[Rockhounds] How Australia became the world's greatest lithium supplier

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Roughly a three-hour drive south of Perth, Western Australia, off the South
Western Highway and behind the historic mining town of Greenbushes, the
land beyond the town's primary school falls away to reveal a deep, grey
scar.

This is the site of an old tin mine known as the Cornwall Pit
<http://inherit.stateheritage.wa.gov.au/Public/Inventory/Details/241642f1-7306-4fab-94fa-0f8f15fc795b>.
At roughly 265m (870ft) deep, the terraced wall of the pit represents a
century's worth of work that began in 1888 when a pound of tin was lifted
out of a nearby creek. When the surface-metal was scoured from the
landscape, methods changed eventually giving way to open-cut mining in the
host pegmatite vein – an igneous rock with a coarse texture similar to
granite.

In 1980, another metal was found at Greenbushes which, at the time, didn't
give the mine owners much pause for thought. Lithium, a soft, silvery-white
reactive alkali metal, was considered more of a geological oddity.

A small-scale mining operation began in 1983, extracting lithium for use in
niche industrial operations like glass making, steel, castings, ceramics,
lubricants and metal alloys. It wasn't until decades later when the
existential risk posed by climate change became widely understood, and
governments began talking about replacing the estimated 1.45 billion
<https://www.pd.com.au/blogs/how-many-cars-in-the-world/> petrol cars
worldwide with electric vehicles, that the reserves at Greenbushes began to
be seen in a very different light.

Today the Cornwall tin pit is closed for business, and Greenbushes has
become the largest lithium mine in the world.


https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221110-how-australia-became-the-worlds-greatest-lithium-supplier