August 2024: Drew Coleman
UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of Earth, Marine, and Environmental Sciences
Developing Clean Energy: The Impact of Research on Lithium Mining
“This offers an opportunity to the state of North Carolina to be a real leader in clean energy for the country.”
Drew Coleman
As battery demand for applications like electric vehicles and energy storage continues to grow, lithium, a key component in lithium-ion batteries, has become a valuable resource for lowering carbon emissions. Large lithium deposits found throughout the North Carolina tin-spodumene belt, stretching from Kings Mountain to Lincolnton, have North Carolina poised to become a national leader in the electric vehicle battery supply chain.
Companies have taken notice and are flocking to the State to take advantage of this natural resource. VinFast Automotive has broken ground on an electric vehicle facility in Chatham County, while Toyota has begun building their first ever battery plant in Randolph County. Similarly, Wolfspeed, a semiconductor manufacturer seeking to improve electric vehicle performance, finished the construction of their Chatham County facility in March.
In 2024, the Collaboratory funded Dr. Coleman’s research, entitled “The Age and Thermal History of Magmatism in the North Carolina Tin-Spodumene Belt,” to facilitate lithium exploration and extraction. With this funding, Dr. Coleman seeks to precisely determine the age of lithium bearing rocks in the tin-spodumene belt, planning to use this information to find other lithium deposits and improve lithium mining efficiency.
What influenced you to start researching lithium?
If I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, it was COVID. I wasn’t allowed to travel out of state for research. I had students that needed research projects, and I saw an opportunity to take up lithium research in North Carolina. It was a little bit out of my area of expertise when I started, and it took me a while to get up to speed, but that’s the honest answer. I’ve long been interested in understanding economic mineral deposits in general, I had just not considered the lithium in North Carolina. It’s a little bit different to the style of mineralization where my expertise is more focused. So, this was a stretch for me to go off in this direction, but it turned out to be an interesting one
Why is lithium mining so important to North Carolina?
Lithium offers an opportunity to the State of North Carolina to become a real leader in clean energy for the country. We have a lot of interest coming to North Carolina around energy storage. There’s the Toyota site that’s going to build batteries. There’s Wolfspeed, building their new factory in Chatham County to make chips regulating EV battery use. We have lithium here in central North Carolina that can be shipped right to the plant to make batteries. In addition to that, North Carolina has a long history of mining phosphate, which is another one of the important components of lithium-ion batteries. That’s down east in Aurora, North Carolina. So, we have the components for the batteries here, which just offers North Carolina a real opportunity to become a national leader in battery technology and battery manufacturing.
How would your research improve lithium mining prospects in North Carolina?
The idea that I’m trying to bring here to North Carolina is an idea that we’ve used elsewhere, on different kinds of mineral deposits. If we precisely know when the minerals were deposited, then we can look at regional age patterns and we can direct exploration in areas where the ages are correct for there to be more lithium deposits. We’ve applied this very successfully to some deposits in the Western United States, and that’s what I’m trying to do here. The goal is to very precisely define when these deposits were being formed, and then, looking at the regional geology and finding when there was action at that same time. That might be a place to go look for additional deposits. That’s the idea behind it. Saying, ‘go direct your exploration here.’ Whether it works, we’ll see.
Do you anticipate any challenges in your research?
Well, yeah, we anticipated and have already encountered some challenges. The biggest problem we’re having right now is we’re having trouble finding the best quality minerals to do the dating. There’s one mineral in particular, zircon, which is a zirconium silicate that is a particularly robust time capsule. And there isn’t much, or any zircon in these rocks, so we had to pivot to looking at different minerals and maybe different dating techniques to nail down the ages. We’re in the process of exploring that right now, so that, I think, is going to be the biggest hurdle.
Another big hurdle I often get with these projects is getting access to samples, because sometimes, mining companies are not forthcoming with their materials, but so far that has not proven to be problematic.