The Security–Sustainability Nexus: - Specialized Research AI at MIT

The Security–Sustainability Nexus:
Lithium Onshoring in the Global North

(cid:129)
Thea Riofrancos*

Abstract

The political economy of lithium, a “critical mineral” for the renewable energy transition,
is marked by two striking developments. First, Global North governments that have his-
torically offshored mining are onshoring lithium to enhance “supply chain security.”
Second, these governments have committed to “sustainably sourcing” lithium. In this
article, I theorize both developments in terms of a novel security–sustainability nexus: an
interlocking set of policies and justiﬁcations that promote lithium extraction and empha-
size the environmental credentials of Global North mining. The security–sustainability
nexus evidences an alignment between state and corporate interests. For public ofﬁcials,
onshoring policies counter China’s “dominance” over battery supply chains. For mining
and auto ﬁrms, onshoring translates into lucrative incentives, supply security, and repu-
tational beneﬁts. However, despite this state–corporate alignment, the tensions within
the security–sustainability nexus illuminate the contradictions of green capitalism. I con-
clude that the geopolitical and socioenvironmental conﬂicts over the material founda-
tions of the energy transition are reshaping the inequalities linked to extractive sectors.

The energy transition is unleashing a global mining boom for the raw materials
required to manufacture green technologies (Ambrose 2021). Lithium exem-
pliﬁes the extractive frontiers of renewable energy. Lithium-ion batteries are
essential for decarbonization, especially electrifying transportation and stabiliz-
ing energy grids powered by intermittent wind and solar. The International
Energy Agency (2021, 9) forecasts that lithium demand will increase 4,200 per-
cent by 2040. But getting lithium—and other transition minerals—out of the
ground entails grave consequences at the sites of extraction, threatening water
systems and biodiversity and violating Indigenous rights (Blair et al. 2022).

* Research and writing were generously supported by the Radcliffe Institute, the Carnegie Cor-
poration, and Providence College. Drafts of this article were presented at the University of
Chicago’s Comparative Politics Workshop, New York University’s Climate Change Doctoral
Group, Princeton University’s Climate Futures Workshop, Ohio State University’s “Worlds
in Contention” Conference, and Utrecht University’s “Tackling Climate Change and Inequality
Together” Conference. I am grateful for feedback from Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen,
Jessica Green, Adam Leeds, Timmons Roberts, Quinn Slobodian, Jake Werner, and two anon-
ymous reviewers.

Global Environmental Politics 23:1, February 2023, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00668
© 2022 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0) license.

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Thea Riofrancos

(cid:129) 21

These consequences are magniﬁed by the pressure to fast-track projects as
demand surges.

The mining imperative appears to pose a zero-sum choice between decar-
bonization and the protection of ecosystems and communities. However, lith-
ium supply is not an objective parameter but a temporally and spatially
dynamic relationship between deposits, scientiﬁc knowledge, technological
innovations, and public policies (Greim et al. 2020). Demand for new lithium
mining is likewise contingent on myriad factors that determine the resource
intensity of the energy transition. The political economy of extraction matters,
and I argue here that political economy is marked by two striking developments.
First, Global North governments are promoting domestic lithium projects to
enhance “supply chain security.” Second, these same governments have com-
mitted to “sustainably sourcing” lithium. Both phenomena are unexpected:
harmful extraction is generally sited in the Global South, and sustainability
rarely factors into interstate competition. Especially striking is the trends’ con-
vergence, with policy makers now conﬂating the security and sustainability of
lithium supplies.

I situate these surprising developments in a broader context: US and
European Union (EU) governments are deploying new corporate-friendly
industrial policies to “dominate” green technology supply chains, in explicit
competition with China. The onshoring imperative is especially marked in
the lithium sector. With direct ﬁnancing, speedy environmental permitting,
public investment in R&D, and supply chain coordination, state ofﬁcials are
luring multinational lithium ﬁrms to explore and extract in their territories.
These developments are remarkable because mining is among the most
environmentally toxic (Luckeneder et al. 2021) and least-value-added nodes
of supply chains, with a record of human rights violations and violence (Global
Witness 2020)—all of which can spark protest (Scheidel et al. 2020, 5). For
these reasons, the Global North has historically offshored mining, reinforcing
a pattern of “unequal ecological exchange” dating to colonialism (Dorninger
et al. 2021). Over the past century and a half, the United States and EU have
increasingly relied on mining imports, with Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru, and Zambia as top exporters (Regueiro
and Alonso-Jimenez 2020, 211). In 1900, Europe “accounted for more than
50% of global mineral production”—falling to under 5 percent in 2018
(Regueiro and Alonso-Jimenez 2020, 209–210); the number of mineral com-
modities for which the United States is more than 25 percent net reliant on
imports nearly tripled between 1954 and 2019, from twenty-one to ﬁfty-eight
(US Geological Survey [USGS] 2020, 4). Lithium exempliﬁes import depen-
dency. The vast majority of lithium processed in the United States comes from
Chile and Argentina; the EU relies on two import streams: Australia for unreﬁned
lithium concentrate and Chile and Argentina for lithium carbonate.1 China is the

1. David Merriman, Wood MacKenzie, personal communication, November 22, 2021.

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22 (cid:129) Lithium Onshoring in the Global North

world’s single largest importer and reﬁner of lithium, accounting for 50–60 per-
cent of global consumption over the past half-decade and 80 percent of reﬁning
capacity (Bloomberg NEF [BNEF] 2020; Hao et al. 2017; Song et al. 2021).

It is this dependence on distant mining and Chinese processing that US
and EU policies hope to transform. Mining, however, entails environmental
costs and social conﬂicts. Why, despite these risks, have Global North policy
makers embraced onshoring? I theorize these governments’ pivot to lithium
onshoring in terms of a novel security–sustainability nexus: an interlocking set
of policies and justiﬁcations that promote lithium extraction and emphasize
the environmental credentials of Global North mining. The security–
sustainability nexus evidences an alignment between state and corporate inter-
ests. For public ofﬁcials, onshoring policies counter China’s “dominance” over
battery supply chains. For mining and auto ﬁrms, onshoring translates into
lucrative incentives, supply security, and reputational beneﬁts.

