Is the U.S. at risk of losing lithium exports from China?
Trade tensions between the U.S. and China continue to ratchet up. Late last week, the Trump administration took aim at China yet again with a memorandum to limit Chinese investment in American businesses and technologies. In response, Beijing has urged the U.S. to stop weaponizing economic issues.
But China has also responded to trade provocations with some of its own. The country is considering export limits on critical technologies, including those needed for the green energy transition. And an exclusive report from Reuters finds a private company has already started down this path. Ernest Scheyder is a reporter at Reuters, and he’s also the author of “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives.” He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour, and the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Sabri Ben-Achour: Up until now, at least, the U.S. has imported materials and equipment from China to process lithium. This is the metal used in electric car batteries, for example. What does that mean exactly, to process lithium? Like what are U.S. companies using this kind of equipment and materials for?
Ernest Scheyder: The main piece of equipment used to filter it is called absorbent, or a sorbent, and that’s basically — it sort of acts like a giant magnet. And in a salty brine solution, it’ll basically attract lithium and not other minerals that might be in that brine, such as calcium or magnesium. China has become the world’s largest producer of those sorbents, and has been using that control for its economic benefit.
Ben-Achour: Now, China hasn’t officially banned its companies from exporting that material to the U.S, but your reporting has found that Chinese companies aren’t waiting around for that to happen. They see the writing on the wall and some of them have stopped exports to the U.S. preemptively. How serious is that for us industries that need that material?
Scheyder: We do know that earlier this year, China basically threatened to withhold all kinds of lithium processing technologies and critical minerals processing technologies to the West as part of this escalating trade spat. So the fact that one company is already preemptively doing it is a sign that private industry within China is beginning to react to whatever Beijing is doing. If Beijing ultimately approves this export ban, companies would need government licenses for overseas sales that are difficult to obtain. Now, there are some Western companies that are trying to catch up with these Chinese rivals and produce more of these sorbents, but the problem is that many of them have not found commercial success yet.
Ben-Achour: There’s a certain symmetry here, it seems, in what China and the U.S. are doing. The U.S. blocked the export to China of the equipment used to make semiconductors, for example. Now you have China blocking the export of the equipment to make or process lithium. Do you think this is coincidental?
Scheyder: It definitely is each country using the tools that it has in its tool kit. And so if you’re able to basically say, “Hey, what do I have? What do I make that my peer or my rival needs, and can I start to slowly take away one bit at a time as part of this escalating trade tension?” Then, I think we’ll start to see things getting more and more intense. We’ve already seen China block exports of germanium and gallium, which are minor metals used to make semiconductors, graphite, which is used to make an electric vehicle battery, and other pieces of equipment and critical minerals out there. So we’ve seen a slow ratcheting up in those export bans, and this sign from this Chinese urban company indicates that it’s only going to get more intense as things go on in 2025.