Highly Competitive Markets for Lithium Producers and the Role of the Lithium Triangle

Introduction

A.   Climate Change and the Need for an Energy Transition
The urgency facing the world in addressing climate change was underscored again in a March 2023 major new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).1
Among other key findings, the report stated with high confidence that “[h]uman activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”2

The report offers the most comprehensive understanding to date of ways in which the planet is changing. It says that global average temperatures are estimated to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels sometime around “the first half of the 2030s,” as humans continue to burn coal, oil and natural gas.3 The 1.5 degrees Celsius number holds special meaning since nearly every world country agreed in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement to “pursue efforts” to limit global warming to that number.4

However, the energy transition—moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy—will not happen without “a decades-long investment in technologies [including] batteries.”5

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A version of this paper was presented at The Foundation for Natural Resources and Energy Law’s April 2023 special institute entitled “International Mining and Energy Law, Development, and Investment”