A massive underground deposit of high-grade phosphate rock recently discovered in Norway is big enough to satisfy world demand for fertilisers, solar panels and electric car batteries over the next 100 years, according to the company exploiting the resource.
Combine that with the massive lithium mine in Wolfsberg, Austria and we are set for the future.
Austria even constructed the whole money with taxpayer money in the 80s, and when the mine was ready, it was sold for a symbolic Schilling (~€0.07) to an Austrian private company in 1991 to mine the lithium, which they immediately did … not. Instead, they boarded the mine up and did nothing with it.
Then then sold it for €10.25 mio to an Australian company in 2011. The state then even changed the law that determines the minimum size from which a mine needs an environmental impact assessment to just over the size of the mine, to make mining that lithium easier. In return, the lithium should be processed locally in Austria.
Sadly, they forgot to get that in writing, and now that Australian company wants to process the lithium in the UAE.
You can’t be serious, right? Right?
Austria is deeply corrupt and making taxpayer gifts to private investors, and then forgetting the ties to what good the investor needs to bring in return is standard procedure in Germany and Austria. Somehow the people involved on government side then tend to get lucrative presentation deals, or flast for cheap, but our corruption laws mostly concern themselves with the waste worker getting flowers too expensive, rather than high level interactions between government, businesses and politicians.
Sadly I am serious.
If you understand German (or can bear automatically transcribed and automatically translated subtitles), here’s a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzyeD33xhi8
Let me guess, Rio Tinto?