As I demonstrate, the security–sustainability nexus consolidated through a
policy process commencing in 2008, when US and EU policy makers ﬁrst
framed China and other emerging economies as threatening Global North
access to “critical minerals.” Policy attention to these minerals accelerated when
COVID-19 snarled global supply chains and an intensifying climate crisis com-
bined with manufacturing innovations—primarily in China—propelled the
energy transition and its technologies. US and EU policy makers now prioritize
the territorial control of green technology supply chains and particularly of lith-
ium, a critical mineral for decarbonizing the multi-trillion-dollar global auto
industry. Simultaneously, these policy makers embrace “sustainable” lithium
on “geoeconomic” (Roberts et al. 2019) grounds: in their estimation, Western
ﬁrms can outcompete their Chinese counterparts on environmental and ethical
credentials.

Furthermore, I show that mining and auto companies endorse the
security–sustainability nexus. In a context of declining investment in the mining
sector (S&P 2020), and uneven investment in lithium speciﬁcally, extractive
ﬁrms welcome government support. Meanwhile, by expanding and diversifying
lithium supply, onshoring addresses EV manufacturers’ concerns about a near-
term shortage. Both sectors beneﬁt from policy makers’ emphasis on sustain-
ability. Under pressure from nongovernmental organization (NGO) campaigns,
local activism, media scrutiny, and “Environmental Social Governance” (ESG)
investing, mining and auto ﬁrms have committed to “sustainable sourcing.”
Lithium companies compete to sell “green” lithium to car companies, which
likewise seek “sustainable” raw materials based on their perceptions of con-
sumer and investor preferences. There are, however, tensions between state
and corporate preferences. Government goals of decoupling from China could
impose logistical and economic costs, and corporations prefer unenforced sus-
tainability standards to binding regulations. Firms want carrots, not sticks. The
security–sustainability nexus illuminates the contradictions of green
capitalism.

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Thea Riofrancos

(cid:129) 23

My conceptualization of the security–sustainability nexus intervenes in a
growing body of research on the political economy and geopolitics of the global
energy transition (Allan et al. 2021; Blondeel et al. 2021; Newell et al. 2021;
Su et al. 2021). As this scholarship reveals, renewable energy systems are criss-
crossed by multiple tensions: between fossil fuel interests and emergent green
capitalists, between incumbent industrial powers and an ascendant China, and
between a greener status quo and a transformative “just transition.” These con-
ﬂicts are particularly fraught at the energy transition’s extractive frontiers.
Intensiﬁed mining for transition metals, such as lithium, cobalt, rare earth ele-
ments (REE), and nickel, has caused social and environmental harm (Lèbre
et al. 2020), prompting local protest; simultaneously, states see such sectors
as strategic for their geopolitical stature (Kalantzakos 2020).

In this vein, social science scholarship on lithium has explored its socio-
environmental impacts ( Jerez et al. 2021; Liu and Agusdinata 2020), the
meanings ascribed to it (Barandiarán 2019; Sanchez-Lopez 2019), the policies
governing it (Lunde Seefeldt 2020; Obaya 2021), and its embeddedness
within production networks (Bos and Forget 2021; Hao et al. 2017; Obaya
et al. 2021; Song et al. 2021). While immensely valuable, this research centers
primarily on Latin America and secondarily on China, therefore neglecting
dynamics within the Global North—the site of the most surprising changes
to the global geography of lithium mining. There, battery supply chains are
a laboratory for a green industrial policy that aims for geoeconomic dominance.
But scholars have not yet analyzed the US and EU governments’ rerouting of the
lithium frontier through their territories—nor their fusion of “security” and “sus-
tainability” into a novel policy paradigm. This article identiﬁes this underex-
plored development and traces the process accounting for it.

In what follows, I outline the lithium sector’s political economy and geog-
raphy; present my methodology and data sources; analyze the consolidation of,
and tensions within, the security–sustainability nexus; and reﬂect on the impli-
cations of lithium onshoring for energy transition research.

Geology Is Not Destiny
The majority of the world’s lithium is found in closed-basin brines, for example,
the Atacama Salt Flat in northern Chile, followed by hard-rock formations, such
as the spodumene deposits of Western Australia, and clay and geothermal
deposits (USGS 2017, 5). Globally, the USGS (2022) estimates 89 million tons
of lithium resources and 22 million tons of lithium reserves (resources that are
proﬁtable to exploit).

Despite relative geological abundance, policy makers and downstream
manufacturers are concerned about supply. One reason is deposits’ variation
in quality (Munk et al. 2016). Another is the regulatory frameworks that condi-
tion lithium’s proﬁtability and the lapse between discovery and production,
which can result in supply lagging behind demand. Furthermore, supply is

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24 (cid:129) Lithium Onshoring in the Global North

partly endogenous to prices: from 2018 to 2020, low prices dampened investor
interest in lithium (with the key exception of Chinese private and public invest-
ment; Helveston and Nahm 2019). Due to these factors, 100,000 tons are in
production (0.0045 percent of global reserves), concentrated in Australia, Chile,
China, and Argentina (USGS 2022). While over the past six years production
levels more than doubled (USGS 2016), market analysts predict that demand
will exceed market supply as soon as 2022.2 Reﬂecting the risk of shortages
and its nonsubstitutable role in the energy transition, the US and EU govern-
ments added lithium to “critical mineral” lists (discussed later), as has China
(Andersson 2020, 133).

“Criticality” is less a stable condition than an emergent outcome of inter-
acting variables: the discovery of deposits, the development of new extraction
methods, government promotion of EVs, evolving battery chemistries, and recy-
cling capacity, among others. This means that policies favoring public transit
and improving materials recovery will reduce lithium demand while accelerat-
ing decarbonization (Greim et al. 2020). The volume of extraction is not a given
but a result of political and economic choices. Key among them is Global North
lithium onshoring. Making sense of this policy shift requires understanding
states’ roles in shaping the global territoriality of extraction.

