Filipe Gomes had been craving fresh air and quiet routine when he and his partner quit the chaos of London’s catering industry for the fog-misted hills of Covas do Barroso, the sleepy Portuguese farming village in which he was raised.
But his rural idyll has been disturbed by miners drilling boreholes as they push to dig four vast lithium mines right beside the village. The prospecting has sparked resistance from residents who fear the mines will foul the soil, drain the water and fill the air with the rumbling thunder of heavy trucks.
“They are destroying everything,” said Gomes, who runs the only cafe in the village with his partner. “They are taking our peace.”
Covas do Barroso is among the first villages caught up in Europe’s efforts to green its economy. As the continent weans itself off fossil fuels that poison the air and heat the planet, demand for lithium is surging, to build batteries that can run electric vehicles and balance renewable-heavy power grids.
Across Europe, people living near lithium deposits appear unconvinced that mines will bring good jobs and are unmoved by pleas to stop a bigger ecological threat. Attempts to push projects through in the face of local resistance have been met with cries of “colonialism”.
In Serbia, broad swathes of society have taken to the streets over the past year to protest against a lithium mine planned for the Jadar valley. In France, a lithium mine planned beneath a kaolin quarry in Allier has alarmed activists and divided residents. In Covas do Barroso, in northern Portugal, people say their village – at the heart of a heritage farming region recognised by the United Nations – has been turned into a “sacrifice zone”.
“You’re talking about destroying an area that has been classified as a globally important agricultural heritage site, an example of sustainability, an area with a system of water management that is at least over 500 years old,” said Catarina Alves Scarrott, a member of the protest group Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso (UDCB). “You’re going to sacrifice all of this for open-pit mines. And then, you start to ask: for what?”
The answer, for EU officials and the Portuguese government, is to obtain a soft white metal that is needed to stop burning fuels that make extreme weather dramatically worse – and do so without relying exclusively on foreign suppliers. Europe produces almost no lithium itself. More than three-quarters of the world’s raw supply comes from just three countries: Australia, Chile and China. The latter dominates the refined supply of lithium too.
Anxious about energy security and scrambling to get more mines dug at home, the European Commission set a target last year of meeting 10% of demand for critical raw materials from domestic sources by 2030. In March, it listed the planned mine in Covas as one of 47 strategic mineral projects that would benefit from “coordinated support” to become operational. The decision is being challenged by MiningWatch Portugal, ClientEarth and UDCB, which lodged a complaint with the commission in June.
Environmental concerns about waste and water are not the only factors that have left communities such as Covas wary of prospectors. Kwasi Ampofo, a metals and mining analyst at BloombergNEF, said the sales pitch had been made harder by the mining industry’s historically poor reputation for safety and the lack of skilled domestic labour forces to profit from the work.
“It’s going to be very hard for the EU to develop primary sources of lithium domestically,” he said. “Not impossible, but very hard.”
In Covas, the long-running struggle between villagers and miners has intensified as political support for the project has grown. The Portuguese environment ministry granted the British mining company Savannah Resources a one-year “administrative easement” in December that allows it to prospect in the land around Covas. The villagers filed an injunction that held up the process, but the ministry quickly allowed work to resume, arguing it was in the public interest.
People in the village, where a tattered banner declares “no to the mine, yes to life”, say they feel misled by the miners and betrayed by the government. They accuse the company of trespassing on land it does not own – much of which is held in common ownership – and downplaying the nature and scale of the project. But opinions in the surrounding Boticas region are mixed, with some hopeful the project will boost a neglected rural economy.
Savannah Resources declined to comment. It has previously told local media it is acting within the law and makes efforts to keep people informed. It projects the mine will produce enough lithium for half a million EV batteries a year and describes itself as “enabling Europe’s energy transition”.
But the continent-wide resistance to lithium mining reveals a snag that green groups and mining companies alike have been reluctant to acknowledge. While surveys find vast public support for stronger climate action – as much as 80-89%, according to a project by the Guardian and newsrooms around the world – the infrastructure for a carbon-free economy carries trade-offs that affected communities are often reluctant to bear.
Some residents of Covas, which is itself threatened by wildfires and droughts, say they recognise the tension, even if they consider the costs too great.
“Every village faced with a mine will say ‘no, no, no’, I get that,” said Jorge Esteves, a forestry worker. “But what’s different here is the proximity to our homes.”
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Gomes, the cafe owner, said he would also have fought an oilwell if someone had tried to drill one in Covas.
“I don’t agree with that either, though I have a car – but that’s already happening,” he said. “We do need to find a solution, but what we are doing now is not a solution.”
Studies have shown that a societal shift away from private cars – such as creating walkable cities with good public transport – would greatly limit the rise in demand for lithium, as would halting the surge in SUVs that need big batteries.
Analysts note there are also significant quantities of lithium in electronic waste such as phones and laptops that do not get recycled. For the lithium that does need to be extracted, harvesting it from brine does less damage to the environment than mining it from rocks.
But with 250m combustion engine cars on EU roads and next to no lithium produced at home, electrifying vehicle fleets without domestic sources of lithium would still mean extracting more abroad. Analysts fear this would largely take place in regions with weaker environment and human rights laws.
“It’s not necessarily a dilemma with no exit, but it’s a real one,” said Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College who visited Covas and several others mining regions when writing a book about lithium extraction.
Mines were most likely to face resistance from people when developers failed to include them in the decision-making process, she added.
“It’s not the environmental risks or the water risks on their own – if they’re not combined with a sense of exclusion, then oftentimes those don’t in and of themselves cause protests,” she said. “It’s the harm combined with the lack of voice to be able to say something about that harm.”
In the green hills of Covas, it is unclear whether a friendlier approach by Savannah and the authorities would have won people over or simply tempered their rage. But the anger at the process is palpable.
“The biggest shock initially was not even the impact of the mine,” said Alves Scarrott, who grew up in Covas and moved to London. “It’s the attack on democracy, and democratic processes, and the rights of the people that live there.”
