The Place With the Most Lithium Is Blowing the Electric-Car Revolution

[Ries]

You are cherry picking lots of terrible examples -- plenty of well run countries make a lot of money on natural resources. Say Norway, or the United States for that matter, or Britain. UAE seems to be making its people pretty rich. So no, it's not proven disastrous for every country.

Norway has socialized the profits, and Norway is hardly representative. Britain is going broke, mismanaging pretty much everything, with rampant underemployment, inflation, and failing infrastructure. And the UAE is a horrible theocratic dictatorship with an economy based on abusing temporary foreign workers...
Australia would be your best response, wherein the now failed conservatives based their economic program on selling iron and coal to the Chinese. Except it has proven to be ecologically devastating, politically unpopular, and not really done much good for the economy- hence the conservatives losing most recent elections amidst storms of scandal.

 

[QuilmesSlo]

Well, that's really a dour view. If Britain is such a disaster, it doesn't so much for the rest of the world.

Canada has done a good job.

UAE has problems -- those problems aren't caused by their extraction industries and they've developed a great deal using their resources.

The US is a major exporter of extracted natural resources.

Colombias' largest legal export is oil & gas.

I just don't see how you write these sectors off as negative for the countries doing it. But I appreciate your response just the same.

 

[Ries]

Just a quick link to the top 50 exports of Britain- and there is no raw material on it, unless you count diamonds, which, my guess is, were not mined there, although they might have been cut there. Refined petroleum products are the closest they come, and that is definitely value added with local labor and profits.

List of exports of the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Anyway, my point remains- Argentina would do much better to export finished or semi-finished goods as opposed to raw lithium.
And the Argentine government is nowhere near as hopeless as many here like to proclaim.
But even just legally requiring a battery factory, even if it was 100% owned by private industries, would be much better than just endless rail cars full of lithium powder.

 

[QuilmesSlo]

Just a quick link to the top 50 exports of Britain- and there is no raw material on it, unless you count diamonds, which, my guess is, were not mined there, although they might have been cut there. Refined petroleum products are the closest they come, and that is definitely value added with local labor and profits.

List of exports of the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Anyway, my point remains- Argentina would do much better to export finished or semi-finished goods as opposed to raw lithium.
And the Argentine government is nowhere near as hopeless as many here like to proclaim.
But even just legally requiring a battery factory, even if it was 100% owned by private industries, would be much better than just endless rail cars full of lithium powder.

Of course it would be better in theory for Argentina to manufacture finished product.

But Argentina has made a mess of things over the decades to the point that even "simple" projects are very difficult to finance. My introduction to Argentina was as a project finance lawyer and things have only gotten worse in the intervening years. It's unfortunate, but it is what it is.

 

[FrankPintor]

Getting back to the original topic, this is another take on the EV / lithium revolution: https://www.economist.com/business/...-run-out-of-juice-before-it-really-gets-going

Some interesting extracts: "Most troubling for Western carmakers is China’s dominance of battery-making. The country houses close to 80% of the world’s current cell-manufacturing capacity", and "It is Europe’s carmakers that seem most exposed... the continent’s car industry looks likely to remain quite reliant on Chinese manufacturers... not a comfortable position to be in for European carmakers".

It seems that China has enough lithium and enough battery manufacturing capacity, so maybe there is a window of opportunity for European manufacturers to assure their supply of lithium in Latin America, and Argentina is, by sheer luck, well placed to take advantage.

 

[carride]

Getting back to the original topic, this is another take on the EV / lithium revolution: https://www.economist.com/business/...-run-out-of-juice-before-it-really-gets-going

Some interesting extracts: "Most troubling for Western carmakers is China’s dominance of battery-making. The country houses close to 80% of the world’s current cell-manufacturing capacity", and "It is Europe’s carmakers that seem most exposed... the continent’s car industry looks likely to remain quite reliant on Chinese manufacturers... not a comfortable position to be in for European carmakers".

It seems that China has enough lithium and enough battery manufacturing capacity, so maybe there is a window of opportunity for European manufacturers to assure their supply of lithium in Latin America, and Argentina is, by sheer luck, well placed to take advantage.

The archived version Could the EV boom run out of juice before it really gets going?