State agencies grant environmental and social permits, concessions for
exploration and exploitation, subsidies for extraction (including energy, water,
and transportation infrastructure), and, if the state is the resource owner, con-
tracts with ﬁrms and the collection—and distribution—of rents (Bakker and
Bridge 2008; Bridge 2014; Perreault 2020). Additionally, by regulating extraction
and compensating communities, states mitigate capitalism’s tendency to under-
mine its socionatural conditions (Gudynas 2016; O’Connor 1988, 23–34).

State agencies thus govern where extraction takes place. Geology is not
destiny. As Klinger (2018) shows for REE, another “critical mineral,” the terri-
toriality of extraction is shaped by two forces in mutual tension: states seek to
“externalize” socioenvironmental harm while “capturing the geopolitical bene-
ﬁts” of controlling “strategically vital elements.” In combination, these objec-
tives “[drive] production to the frontiers of empire, state, and capital” (Klinger
2018, 11). Capitalism’s extractive frontiers are mobile. The lithium sector pro-
vides a clear illustration: in a world order marked by China’s economic ascent,
Global North policy makers prioritize the beneﬁts of territorial control over
those of offshoring.

States do not, of course, act in a vacuum. In recent decades, neoliberal pol-
icies have challenged the primacy of the state in raw materials sectors and
empowered markets and ﬁrms to coordinate extraction (Bakker and Bridge
2008, 224–225; Perreault 2020, 231–232). Although the neoliberal turn vali-
dates Huber’s (2021, 167) contention that proﬁtability determines whether a
particular resource is extracted, lithium onshoring cannot be explained by

2. https://twitter.com/sdmoores/status/1457332359485874178, last accessed April 13, 2022.

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Thea Riofrancos

(cid:129) 25

ﬁduciary obligation alone. Rather, it constitutes a public–private response to the
co-constitutive dynamics of capital accumulation, geopolitical tensions, and
socioenvironmental conﬂict.

Global North onshoring evinces parallels with resource nationalism in the
Global South, particularly Latin America. Both paradigms reassert the state’s role
in extraction (Haslam and Heidrich 2016), a trend evident in the region’s lith-
ium sector (Barandiarán 2019, 388; Obaya 2021). Similarly, Global North
onshoring uses state power to encourage and legitimate extraction and, in its
ambition of supply chain dominance, echoes the developmentalism of resource
nationalism. But rather than increasing the state share and equitable redistribu-
tion of resource rents, US and EU lithium policies subsidize and de-risk extractive
projects to ensure proﬁtability, while boosting their environmental and ethical
credentials. Ultimately, Global North lithium onshoring evidences both the
necessity and limits of state action in the context of a nascent green capitalism.

Methodology and Data

To identify and explain the understudied phenomenon of Global North lithium
onshoring, I analyze data gathered from interviews (more than 100 conducted
with corporate personnel, investors, market analysts, regulators, Indigenous and
environmental activists, and NGO staff in Chile, the United States, the United
Kingdom, the EU, and Australia); media (more than 2,000 news clippings
coded); participant observation of four industry conventions; government and
corporate documents (legislation, regulations, executive orders, press releases,
investor relations communiques, and company websites); and ﬁeldwork in
Chile (Santiago and the Atacama Desert), the United States (Nevada), and the
EU (Brussels). These sites capture a range of positions in the lithium sector and
evidence the effects of onshoring policies. Chile’s Atacama Desert contains
almost half of global reserves and supplies about a quarter of the world’s market
(USGS 2022). The United States contains signiﬁcant reserves (USGS 2022), but
its one lithium mine in operation (Silver Peak Mine, Nevada) accounts for just
1 percent of global output (Blackmon 2021); the Trump and Biden administra-
tions have aimed to expand domestic production. As a result, in Nevada alone,
forty-seven lithium projects are currently at some level of exploration or devel-
opment.3 The EU accounts for a miniscule portion of the world’s lithium
(Portugal, the continent’s top supplier, produces 1.6% of global output).
But EU ofﬁcials have prioritized expanding lithium mining, and projects are
under development in Portugal, Spain, and Germany.

Multi-sited ﬁeldwork is crucial to understanding Global North onshoring,
which unfolds in the context of the global political economy of lithium of
which it forms a constitutive part. For this reason, I treat the locales of this study

3. Nevada lithium projects map, compiled by Center for Biological Diversity, available at: https://
www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1kq8TRUSMR97kg-XQ22kdQpE4lUT0Rj49&ll=39
.063819831243%2C-116.9765662&z=7, last accessed April 13, 2022.

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26 (cid:129) Lithium Onshoring in the Global North

as sites of a macro-level process rather than cases to compare. The analytic and
methodological challenge is to simultaneously “connect the dots” while keeping
in view the overall shape that the dots form—in dynamic relation with one
another and with the emergent macrostructure they compose (Mintz 1986,
xiv–xx). Site selection is governed by different principles than case selection
(Riofrancos 2021). Rather than selecting cases with the goal of maximizing var-
iation on a dependent variable, I assume heterogeneity and interdependence
among sites. I choose sites where the macroprocess in question is empirically
observable, politically salient, and the subject of conﬂict—three criteria that pro-
vide leverage on the co-constitution of process and sites.

To explain lithium onshoring, I connect data and argument via process
tracing attuned to situated actors’ evolving understandings of the world around
them (Glaeser 2011, 165–250). Here the process encompasses the chronologi-
cal and multi-sited unfolding of lithium onshoring—evidenced by public pol-
icies, and public and private investment—and actors’ motivations for those
events, accessed via interviews, participant observation, media coverage, and
documents.

