Olaf Scholz hopes his trip to Latin America will help secure the lithium supplies that Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen need.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz is hoping his trip to Latin America this weekend will help Germany secure additional supplies of the lithium that car giants like Mercedes-Benz Group AG and Volkswagen AG need for their electric-vehicle batteries.
In the global race for many commodities, China has become the dominant supplier or processor, leading to warnings about the government in Beijing wielding excessive influence. On Sunday, he directly referred to China as Germany’s competitor in the global commodity market. “There are states that think that all raw materials come from China, but this is not true. Many raw materials in fact come for example from Argentina or Chile, get shipped to China, are processed there and then sold again,” Scholz said in a discussion with young Argentinians in Buenos Aires.
SQM and Albemarle both pump up vast amounts of brine from beneath a salt flat in Chile’s northern desert, storing it in giant evaporation ponds for a year or more. The resulting concentrate is turned into lithium carbonate and hydroxide at nearby plants and sent off to Chinese and Korean battery makers.
While Chile and Australia account for the majority of the global lithium mine supply, China has more than half of all capacity for refining it into specialist battery chemicals.
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