Standard Grant: The Lithium Trade

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

Lithium is used in light-weight, rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles, mobile devices, and renewable energy systems. Now in high demand, the global market for lithium is changing rapidly, raising expectations of growth and fears of economic busts and environmental harm. For instance, there is the desire to ensure a stable supply of lithium, while elected officials representing lithium mining communities hope to attract new industries. These communities also worry about the environmental consequences of increased extraction, as do multinational companies whose brands rely on marketing a sustainable product. Although booming demand has given these concerns urgency, similar concerns about the distribution of benefits and harms have historically shaped the extraction, trade and governance of other minerals important to global energy systems, such as oil, uranium and copper. This project asks how lithium production since the 1960s compares with the production of these other minerals. Stakeholders engaged across lithium's production chain will find this information useful in developing policies that respond to these disparate expectations and that are environmentally and socially responsible. Findings will be disseminated to various stakeholders through publications and public talks. This project will provide research training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in the Spanish language, broadening participation from under-represented students. It will also build collaborative partnerships with scientists assessing the impacts, opportunities, and challenges posed by new clean energy industries. This project is a comparative analysis of lithium production, identifying the forms of expertise that have participated in production, who had access to these forms of knowledge, their influence on national development policies, and the consequences for how quantities of lithium have flowed through global production networks. Research will take place over a two-year period in various archives that maintain records of the relationships between corporations, state agencies, military offices, and the scientists who pioneered lithium mining. Tracing these relationships through the Cold War years and into the rise of free-trade globalization, the principal investigator will analyze how technical and industrial capacity were created and distributed. They will also examine lithium development policies and the comparisons to copper, uranium, or oil stakeholders used over time to justify these policies. The research will advance theories of how natural resources, science, and technology are understood to produce positive development outcomes. The findings will also contribute to academic and policy debates about how to assess the benefits and sustainability of lithium extraction over long periods of time. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.