The Security–Sustainability Nexus

Institutional and Ideological Roots of Critical Minerals Onshoring

In the United States, mineral stockpiling dates to the interwar period: the lead-
up to World War II saw the ﬁrst legislation to catalog and store “strategic and
critical minerals” (Black 2018, 68–83; National Research Council 2008, 29–30).
This policy shifted in 1951, when the Paley Commission recommended that,
aside from minerals needed in a “military emergency,” the nation rely on
“lower-cost foreign sources for economic purposes” (Congressional Budget
Ofﬁce 1983, 9). Layered on this history is the 1970s “energy crisis.” Although
the causes of rising oil prices were myriad, the attribution to “dependency” on
“foreign oil” became hegemonic (Huber 2013, 97–127). This narrative endured,
inﬂecting President Obama’s expansion of fracking under the banner of “energy
independence” (Sica and Huber 2017, 338) and President Trump’s “energy
dominance.” These legacies form the ideological groundwork for onshoring
lithium. But they do not explain the motivation or timing of the US and EU
governments’ onshoring decisions. This development is particularly surprising
in the EU, where, despite the body’s origins in the regulation of and market-
making for steel and coal, raw materials have long been a relatively neglected
policy area (Šolar et al. 2012, 22).

On both sides of the Atlantic, 2008–2011 marked a turning point for the
salience of raw materials and a rebooting of the “critical minerals” frame. The
inﬂection had two causes. First, the global commodity boom (2000–2014) saw
skyrocketing prices for raw materials, owing to China’s rapid industrialization
and that of other emerging economies. US and EU ofﬁcials worried about access

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(cid:129) 27

to and cost of primary commodities—especially those required by new energy
technologies (European Commission 2011; National Research Council 2008,
ix–x, 57–61, 76–77; Šolar et al. 2012, 22). Geoeconomic anxiety transposed
the threat of external dependency from petrostates to China, now seen as a com-
petitor to incumbent powers. In 2008, following the global ﬁnancial crisis, the
EU Commission launched its Raw Materials Initiative and the National Acad-
emy of Sciences published Minerals, Critical Minerals, and the US Economy, with
support from the USGS and the National Mining Association.

Exacerbating fears of mineral dependency were a second set of events
centering on REE. Between 2000 and 2010, the Chinese government reformed
its governance of REE, of which China provided 97 percent of global supply
(Klinger 2018, 4). Responding to environmental and health crises in mining
regions and policy makers’ desire to upgrade to value-added reﬁning and
manufacturing, the central government reined in extraction and imposed
export quotas (Klinger 2018, 128–143). Then, in September 2010, the Chinese
military disrupted an REE shipment to Japan following a dispute in the con-
tested waters between Taiwan and Okinawa. Although the disruption was rel-
atively minor and unrelated to China’s decade-long REE policy shift, the
international press framed it as an “embargo,” setting off a market panic. In
response, Obama administration ofﬁcials and members of Congress adopted
“green nationalism” (Klinger 2018, 143–146), advocating for REE reshoring
and recycling on the grounds that domestic sourcing is “environmentally supe-
rior” to Chinese imports—despite the fact that the Mountain Pass mine in Cal-
ifornia, which had previously accounted for more than half the world’s REE
supply, was shuttered partly for environmental contamination (US Department
of Energy 2010, 6; Klinger 2018, 113–114; National Research Council 2008,
22–23, 40–41, 128–136).

These events set the stage for renewed attention to “critical minerals” and
their centrality to the energy transition, taking the form of the US Department of
Energy (DOE 2010) US Critical Minerals Strategy and the European
Commission’s (2011) ﬁrst catalog of critical minerals. Although neither consid-
ered lithium to be “critical” yet, the DOE noted that “lithium is the only key
material that shifts into a higher criticality category from the short to medium
term” (DOE 2010, 99).

This observation proved prescient. In 2018 and 2020, the United States
and EU added lithium to their critical mineral lists, citing its essential role in
the energy transition and the threat of supply disruptions (European
Commission 2020, 3; US Department of the Interior 2018). This trajectory
intersected with the United States–China trade wars and the COVID-19 pan-
demic, which reinforced US and EU ofﬁcials’ desires to onshore supply chains.
It also intersected with another trajectory, relevant to the private sector’s
embrace of onshoring. Since the end of the commodity boom, investment in
mining has declined (S&P 2020), and two years of low lithium prices (2018–
2020) reduced ﬁnancing for new projects. Lithium ﬁrms were receptive to

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28 (cid:129) Lithium Onshoring in the Global North

government support that would attract investment—and downstream EV man-
ufacturers embraced any policy to increase lithium supply as analysts warned of
a shortage. Lobbying activity reﬂects these industry preferences: the Battery
Materials and Technology Coalition advocates for “[tax] incentives, grants, loan
guarantees and other federal policy supports” (Iaconangelo 2020), and the Zero
Emissions Transportation Alliance favors policies to “promote production
across the entire supply chain, from raw materials to manufacturing to battery
recycling.”4

From Security to Sustainability
The end of the Trump administration saw a ﬂurry of executive, legislative, and
agency activity around critical mineral security. In May 2019, Senator Lisa
Murkowski introduced the American Mineral Security Act to “[reduce] the United
States’ dependence on foreign minerals.” As she put it, “our reliance on China
and other nations for critical minerals costs us jobs, weakens our economic com-
petitiveness, and leaves us at a geopolitical disadvantage.” Several of its provi-
sions were incorporated into the 2020 Omnibus Appropriations Bill and the
bipartisan 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (discussed later).5 In
September 2020, Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 13953, “Addressing the
Threat to the Domestic Supply Chain from Reliance on Critical Minerals from
Foreign Adversaries and Supporting Domestic Mining and Processing Indus-
tries.”6 The EO directed agencies to “accelerate the issuance of permits and the
completion of projects.” The DOE’s Argonne Lab expanded its role in the battery
supply chain, from awarding grants and prizes to lithium mining companies for
R&D to establishing a battery recycling center (Kunz 2019).7 This is green indus-
trial policy: state and capital collaborating to secure the extractive inputs of
renewable energy technologies.

