Thailand has discovered nearly 15 million tonnes of lithium deposits, a shot in the arm for the southeast Asian nation’s goal of becoming a regional hub for electric vehicle production. Electric car batteries require lots of lithium.
The discovery means Thailand has the world’s third largest lithium resources, behind Bolivia and Argentina. But the real challenge is the refining of lithium, which is dominated by China. Right now, America is dangerously reliant on China for lithium, which is used in batteries, medicine, and industrial applications.
Tesla’s Texas lithium refinery will come online by 2025, but until then, China will provide the lion’s share of the world’s refined lithium. Hopefully, Thailand will be able to set up its own refinery, but that won’t happen by 2025. Thailand assembles gas-powered cars, but it is not an industrial powerhouse like Germany or China.
The 14.8 million tonnes of lithium are found in two separate sites in the southern province of Phang Nga, near Malaysia.
“We are trying to find out how much can we use from the resources we found. It takes time,” said a Thai government official.
Lithium is a key component in the manufacture of batteries used in electric vehicles, as well as smartphones and other electronics.
The Thai government that came to power six months ago has made it a priority to try to boost Thailand as a regional production hub for electric vehicles, building on Thailand’s history of assembling conventional cars for Japanese car companies.
A U.S. volcano might contain an even larger supply of lithium, although the size of that deposit is unclear, and environmental regulations may delay tapping that supply. The Salton Sea may contain even more lithium still, although California environmental regulations could be an impediment to accessing it.
Although lithium is needed for things on the green agenda, such as electric cars, green activists have blocked lithium mining in other places in America like Maine. In the past, the world’s richest known lithium deposit was in the woods of western Maine, worth perhaps $1.5 billion, but Maine’s greens made it impossible to mine it, reported Time Magazine.
Rather than working to promote energy independence in areas like lithium, the Biden administration is making America reliant on foreign energy, by making it harder to mine and drill for oil and natural gas. The Biden administration canceled the seven remaining oil and gas leases in Alaska’s ANWR, even though oil drilling took up only a microscopic fraction of that desolate area, and posed no problem for wildlife.
As the Heritage Foundation notes, Biden took many steps to reduce America’s supply of oil and gas, which will drive up gas prices and make America more reliant on foreign producers:
On Mr. Biden’s first day in office, he issued an executive order directing the Secretary of the Interior to put a …. moratorium on the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program. That program directs the Bureau of Land Management to lease certain lands in Alaska for oil and gas extraction.
A few days later, he issued another order “pausing” oil and gas leases on all public lands and waters.
According to the Bureau, Alaska’s Coastal Plain is “some of the most highly prospective land on Alaska’s North Slope.” It contains billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. It is a king’s ransom of energy wealth, and the law requires that the administration make it available for extraction….The result: Mr. Biden has unlawfully trapped much of America’s vast energy reserves behind a wall of bureaucratic red tape, leaving them unavailable now that the country needs them.
Biden has left America much more vulnerable to foreign oil embargoes, by depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Thanks to his policies, America can’t fully offset any sudden cuts in oil production overseas. Joe Biden has left the reserve partly empty, by releasing oil from it on multiple occasions, such as 50 million barrels in November 2021, 210 million barrels beginning in March 2022. Democrats kept President Trump from expanding the reserve back when oil was dirt cheap. The reserve now is now partly empty, and nowhere near its storage capacity.
In March 2020, President Trump proposed adding oil to the strategic petroleum reserve when oil cost only $14 per barrel (compared to $90 per barrel today), but Democrats blocked him from doing that.
Biden’s releases of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve have been illegal, because they weren’t in response to an emergency, and left the reserve with insufficient oil to respond to a true emergency. Biden’s actions violated the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act, notes Mark Robeck, the former deputy general counsel of the Department of Energy. The law prohibits releases from the reserve unless there is a severe domestic supply shortage, an act of sabotage or natural disaster. Biden’s “unlawful release of oil from the SPR threatens national security by depleting” the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Robeck says.
