Hi everyone! This week's links and roundup of interesting minerals items includes two topical news items and three less-topical but very interesting rock-related things I read this week.
Newsy things
Sichuan floods and US rare earth production
It's understandable if you happened to miss that over the last few months southern China has seen its heaviest rainfall in over 20 years, devastating Sichuan province. Among the businesses affected by the floods: a subsidiary of Shenghe Resources Holding Co., a rare earths producer. A rare earths producer in which Shenghe has a 38.8% stake, Sichuan Runhe Catalytic New Material Co., was also affected.
Shenghe has a hand in a few international rare earth development projects. It's the largest shareholder in the project to develp the Kvanfjeld rare earth deposits in Greenland and has a minority stake in MP Materials, the company that manages the United States' only major rare earth mine (the Mountain Pass mine–MP, get it etc etc). Currently, Mountain Pass exports its raw materials to China for processing and Shenghe is the local vector for selling and distributing Mountain Pass rare earths (unclear to me if Shenghe processes the Mountain Pass ore, but it seems likely?).
Right now what coverage of the impact of the floods on Shenghe is focused on the near-term costs and impact to the company (an estimated $35 million-$48 million loss, a large percentage of which is inventory alone (i.e. rocks), and it' not clear if this will affect Shenghe's distribution arrangement with MP Materials. Remember, China is the top rare earth oxides producer in the world, and this hit like two facilities, so this is probably won't cause a massive logjam in rare earth supply chains. But worth keeping an eye on.
Chilean lithium notes
Chliean mining company SQM announced record lithium sales this week–which seems like it should be good news for the Chilean economy, which has been struggling due to the pandemic. But the company's actual revenue dropped this year, as production across all sectors slowed mineral demand (and diminished commodity prices) worldwide. SQM is also among a number of companies slated to receive support from Chile's economic recovery plan announced earlier this month.
Mostly, I'm interested in what's going on with SQM's finances and future because they recently lost a major lawsuit to the organization Atacama Indigenous Council over an environmental remediation plan that the council considered insufficient. Council president Sergio Cubillos has stated the council's next steps following this victory is to get SQM's permits revoked altogether. SQM is literally the second-biggest lithium producer in the world so it seems pretty unlikely Chile would let them just go under or something, but it's cool to see the indigenous council's win and I wonder what the costs of re-doing that remediation plan will look like.
Not-Newsy Things
Laws of the Land
This blog post by Emma Teitelman about the history of the United States Mining Law of 1872 is a useful reminder of the history of American extraction (particularly how westward expansion influenced American extraction). A crucial detail that the text highlights: the eventual domination of the US mining industry by a handful of large firms did lead to labor organizing among miners (and miners' labor struggles inspired other worker movements), but those worker movements often fail to imagine their own struggles as intertwined with anti-colonial struggles.
So You Want to Make Batteries Too
This commentary/analysis paper from fellows at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines was published in June, so this one's still kind of topical. It's a pretty glossy but still useful introduction to projects in different countries to build out more robust lithium-ion battery supply chains and useful for thinking about the dominant discourse and ideology of mineral policy land. Notably they highlight Bolivia's lack of a robust battery supply chain which includes a very awkward sentence that begins "Politics aside,"–after...not mentioning politics? Maybe they just had a bad editor.
How to Build Anything Ethically
This is an excerpt from the Indigenous Protocol and AI Working Group's position paper (which is overall really interesting and I recommend checking out). This section explores applying Lakota ethical protocols to the work of creating AI systems. Two really delightful things about this text: it explicitly starts the process of making an "ethical AI" with the extraction processes required for making computational hardware (something that a lot of "AI ethics" discourse sidesteps as unrelated externality), and it invokes a Lakota concept of stone ontologies. Sacred stones appear in several traditional Lakota practices, and stones are conceived of as having agency and spirit in and of themselves. In general, most of the policy or media discussions of extraction and technology emphasize the consequences for humans–environmental harms are bad if they're bad for people, basically. I appreciated the way this proposed framework treats minerals as stakeholders in a process rather than a commodity to be used or not used.
Next week you’ll be getting a links roundup like this and a longer overview of lithium market stuff. Thanks for reading!