President Biden ramped up these efforts. His administration linked
Trump’s geoeconomic framing with climate imperatives and ushered in an inter-
agency push to onshore the lithium battery supply chain. Biden signed the
“Executive Order on America’s Supply Chains,” requiring a 100-day review of
supply chains for four “critical and essential goods”8 —two of which were

4. ZETA Policy Platform, available at: https://www.zeta2030.org/policy-platform#manufacturing,

last accessed April 13, 2022.
For a quote, see https://www.energy.senate.gov/2019/5/murkowski-manchin-colleagues
-introduce-bipartisan, last accessed April 13, 2022.
See https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/05/2020-22064/addressing-the
-threat-to-the-domestic-supply-chain-from-reliance-on-critical-minerals-from-foreign, last
accessed April 13, 2022.
“Albemarle Selected by U.S. Department of Energy for Lithium Research Projects,” https://
www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/albemarle-selected-by-us-department-of-energy-for
-lithium-research-projects-301123271.html, last accessed April 13, 2022.
“Executive Order on America’s Supply Chains,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/brieﬁng-room
/presidential-actions/2021/02/24/executive-order-on-americas-supply-chains/, last accessed
April 13, 2022.

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(cid:129) 29

“high-capacity batteries, including electric-vehicles,” and “critical minerals and
other identiﬁed strategic minerals.”9 The resulting report dedicated nearly half
of its 250 pages to these sectors (White House 2021). The document evidenced
the decade-long policy process that deﬁned “critical minerals” in geoeconomic
terms: “More secure and resilient supply chains are essential for our national
security, our economic security, and our technological leadership,” and thus
“we cannot afford to be agnostic to where [clean energy] technologies are man-
ufactured and where the associated supply chains and inputs originate” (White
House 2021, 6–8).

The executive and legislative branches soon began implementing the rec-
ommendation to onshore lithium under the banners of security and sustain-
ability. Argonne was again a key institution. Working with the multinational
lithium company SQM, it published a life cycle analysis comparing the sustain-
ability of different methods of lithium extraction (Hansard 2021)—buoying the
green credentials of a ﬁrm under environmentalist and Indigenous pressure for
its operations in Chile. The lab also launched a public–private alliance,
Li-Bridge (“the ﬁrst collaboration of its kind in the U.S. battery industry”), to
“[accelerate] the development of a robust and secure domestic supply chain
for lithium-based batteries” (Burmahl 2021). Simultaneously, the DOE
announced $209 million in funding to ﬁll gaps in the domestic lithium battery supply chain.10 The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allotted $6 billion
(of $550 billion) to lithium battery–related investments.11 The bill funds USGS to map “critical minerals” linked to green technologies;12 encourages critical minerals onshoring by requiring federal permitting processes be completed “with maximum efﬁciency and effectiveness”;13 and establishes grants, prizes, and federal programs to incentivize battery recycling and materials recovery as a means to “supply chain resiliency,” to “[make] better use of domestic resources; and … [to eliminate] national reliance on minerals and mineral materials that are subject to supply disruptions.”14 These policies reﬂect an ideological consensus spanning the political spectrum: onshoring is the route to critical mineral security and sustainability. Francis Fannon, Trump’s appointee to assistant secretary of the Bureau of Energy Resources in the State Department, animated this consensus at 9. 10. “FACT SHEET: Securing America’s Critical Supply Chains,” https://www.whitehouse.gov / brieﬁng-room/statements-releases/2021/02/24/fact-sheet-securing-americas-critical-supply -chains/, last accessed April 13, 2022. “26 Projects and Partnership with Argonne Lab Will Advance the Development of Lithium Batteries and Bridge Existing Gaps in Domestic Battery Supply Chain,” https://www.energy .gov/articles/doe-announces-209-million-electric-vehicles-battery-research, last accessed April 13, 2022. 11. H.R.3684, available at: https://www.congress.gov/ bill/117th-congress/ house-bill/3684/text, last accessed April 13, 2022. 12. Secs. 40201, 40204. 13. Sec. 40206. 14. Secs. 40207, 40208, 40210. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . l / / e d u g e p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / / 2 3 1 2 0 2 0 6 7 7 7 6 g e p _ a _ 0 0 6 6 8 p d . l f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 30 (cid:129) Lithium Onshoring in the Global North Benchmark Mineral’s EV Fest in May 2020.15 He noted the “serious issues” plaguing extractive sectors linked to the energy transition: human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and political corruption. He worried that these threatened a ﬂedging EV market, potentially “[staining] a whole industry.” Fannon saw the United States playing a key role in improving the industry’s sustainable credentials via the country’s “long earned history of responsible mineral development” and relationships with “responsible” country partners. During her conﬁrmation hearing, Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s appointee for DOE secretary, shared Fannon’s sentiment: “If we allow for China to corner the market on lithium or for the Democratic Republic of Congo to be the place where everybody gets cobalt when there may be child labor or human rights violations associated with that supply, then we are missing a massive opportu- nity for our own security but also for our market” (Dillon and Clark 2021). Once conﬁrmed, she applied this logic to lithium, hosting the “US Department of Energy Roundtable: A National Lithium Battery Blueprint” (pegged to the aforementioned report).16 As she stated there, “China is the only country with control over every tier of the supply chain for critical materials including lithium and 80% of raw material reﬁning capacity—and here again the US has virtually none. And if we remain reliant on imports, we just simply will not be able to compete in the global market for clean energy technologies.” Despite tensions between onshoring and the incentives governing global capital (discussed later), industry participants welcomed Biden’s onshoring paradigm. As J. B. Straubel, cofounder of Tesla before starting the battery recycling outﬁt Redwood Mate- rials, put it, “we have a pretty challenging supply chain problem in front of us and not only is it a national competitiveness issue, it’s a national security issue. But this is really an economic issue and an environmental issue as well.” For Straubel, recycling secures supply chains, protects the national interest, and improves EV’s environmental proﬁle. Mining executives concurred. Glenn Merﬁeld, vice president and CTO of Albemarle (which operates the United States’ lone lithium mine, in addition to overseas assets), interwove security and sustainability—without losing focus on the bottom line. He advocated for the United States “fully [utilizing]” its lithium resources in a “cost [com- petitive]” and “sustainable manner.” Along with domestic mining, recycling would keep lithium “within the circular economy in the US.” Whether through onshoring or recycling, reducing “dependency” on other countries—especially particularly worrying foreign powers—has become para- mount. As the House of Representatives’ Energy Subcommittee and the Environ- ment and Climate Change Subcommittee warned ahead of a joint hearing titled “Securing America’s Future: Supply Chain Solutions for a Clean Energy 15. EV Fest, May 2020, https://www.benchmarkminerals.com/events/ev-festival/, last accessed 16. April 13, 2022. “US Department of Energy Roundtable: A National Lithium Battery Blueprint,” June 2021, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM8DUnQxQa8, last accessed April 13, 2022. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . l / / e d u g e p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / / 2 3 1 2 0 2 0 6 7 7 7 6 g e p _ a _ 0 0 6 6 8 p d . l f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Thea Riofrancos (cid:129) 31 Economy,” “in some cases, the United States is almost entirely dependent on countries, like China, that have developed supply chain strongholds. Develop- ing or relocating parts of these supply chains to the United States could reduce reliance on other countries, including those with deﬁcient human rights protec- tions or environmental standards” (Holzman 2021). This discourse circulates subnationally, among ofﬁcials tasked with lithium governance. Mark Visher, administrator of Nevada’s Division of Minerals, framed lithium sourcing as an ethical choice: “Where do you want them to come from? From a place where it’s highly regulated, or from a third world country where nobody’s pay- ing attention? And what’s more environmentally responsible for the world?” (Dentzer 2021). Despite the seeming shift away from neoliberal globalization and the pur- suit of low-cost inputs, domestic extraction has an economic logic: US and EU policy makers see sustainable and ethical production as “the West’s” last hope to resume its manufacturing prowess—the one terrain on which its manufacturers can outperform China. According to interviews at a prominent commodity ana- lytics ﬁrm, the “sustainability agenda” justiﬁes a supply chain diversiﬁcation away from China and claims an axis of competition along which the United States and EU can prevail: “there was a period where the EU and US tried to go toe to toe with China economically, and it didn’t work. … What can we tar- get? Sustainability.”17 The security–sustainability paradigm is particularly advanced in the EU. To onshore battery supply chains, and subject them to sustainability standards, the European Commission established the EU Battery Alliance (in 2017) and the EU Raw Materials Alliance (ERMA; in 2020). Both take a multistakeholder approach—albeit with an outsized role for corporations—and channel public funds to private entities. In 2019 and 2021, the Battery Alliance approved its ﬁrst tranches of member state funding: over $7 billion to build out the battery
supply chain, including raw material extraction and processing, and over a
billion dollars from the R&D fund Horizon Europe.18 It announced new roles
for the European Investment Bank: “de-[risking] raw materials projects” and,
with private funds, closing the “estimated ﬁnancial gap [in raw materials invest-
ment] of 15 billion euros by 2025.” ERMA aims to boost the regional supply of
“critical minerals,” including lithium. In launching ERMA, commissioner
Thierry Breton declared the ambitious goal of the EU becoming “self-sufﬁcient
in lithium for our batteries” by 2025 ( Willuhn 2020). To this end, the EU
has directly invested in the pilot stages of lithium mines (via the fund EIT
InnoEnergy) in Spain, Germany, Portugal, and the Czech Republic.19

