~ Linn Maung ~
For the manufacturers of electrical vehicles (EVs) in China it is encouraging news that China’s lithium battery manufacturing capacity is expected to increase from one terawatt hour in 2022 to three terawatt hours in 2025 and to 4.5 terawatt hours in 2030. For buyers of EVs in China, too, this may be encouraging news. But for the ethnic Tibetan people inhabiting the plateau of Tibet, this has spelled disaster. To feed the battery manufacturing units in mainland China, the authorities are encouraging Chinese companies to plunder the lithium reserves of Tibet and in the process destroying the fragile environment of Tibet through wanton mining activities.
Until recently, China, the leading EV market in the world, had been relying largely on other countries for the supply of lithium. Now, however, Beijing has started exploiting the vast lithium deposits in the plateau of Tibet which is estimated to hold about 85 percent of the lithium reserve of China. Tibetan researchers have reported that this “white gold rush” has led to Chinese miners using quick, cheap and dirty processing techniques.
Leading electric car manufacturer in China BYD has been granted by the Chinese government a 20-year lease to exploit the Chabyer Tsaka Lake in Tibet. “Across Tibet’s vast terrain are salt lakes that contain some of the largest lithium reserves in the world,” writes Free Tibet, “Chabyer Tsaka, known in China as Lake Zabuye, is a massive salt lake in southwest Tibet with an extraordinarily high concentration of naturally-occurring lithium carbonate in its waters.”
In the rush to cash in on the lucrative market for lithium batteries, several other Chinese companies have also moved into Tibet. Tibetans, on the receiving end of environmental costs of lithium extraction, have opposed the move but in vain. Tibetans have no say over lithium extraction by China, though they see none of its benefits. All that they experience is pollution and build-up of factories and other infrastructure across their pristine landscape.
Methods being used by Chinese companies to extract lithium such as harvesting of brine from the salt-water lakes and mining of hard rock entail environmental damage because of the toxic chemicals used in the process. The Ganhetan industrial zone near the Kumbum monastery in the Amdo province of Tibet is now notorious for air pollution. Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism, was believed to have been born in Kumbum where the monastery was built in 1583 by the 3rd Dalai Lama.
The mining has caused serious damage to the land, to the shapes of the mountains and to the water courses, says a study. Water sources have been polluted and plant cover has been destroyed. This has been accompanied with increased rates of fluorosis, causing teeth to become brittle. High concentrations of toxic metals in the soil have made the surrounding areas unsuitable for agriculture.
Toxic chemicals used by the Chinese company Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium at Dartsedo in the Sichuan province in eastern Tibet have percolated into the waters of river Lichu on many occasions; killing fish and farm animals of the local communities. On one occasion, residents of Dartsedo County had defied a large police presence to lodge their protest to the local government; securing a temporary halt to the extraction.
The mining of lithium is over and above the massive extraction of other minerals and natural resources of Tibet like coal, gold and copper. These minerals meet the industrial needs of mainland China but bring little benefit to the people of Tibet, destroy the environment and unsettle the traditional life of Tibetan nomads.
China is now the world’s largest consumer of energy. Nearly 60 percent of this energy comes from coal. To avoid polluting mainland China by mining activities, the Chinese government has shifted many of the coal mining activities to Tibet. China is also the world’s largest producer of copper. One-sixth of the copper reserves of China are in Tibet. Car manufacturers in China depend for copper on Tibet; used in the electrical systems of vehicles. Copper is also used for the transmission of high voltage electricity across China. Gold, too, continues to be mined in Tibet; either through the illegal method of dredging river-beds or through the mining of gold deposits, destroying land considered sacred by many Tibetans. The careless way the mining is done has exposed the Tibetan highlands to landslides. In March 2013, in a landslide at a copper mine in Gyama, about 60 km from Lhasa, 83 miners were buried alive.
A new craze for bottled water in China has led to numerous bottling companies exploiting the water resources of Tibet, gathering the water of the plateau at a low cost and marketing it as pure Himalayan water. The bottling of water takes place among the glaciers of Tibet which are shrinking fast as a result of the warming of the plateau. Water is also bottled in national parks and protected areas. The massive generation of hydro power in Tibet that helps to meet the energy needs of mainland China is another way the water resources of the plateau are being exploited.
To facilitate mining and extraction projects across Tibet, the Chinese government has introduced a policy of resettling the Tibetan nomads, millions of them, in urban settlements; depriving them of their traditional grasslands and their way of life. They grazed their cattle population in these pastures which are now available for mining.
The construction of the Qinghai – Lhasa railway in 2006 has greatly facilitated the transportation of the minerals out of the plateau. By 2016, over 100 mining projects were spread across the Tibetan plateau.
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