Lithium – A review review for Barroso Covas?
Beef citizens of Barroso and other districts in northern Portugal, where mining threatens their traditional way of life, can find some comfort in recent revelations that show that cracks continue to appear in the supposed Honey-Pot Lithium.
In October 2023, the sovereign state of Ghana announced that it had granted exclusively to the Atlantic Lithium Limited a fifteen-year lease agreement to explore its main Ewoyaa mine, with estimated production potential of thirty-five million metric tons, making it one of the top ten currently explored deposits worldwide. Atlantic’s main shareholder appearances (registered in Australia) belong to Cleantech Group and Piedmont Lithium, both US companies. It is for a refinery operated by the latter that more than half of emoyaa production will be sent subject, from the Trump era, the tariffs to be agreed.
The intention was to start mining before the end of 2024, but in a carefully written press statement, Atlantic announced that its project was “suspended” while waiting for a renegotiation with the Ghanaian government about the lease’s fiscal terms. In his CEO’s words, « the internal rate of return plummeted from 105% to 14% and no one will invest in it. »
Atlantic had already invested $ 70 million, but future market values have descended from November 2022. Since then, large discoveries of huge lithium reserves in China and in the US have agreed with an increasing perception that the planned adoption of electric vehicles will probably be much slower than expected.
This probable excess of lithium supply in the next decade has been emphasized by news from China that research on alternative sodium use batteries is advancing rapidly and prototypes are already beyond field tests, with the manufacture and marketing of short -range commercial and industrial vehicles in full swing.
Atlantic Lithium may well be compared in various ways to Savannah Resources’s composition and objectives, whose company predicted a production of 25 million tons in its main Barroso Covas Unit and also has tax concessions from the Portuguese sovereign state.
Although the proximity of Barroso’s “white gold” to EU refineries and markets may alleviate a worrying fall in the Atlantic-like demand, it is thought that the exploration of one of Portugal’s main actives can be limited and with much lower return values, thus reflecting a much greater consideration for the environment by local citizens.
Take April 28, 2025