Interviews, analysts at Roskill, London, February 23, March 4, and March 11, 2021.

17.
18. For the ﬁrst ﬁgure, I combined sums as reported in https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021
/02/20210207-eubatin.html and https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/12/20191210-ec
.html, last accessed April 13, 2022. For the second, see https://ec.europa.eu/commission
/presscorner/detail/en/speech_21_1142, last accessed April 13, 2022.
See https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/ latest-news/metals/061820-inﬁnity
-lithium-secures-eu-backing-for-spanish-project, last accessed April 13, 2022; https://www

19.

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32 (cid:129) Lithium Onshoring in the Global North

The apotheosis of the security–sustainability nexus is the EU Commis-
sion’s Sustainable Battery Regulation, pending parliamentary ratiﬁcation. Align-
ing with commitments to a circular economy and the Green Deal, the regulation
requires batteries be manufactured with increasing levels of recycled content and
with carbon footprint labels; eventually, batteries will be subjected to life cycle
emissions targets. These environmental goals have a geoeconomic logic. As the
regulation states, “this [critical raw materials] is an area where Europe needs to
enhance its strategic autonomy and increase its resilience in preparation for
potential disruptions in supply due to health or other crises. Enhancing circu-
larity and resource efﬁciency with increased recycling and recovery of those raw
materials, will contribute to reaching that goal” (EU Commission 2020, clause
19). Alongside onshoring, circular economy approaches reduce “environmental
and social impacts” and “Union dependency on materials from third countries.”
It is worth noting, however, that when tensions between security and sustain-
ability emerge, security is prioritized: in the event of supply risks, the Commis-
sion can “[amend] the targets for the minimum share of recycled” battery
materials (EU Commission 2020, clause 21).

