Cornish mining is staging a comeback but this time it is not tin that is the prize – it’s lithium and other critical minerals for the transition.
Cornwall could provice the suite of critical minerals to fuel the UK’s clean-tech future and cut reliance on China and the wider global supply chain.
Cornwall arrives in London this week for the Resourcing Tomorrow conference with one message: Britain can mine its own battery metals.
Delegates will showcase live projects and early production plans that could put the county at the centre of the EV and energy-storage boom.
Lithium is the main prize. Cornwall holds some of Europe’s most promising resources in its granite and geothermal brines.
Companies are racing to scale up both hard-rock and deep-geothermal extraction with pilot plants already running and full commercial sites on the table.
The aim is simple. Produce battery-grade lithium in Cornwall then ship it directly to British gigafactories instead of importing it from the other side of the world.
The shift could be huge for the region. Hundreds of jobs, new processing hubs and a supply chain anchored in a county once written off as a relic of Britain’s industrial age.
It also fits squarely with the government’s critical minerals plan which calls for home-grown production of lithium tungsten and rare earths.
Cornwall makes its case for home grown critical minerals supply appeared first on Energy Live News.