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Combine that with the massive lithium mine in Wolfsberg, Austria and we are set for the future.
Austria even constructed the whole money with taxpayer money in the 80s, and when the mine was ready, it was sold for a symbolic Schilling (~€0.07) to an Austrian private company in 1991 to mine the lithium, which they immediately did … not. Instead, they boarded the mine up and did nothing with it.
Then then sold it for €10.25 mio to an Australian company in 2011. The state then even changed the law that determines the minimum size from which a mine needs an environmental impact assessment to just over the size of the mine, to make mining that lithium easier. In return, the lithium should be processed locally in Austria.
Sadly, they forgot to get that in writing, and now that Australian company wants to process the lithium in the UAE.
You can’t be serious, right? Right?
Austria is deeply corrupt and making taxpayer gifts to private investors, and then forgetting the ties to what good the investor needs to bring in return is standard procedure in Germany and Austria. Somehow the people involved on government side then tend to get lucrative presentation deals, or flast for cheap, but our corruption laws mostly concern themselves with the waste worker getting flowers too expensive, rather than high level interactions between government, businesses and politicians.
Sadly I am serious.
If you understand German (or can bear automatically transcribed and automatically translated subtitles), here’s a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzyeD33xhi8
Let me guess, Rio Tinto?
Despite this vast resource, prices will remain the same?
I hope so. There’s enough phosphate being dumped on fields and washed into waterways already.
That will not stop for the foreseeable future, as it would require a common understanding among all EU countries to reform the farming subsidy system. We currently see in the Netherlands and northern Germany, that they rather poison the water supply with nitrate and pay large fines to the EU than reducing the use of mineral fertilizers.
Ironically the abhorrent use of fertilizers destroys the soil, so eventually they are stuck with using the fertilizers or let the fields recover for years. It’s like a severe alcohol addiction and no politician has the balls to put agriculture into rehab.
Norway has strict labour and environmental laws. If anything, it will continue to rise as demand increases steadily. And that’s probably for the best. Some countries are doing some heavy reasearch in recycling phosphate and lithium components. That means less waste and more indepedence. A drop in price could eliminate these environmental friendly plans.