These themes appear in the discourse of top ofﬁcials. According to Maroš
Šefčovič, the Commission’s vice president for inter-institutional relations, “this
ambitious framework on transparent and ethical sourcing of raw materials,
carbon-footprint of batteries, and recycling is an essential element to achieve
open strategic autonomy in this critical sector and accelerate our work under
the European Battery Alliance.”20 In announcing the EU–Canada Strategic Part-
nership on Raw Materials, Commission president Ursula von der Leyen stated,
“We, as Europeans, want to diversify our inputs away from producers like China
because we want more sustainability, we want less environmental damage, and
we want transparency on labor conditions” (Aarup 2021). The words security
and sustainability recur throughout the partnership text.21

Interviews with EU ofﬁcials offer additional insight. I spoke to Peter
Handley, head of the EU Commission’s Raw Materials Unit, in December
2019.22 One month before the ﬁrst reported case of COVID-19 in Europe,
Handley was already worried about global turbulence and saw onshoring lith-
ium as the solution. He ticked off the causes of onshoring—solar trade wars,
volatile lithium markets, and the instability roiling Latin American exporters

.thinkgeoenergy.com/vulcan-secures-agreement-on-help-launching-geothermal-lithium
-project/, last accessed April 13, 2022; https://www.innoenergy.com/news-events/the-business
-investment-platform-closes-agreement-to-support-savannah-resources/, last accessed April 13,
2022; https://www.mining.com/ lithium-projects-key-to-the-race-to-secure-strategic-materials
-report/, last accessed April 13, 2022.
“Green Deal: Sustainable Batteries for a Circular and Climate Neutral Economy,” available at:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_2312, last accessed April 13,
2022.
“European Union-Canada Summit—Joint Statement,” available at: https://www.consilium
.europa.eu/media/50757/20210614-joint-statement-ﬁnal.pdf, last accessed May 4, 2022.
Interview, Peter Handley, Brussels, December 11, 2019.

20.

21.

22.

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(“Chile or Bolivia, one day it’s the most reliable supplier, next day in chaos”)—
and tempting advantages: investment, jobs, and “sovereignty.” The downsides
of not acting were stark: “There is a risk that we will lose our whole value
chain … with massive economic consequences.” Handley expertly wove
together security and economy; this was geoeconomics in action. He wove
in a third concept: sustainability. Europe, he noted, could not compete with
Asian-made lithium batteries on cost. But, he asserted, Europe can be “greener
than the competition,” especially in terms of sourcing materials like lithium.
He imagined a future in which Europe self-supplies a quarter of its demand
for all battery minerals, extracted and reﬁned under EU standards, and imports
the rest under equally strict protocols—all while increasing recycled feedstock.
Handley’s colleagues concurred. As Joanna Szychowska (head of the EU Com-
mission’s Automotive and Mobility Industries Unit) told me, the impetus to
onshore supply chains is “as much an economic project as political.”23
Onshoring supply chains enables “control”: “the longer the value chain is, and
the more distant a speciﬁc segment, the less control you have”—especially over
the “sustainable sourcing” of raw materials like lithium.

Andreas Klossek, director of EIT’s RawMaterial Community, elaborated
how sustainable sourcing would give European companies a competitive edge:
“We [the EIT] need to promote companies that are behaving sustainably, show-
case them, show a success story … if you have a champion in sustainable sourc-
ing and gets a value for this, enjoys a premium on prices for its products, then
you will see followers. That’s where Europe needs to be at the forefront.”24 He
saw sustainable sourcing occurring through a mix of private “entrepreneurship”
(reinforced by competition) and EU regulations—though he worried about the
possibility that new rules might “hamper” the global competitiveness of Euro-
pean companies. One year after these interviews, the EU Commission promul-
gated the Sustainable Battery Regulation. Sustainability, once the mantra of
nature-loving utopians, is now a vital source of proﬁtability and a strategic bul-
wark against geoeconomic threats.

Tensions on the Horizon
Corporate representatives have embraced the security–sustainability paradigm.
Take the example of Thacker Pass, a claystone project that aims to be the second
lithium mine on US soil. The project is owned by Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary
of Canada-based Lithium Americas, which is also developing a project in Argen-
tina. In January 2021, the Bureau of Land Management (2021) granted Thacker
Pass a “record of decision,” approving the company’s Environmental Impact
Assessment. Echoing the critical minerals consensus, Lithium Americas presi-
dent and CEO, Jon Evans, told reporters, “Thacker Pass has the potential to

23.
24.

Interview, Joanna Szychowska, Brussels, December 10, 2019.
Interview, Andreas Klossek, Brussels, December 11, 2019.

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34 (cid:129) Lithium Onshoring in the Global North

provide … lithium chemicals critical for establishing a strong domestic lithium
supply chain.”25 Security rhetoric is complemented with sustainability. Alexi
Zawadski, president of the company’s North American operations, favorably
compared Thacker Pass with South American brine deposits—which activists
have targeted for their impact on water—noting, “We recycle a lot of our water.
We actually generate carbon-free energy from our process, and we’ll have an
excess that we’ll sell to the grid.”26 Perhaps the clearest corporate articulation
of the security–sustainability nexus appears in an Atlantic Council report on
minerals in transportation electriﬁcation, funded by the National Mining Asso-
ciation (Blakemore 2021). A section titled “Supply Chain Security and Sustain-
ability” highlights the US mining sector’s role in provisioning reliable and
responsible minerals to the EV industry and lauds the Biden administration’s
focus on the domestic supply chain—especially its commitment to “streamline”
permitting and “manage risk” for ﬁrms and investors (Blakemore 2021, 14–16).
This public–private alliance, however, is beset by tensions. US and EU ofﬁ-
cials hope to square the circle, betting customers will pay a premium for green
and ethical supply chains. More important, however, are subsidies and de-
risking that mitigate the costs of sustainability requirements (most notably in
the EU) and of Global North operations. But these corporate-friendly policies
do not resolve the contradictions between economic efﬁciency and environmen-
tal sustainability, or between hawkish industrial policy and globe-trotting cap-
ital. As I learned in interviews and observation of industry conventions, auto,
mining, and recycling managers and executives welcomed government support
but warned of the difﬁculty of decoupling from China.27 Regulation is another
sticking point: these personnel were skeptical about new environmental rules,
instead professing that the proﬁt motive and competition would spur adoption
of sustainable practices.28

Concern about the regulatory dimension of green industrial policy mani-
fests in the corporate response to the EU’s Sustainable Battery Regulation. The
auto industry, the most powerful sector affected by the regulation, rhetorically
embraces its sustainability goals while lobbying to dilute them. In the European
Automobile Manufacturers’ Association’s (representing the sixteen major
Europe-based automobile manufacturers) position paper , the ﬁrst “Key Mes-
sage” is that “batteries must become sustainable, high-performing and
safe”—a direct, albeit unattributed, quote from the EU Commission’s press
release on the regulation (European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association

25.

