I started writing about critical minerals for two reasons. First, I wanted to understand them better: what they actually are, where they show up in daily life, and why they matter beyond policy briefs and headlines. Second, I wanted to explore the kind of leverage they give Canada as it navigates a world that is increasingly ruptured from the old order, as Mark Carney recently described.
Critical minerals sit at the intersection of energy, food, security, and trade. They shape how countries grow, cooperate, and compete. This series is an attempt to make that connection visible: one mineral, one story at a time.
Read the other articles in this series here:
Part 1 of my “Critical Minerals & The Modern World” series
There has been a lot of excitement lately about critical minerals. They are framed as the backbone of future prosperity: fuelling green growth, powering electrification, strengthening supply chains, and giving nations new strategic leverage.
It is a neat, compelling narrative. A bit too clean.
Because underneath the optimism sits a quieter story of water loss, Indigenous rights disputes, environmental damage, labour concerns, and geopolitical pressure. Recent foreign policy discussions have highlighted how the United States long used tariffs and economic pressure as tools of influence. Now China has learned those same tactics, using its dominance in processing and refining minerals like lithium as strategic leverage. This is not just industrial competition. It is a new form of power.
So I wanted to write a series that brings both sides together: the promise of critical minerals, the human cost of extracting them, and the inevitability that the world will keep demanding more.
I start with lithium. A metal that calms human minds, yet destabilizes global systems.
What Lithium Takes From the Thirsty
When I read Catching Fire (Hunger Games trilogy) years ago, there was one scene that stayed with me. Katniss is thrust into a jungle arena carved like a clock, each segment filled with a trap. The danger is terrifying, but the emotion that lingered was not fear. It was thirst. She receives a spigot and is told to find her own water in a place that refuses to give it easily. That feeling of desperation felt real in a way I could never forget.
If you have ever lived in a place where water is not guaranteed, you know how a single drop can shape an entire day.
I grew up in South India where groundwater was the line between stability and crisis. Every evening we gathered around the handpump borewell. Children took turns pumping until their arms trembled. We filled heavy steel koda that rested on the hip and carried them home with quiet focus. Water was not a backdrop to life. It was life itself.
Now imagine a global corporation arriving in that same community and withdrawing billions of litres of freshwater while your own wells run dry. Imagine watching your crops yellow at the edges. Your livestock weaken. Your children walk farther for water that once sat beneath your own soil.
This is not a hypothetical. It is the reality in northern Argentina’s Puna region where lithium brine extraction has caused wells to collapse, wetlands to shrink, and local agriculture to falter. The Global Press Journal reported that entire towns are now struggling because the water they depended on is gone.
These communities have contributed almost nothing to the global carbon crisis. Yet they are being asked to pay part of the price for solving it. Lithium extraction gives the world cleaner energy, but the cost is being carried by people who will never enjoy the benefits equally.
Where Lithium Comes From
Lithium is one of the oldest elements in the universe. This metal predates the Earth, the oceans, and the first traces of life.
Long before science identified it, humans encountered lithium in ways that shaped their well-being.
Ancient Greeks visited mineral springs rich in lithia salts to soothe agitation and melancholy. Ayurvedic practitioners used mineral infusions to treat imbalances in mood and body. In the late 1800s, bottled lithia water and tonics were marketed as cures for nervous conditions. Coca Cola even released a drink called Lithia Coke.
People understood the effect long before they understood the element. Lithium had the ability to settle the noise in the mind.
That same quieting property would later become central to psychiatry. Lithium carbonate remains one of the most effective treatments for bipolar disorder even though its full mechanism is still not fully understood. A metal born from cosmic fire became a medicine that stabilizes human emotion.
A Modest Life Before the Battery Era
Before lithium became the star of the clean energy revolution, it lived a quiet industrial life. It was used to strengthen specialty glass, stabilize ceramics, lubricate aircraft, and support niche chemical processes. During the Cold War, certain isotopes of lithium played a role in nuclear weapons development, which elevated its strategic importance for a time.
For decades, lithium was known but not celebrated. Important but not transformative.
That changed when scientists discovered that lithium ions could move quickly and reversibly within layered materials. This discovery led to the invention of the lithium ion battery which reshaped modern life. Every phone, laptop, and handheld device we rely on today exists because of the mobility of a lithium ion.
And soon this same battery would become the cornerstone of global electrification.
