by increasing the availability of both public transit and recycling infrastructure to reuse existing lithium and other minerals, said Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College who co-authored a report on the U.S. battery supply chain for the nonprofit Climate and Community Project.“Our entire economic system is resource-intensive — but we live on a finite planet,” she said. “We could extract a lot less lithium, with fewer impacts on rural communities like those in Gaston County, if we took the opportunity of the energy transition to transform our transportation sector, building out mass transit and moving away from car dependency.”But Klanecky suggested some local opponents to the mine may have ideological blinders that make them less sensitive to the urgent realities of climate change.“This isn’t a place where you’re going to see something like the Bay Area, where everyone is going to convert to EVs because they think it’s good for the environment,” he said.Sixty-five percent of adults in Gaston County recognize that global warming is happening, 7 percentage points lower than the national average, according to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s 2021 survey.