26.

27.

“Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass Closer to Production,” available at: https://www.mining.com
/lithium-americas-thacker-pass-moves-closer-to-production/, last accessed April 13, 2022.
“Nevada’s ‘Lithium Valley’ Could Provide Domestic Supply for Tesla Batteries,” available at:
https://insideevs.com/news/419466/tesla-nevada-lithium-supply-potential/, last accessed
April 13, 2022.
Interview, Auto Manufacturer Supply Department manager, September 1, 2021; interview,
Redwood Materials representative, September 20, 2021.

28. Ryan Melsert, CEO of American Battery Metals, Lithium Supply and Markets convention, Las

Vegas, NV, September 20, 2021.

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[ACEA] 2021, 1).29 But subsequent messages warn of regulatory overreach that
“hinder[s] innovation as it would slow down the electriﬁcation process, thereby
jeopardising the EU climate targets” (ACEA 2021, 1). This framing protects the
industry’s interests and positions the sector as a climate savior. As I was told by
Michael Reckordt of the Berlin-based NGO PowerShift, the auto industry is “try-
ing to weaken the regulation,” acting in concert to go at the “speed of the slow-
est.”30 They are particularly worried about “liabilities”: while open to standards
that create a “level playing ﬁeld” among competitors, they oppose binding
enforcement and legal accountability (they want, in Reckordt’s words, “a tiger
without teeth—or sharp teeth”), which increase costs. These observations were
conﬁrmed in interviews with EU-based auto ﬁrms; one procurement manager
commented that the materials tracing envisioned by the sustainability regula-
tion is “very ambitious” and “very expensive to carmakers.”31 However, the
manager also noted that the industry is not monolithic: some ﬁrms already sub-
ject their raw materials to “sustainability” standards. These tend to be lead ﬁrms
that can absorb the cost of implementation because they beneﬁt from econo-
mies of scale and leverage over their suppliers, allowing them to externalize
the costs of “green capital accumulation” onto upstream companies (Ponte
2020).

These corporate responses reveal the contradictions inhering within the
security–sustainability nexus and the heterogeneity of interests, power, and
proﬁtability along battery supply chains. Ultimately, the afﬁnities as well as
the tensions between state and corporate strategy make clear that powerful deci-
sion makers are operating in a state of ﬂux and contingency. The choices they
make will shape the trajectory to come—encoding power relations into the
extractive materiality of the energy transition.

Conclusions
Under the rubric of the security–sustainability nexus, Global North govern-
ments and multinational mining and auto companies are promoting lithium
onshoring, thereby transforming the sector’s economic and political geogra-
phy. Policy makers are redrawing the lithium frontier through a novel policy
framework combining corporate-friendly industrial policy—subsidies, public
investment, regulatory fast-tracking, and supply chain coordination—with an
emphasis on sustainable sourcing: statutory incentives for battery recycling
and recovery in the United States and the EU’s pending Sustainable Battery
Regulation. For policy makers and corporate executives, “secure” lithium is
“sustainable” lithium, and vice versa. With this two-pronged approach, an elite
alliance seeks green industrial prowess in direct competition with China.

29. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_2312, last accessed April 13,

2022.
Interview, Michael Reckordt, May 20, 2021.
Interview, Auto Manufacturer Supply Department manager, September 1, 2021.

30.
31.

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36 (cid:129) Lithium Onshoring in the Global North

It is too soon to tell whether the competing objectives of national security,
environmental sustainability, and corporate proﬁtability will coexist in an equi-
librium or whether one will prevail over the others. Key in determining the out-
come of this dynamic process is a force thus far neglected in this article: social
movements. Global North onshoring has shifted the front lines of lithium
extraction. As the sector expands, Indigenous and environmentalist protest
erupts in major exporting countries like Chile and Argentina alongside new sites
in Spain, Portugal, Serbia, and the United States. These activists act in transna-
tional coordination, via networks such as Yes to Life, No to Mining and Earth-
work’s Making Clean Energy Clean, Just and Equitable campaign. Their efforts
reﬂect shared realities: from Chile’s Atacama Desert to the western United States
to northern Portugal, activists decry impacts on water, ecosystems, and liveli-
hoods and call for the enforcement of community consent. To the dismay of
governments and ﬁrms, movements have complicated onshoring, whether by
slowing down the permitting process or by stalling projects altogether.

Conﬂicts over the material foundations of the energy transition are reshap-
ing the inequalities linked to extractive sectors. For centuries, unequal ecological
exchange between Global North and South has structured the geography of
extraction—and is evidenced in today’s “green sacriﬁce zones” on the periph-
eries of the world system (Zografos and Robbins 2020). However, as the liter-
ature on environmental justice makes clear, toxic harms also afﬂict marginalized
communities within the Global North (Mohai et al. 2009). The emerging map
and sheer volume of planetary extraction will intensify unequal ecological
exchange at multiple scales: within Global North countries, where policy makers
seek to expand domestic extraction; between the Global North and South; and in
territories that defy easy classiﬁcation in either supranational category, such as
between China’s resource hinterlands and its industrial centers or between
China and low-income countries. These developments call for an interdisciplin-
ary research agenda on the emerging geographies, geopolitics, and political
economy of the energy transition.

Thea Riofrancos is an associate professor of political science at Providence Col-
lege. She researches resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green
technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. She is author of
Resource Radicals: From Petro-nationalism to Post-extractivism in Ecuador (2020) and
coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (2019), and she is
currently writing Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. Her peer-reviewed
articles have appeared in World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Cultural
Studies.

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7
S
e
p
e
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b
e
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2
0
2
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