Controversy over a lithium mine in Cáceres: bury exploitation to avoid rejection | Climate and environment

Two kilometers from the historic center of Cáceres, in the Sierra de la Mosca mountain, in the area known as Valdeflores, the company Extremadura New Energy, SA (a subsidiary of the Australian Infinity Lithium) wants to operate the first underground lithium mine in the mouth. It is the second attempt by this company to extract the lithium it contains from this deposit in Cáceres, a key element for batteries and strategic in energy transmission. The first attempt —which was contemplating building an open-cast mine— was widely rejected by a large part of the city’s civil and political society, for which reason they decided to reformulate the project.

Currently, the company has an exploration permit, an authorization that was granted to the company Castilla Mining, SLU (another branch of Infinity Lithium), which allows it to investigate the possibilities of this deposit in an area of ​​9,305 hectares of the Municipal terms. from Cáceres, Sierra de Fuentes and Torreorgaz. The next step presents the explosion project, the restoration project and the environmental impact study for which the company has a period of one year.

From Extremadura New Energy they explain that since there is a law in the region that classifies lithium projects as of regional interest, the procedure of the paperwork would be accelerated, with which they estimate that in between 9 and 12 months they could all be completed. If you decide to do it, it is necessary to do it as part of the first quarter of 2024 to come in the construction of the plant. In the first quarter of 2026 they could be extracting lithium. The series investment of 600 million euros in the lithium processing plant and another 200 million euros in the development of the underground mine. The objective calls for 30 years of concession, of which two would be for construction, 26 for exploitation and the last three for restoration.

The CEO of the company, Ramón Jiménez, defined the underground mine project as an example of sustainable mining. “This project contemplates the use of 100% renewable energy, in addition to the extraction processing of the material, the use of electrical appliances for heat cells, as well as for electric motors.” The shallowest point of the mine would be 40 meters and the deepest 400 meters. “The objective is to make galleries, extract the material and fill it in again, so that the mountain would not remain hollow, the material is cemented to make it more rigid and allow the mountain to remain stable”, explains Jiménez. “Every year we anticipate extracting about 20,000 tons of lithium hydroxide, the equivalent of the batteries of 500,000 Tesla model three cars.” Regarding employment, they maintain that they will create more than 700 jobs during the explosion and 1,500 during construction.

However, the new project does not convince some groups, such as the Salvemos la Montaña platform, which was born as a movement against the installation of the open pit mine and gained significant notoriety. Now, this platform also rejects the underground mine. The developer company accuses this platform of not wanting to talk to them about the project. And one of the spokespersons for this civil association, Santiago Márquez, argues that the only thing the company wants to get from them is the “social license and take the picture.”

water problems

The platform indicates that the underground mine project is not different from the previous one. “The example they give of an underground mine is that of Aguas Teñidas in Huelva, but if the total occupation of that project is analyzed it is 660,000 square meters in all its facilities, an occupation the same as that of a mining operation,” he warns. Marquez. In addition, this activist incident in which the facilities will have to drain water as they go deeper into the mountain, which could cause the aquifers in the area to dry up.

He also advised Márquez that at the moment the documentation presented by the company is very scarce, and he accuses them of hiding a lot of information. Salvemos la Montaña highlights that the hydrometallurgical plant is the same in both projects: “25,000 clays of acid chemical products, caustic soda and sulfuric acid per year, which will be expelled by the chimneys in the form of water vapor and which will reach the city ”.

Most of the parties present in the Cáceres City Council are expectant before the final presentation of the project; They are also awaiting the decision that the environmental technicians of the Junta de Extremadura take on the essential declaration of environmental impact of the mine. But against unequivocally it is already positioned United We Can. Its spokesperson, Consuelo López, explains: “We do not want a mine in the mountains in any way, regardless of whether it is buried. There is no such mine in the world.” López regrets that some parties have changed their minds in recent months. The non-assigned councilor Francisco Martín Alcántara is also against: “the underground mine is an unfeasible project, it is illegal, it does not comply with the urban regulations of the general plan that declares mining extraction in that place illegal; it would also be done a few kilometers from the city and close to hospitals and residential areas.”

On the opposite side are parties like Ciudadanos. Their spokesperson in Cáceres, Raquel Preciados, assures that they are waiting for the technical reports and once they have them they will make a firm assessment, since they will never support something that is detrimental to Cáceres. Since the PP incident, they also do not know about the project and that once it is made public they will value it. Its speaker, Rafael Mateos, assures that meetings are being held and will continue to be held with experts in the field, to have an opinion based on objective and technical data.

In all this case, the role that the Junta de Extremadura will play is vital, which at the moment does not value the mining project either, since the only information they have is the initial document that accompanies the environmental scope request. With respect to the change from an open pit exploitation to another underground one, the Board assures that an exclusive decision of the promoting company. The Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Sustainability insists that it does not prejudge the result of the processing of an environmental evaluation file of a project that they have not yet received.

Regarding the impact that the mine could have in Cáceres, the Board assures that they are defenders of strategic mining that is compatible with the green economy. “We are referring to sustainable mining, whose paradigm is the need to produce with the least possible damage to the ecosystem, with the highest energy efficiency and with the maximum recovery of products and waste recovery,” say regional government sources. The same sources also indicate that any major mining project can be a boost for economic revitalization. In addition, the Board insists, as in other cases, on the need for this project to also involve industrial development in Extremadura: “the region is aware that its time has come for industrialization and for this, both extraction and industrial use lithium should stay in the community.”

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