“Lithium” re -drawing the political geography of “critical minerals”

The new American administration must reconsider its entire “lithium” policy in dealing with other countries, by focusing on the Western hemisphere.

The year 2025 will be pivotal to the political geography of critical minerals, given the new energy policies pursued by the administration of President Donald Trump, and the executive orders that are largely incompatible with the policies of former President Joe Biden.

In particular, the “lithium” industry is a great importance for energy security, national defense, and the potential global transformation (albeit slow) to clean energy, and it is driven by its primary role in electric car batteries and energy storage systems.

While the United States has large resources of “lithium”, China is the undisputed dominant player in the fields of “lithium” batteries, electric cars and energy storage systems in general.

While there are many people in Washington, DC, who may believe that the United States is able to catch up with a pink view.

“Lithium Triangle”

What the United States can do is to seek to create a new energy space in the Western hemisphere to build more stable and reliable supply chains for its emerging sectors.

The two Americans have an abundant supply of copper, nickel, tin, aluminum and other main minerals.

In particular, the “lithium triangle”, which includes Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, is home to more than 60% of the “lithium” supplies in the world, and access to this supplies will be largely dependent on international politics.

The Trump administration has made it clear that it is against the “authorization of electric vehicles” and supports more fossil fuel drilling.

However, she also realizes competition with China for hydroelectric materials, which are important for energy systems used in military equipment, and “lithium” is used in nuclear energy.

Thus, while traditional fossil fuel industries, such as natural gas and petroleum, will witness a recovery, geopolitical competition will make it necessary for the United States to expand and improve the supply chains of electrical materials and “lithium”, and it will be short of view from the United States to ignore this dimension.

Decisive

The role that Elon Musk plays, which has a personal interest in “Lithium” because of his ownership of “Tesla”, will also be a decisive factor that must be taken into account, and during the Trump era the economic policy has taken a decisively indulging approach, and the imposition of commercial definitions has led to reactions from China side.

In December last year, China banned the export of biological minerals to the United States, after a strict campaign launched by the United States, recently, to make semiconductor Chinese.

We have not yet seen the specific market measures that the White House administration may take in the “Lithium” sector.

In recent years, the price of “lithium” carbonate decreased sharply from about 80,000 dollars per metric ton in 2022 to less than half of that now, due to the deep decline due to the slowdown in the Chinese economy and the slowdown in the green energy industries in the United States and Europe.

Moreover, the inflation reduction law, which was approved by the Biden Administration, faces an uncertain future, and the law focuses on clean energy technology, innovation and manufacturing with more than $ 350 billion of incentives to move towards a transformation in the energy field and reduce carbon emissions.

However, the law can be canceled or partially amended under the Trump administration, and this foreshadows the “lithium” sector, yet most analysts expect a deficit in “lithium” and the stability of prices by 2030, and for these reasons China continues to move forward in its global transition to green energy.

Major

Chinese companies are spread in Africa, where they dominate “Cobalt” mining, and these companies are owned by the Chinese state or companies with mixed capital with a special capital from Chinese investors from places such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

This broad diversity in business, with the support of the government, allows China to bear the risks from which Western companies alienate, and the Democratic Congo is very volatile, and is now in violent conflicts with the Rwandan forces, one of the areas where Chinese companies have an interest in which the main foreign player becomes.

In the “lithium” sector outside Australia (the largest producer in the world with more than 80 thousand tons annually), the “Lithium” triangle has increasingly became the focus of the attention of the major global powers, and China has put its attention on the largest known resource for “Lithium”, which is the plain “Ayoni” “The salt in Bolivia, and at the same time Russia took control of the“ Salar Bastos Grandis ”in this country.

In the triangle, Bolivia is of pivotal importance to the Chinese and Russian presence in the region, and the Bolivian Congress is currently seeking to agree to laws that will grant exclusive extraction and production rights to the long -term “lithium”, to a Chinese union led by the “Catal” batteries, and “uranium And that »a Russian state -owned company, and is part of the company“ Rosatom ”, it seems that the Russian company is also interested in the small uranium ongoing in Bolivia and its rare ground elements, and all these developments are far from the attention of the Bolivian and American media. About National Interest

. The “Lithium Triangle”, which includes Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, is home to more than 60% of the “Lithium” supplies in the world.