Secret, horizontal lithium mines being dug in Canada

Filed under: Emerging Technologies, EV/Plug-in, North America

There is a general consensus that the world’s lithium supplies are quite plentiful, with the metal found in Argentina, Bolivia and Russia, to name just a few places. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some shady mining going on to find more of the stuff that is regularly seen as the most important advanced vehicle battery material for the coming decades.

For example, there is a lithium rush going on in West Quebec, Canada that has some property owners discovering “unknown prospectors drilling horizontally onto their land in their search for minerals.” Yikes. The problem is that landowners there only have surface rights, which means companies like Stelmine Canada Ltd., a Montreal-area mineral exploration company, can stake claims on 13,000 acres of private land in the area. As one resident told the Windsor Star, the unknown prospectors:

came with bulldozers and dug up everything with no letters, warnings or anything. They left the place a total disaster and didn’t fix anything. You feel that you shouldn’t own or develop anything because you could be left completely in ruins and destroyed.

That doesn’t sound very green to us.

[Source: Windsor Star]

Secret, horizontal lithium mines being dug in Canada originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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