Scaling Lithium: A Once Quiet Metal Becomes a Global Force
The demand for lithium is rising faster than almost any mineral on Earth. It is now extracted from:
- Salt flats in Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina
- Hard rock mines in Australia, China, and Canada
- Developing clay deposits in the United States
Traditional brine extraction is slow and thirsty. Brine is pumped to the surface and left in large ponds to evaporate in the sun, concentrating lithium over many months. This method uses large areas of land and can disrupt local water systems, especially in arid, high altitude regions.
In response to growing criticism, companies and researchers are racing to develop “more sustainable” methods. One of the most talked about is Direct Lithium Extraction, often called DLE. Instead of leaving brine to evaporate, these processes use sorbents, ion exchange resins, membranes, or electrochemical systems to pull lithium out more quickly and return much of the brine to the ground. They promise less land use, shorter extraction times, and significantly lower water consumption, although the actual footprint depends on the specific technology and local context.
New DLE based projects are being piloted in places like Argentina, the United States, and parts of Europe. Some companies have won innovation or sustainability awards for systems that recover lithium with minimal water loss and reduced chemical waste. At the same time, the lithium ion battery recycling industry is growing quickly. Global recycling market estimates for spent lithium ion batteries range from about 7 to 16 billion US dollars in 2024, with projections of many times that value by the mid 2030s, driven mainly by end of life EV batteries and stricter regulations in the EU and Asia.
These trends matter. They mean that the story is not just one of extraction. It is also one of technology, policy, and design beginning to respond to the social and environmental backlash.
https://www.eralberta.ca/projects/details/pilot-plant/
Yet it is important to be honest. DLE is not a magic fix. Many projects are still at pilot or early commercial scale. They face their own challenges, such as energy use, chemical inputs, and cost. Recycling will help, but it takes time before large waves of EV batteries reach end of life and can meaningfully reduce demand for newly mined lithium.
For now, communities at extraction sites still bear most of the immediate burden.
Lithium’s Role in Climate Disruption
Lithium is essential for the clean energy transition. Without it we cannot scale electric vehicles or renewable energy storage. We cannot stabilize grids or meet net-zero targets. Electrification depends on lithium in a way that is unavoidable.
Yet the extraction of lithium, particularly from brines, can cause water depletion, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss. This creates an uncomfortable tension. Lithium helps slow climate change, but its extraction accelerates environmental disruption for the communities living closest to its source.
A mineral that stabilizes societies at a planetary scale destabilizes them at a local scale.
Beyond lithium: chemistries waiting in the wings
In parallel with mining and recycling, there is an intense research push to reduce the pressure on lithium itself. Several pathways are emerging:
- Sodium ion batteries are advancing quickly. Sodium is far more abundant than lithium and found in ordinary salt. Recent studies suggest that sodium ion cells for stationary storage and some lower range vehicles could be 20 to 30 percent cheaper than common lithium iron phosphate batteries, once produced at scale. Companies in Asia and Europe have begun early commercial production, and you can already buy a consumer power bank that runs on sodium ion cells rather than lithium.
- Solid state batteries are being developed that use solid electrolytes and, in some designs, different combinations of materials. In many cases they still use lithium, but not always in the same amounts or forms.
- Research is also progressing on lithium sulfur, multi ion and other next generation chemistries that aim to increase energy density, improve safety, or reduce dependence on constrained materials such as cobalt and nickel.
None of these alternatives will make lithium irrelevant in the near term. Electric vehicles, consumer electronics, and grid storage will continue to rely heavily on lithium based batteries for many years. A truly sustainable transition cannot rest forever on the back of one stressed mineral extracted from a handful of regions.
How the G20 Frames Lithium in Its Climate Commitments
The G20 communiqué speaks proudly about expanding climate finance, accelerating clean energy adoption, and advancing global sustainability. These goals depend heavily on critical minerals like lithium.
However, the document rarely acknowledges the human consequences of extracting these minerals at scale. There is little recognition of water loss, Indigenous rights concerns, supply chain inequities, or the social cost of extraction.
The gap between ambition and reality is wide.
We celebrate clean technologies without acknowledging the communities whose lands are disrupted to make them possible. We speak about climate justice without addressing the minerals that make justice possible. We set bold targets without reconciling the extraction footprint that lives beneath them.
The global transition is not clean at the source. It is clean at the destination.