, Columnist
Fear and Lithium in Las Vegas
The metal’s hangover has a long-term cure.
The perfect spot for a lithium conference, it turns out.
Photographer: Ethan Miller/Getty Images North AmericaThis article is for subscribers only.
As locations go for a conference about lithium, Las Vegas is hard to beat. Aside from the obvious, there’s just something apt about this desert cauldron of greed and fear hosting an industry finely balanced between both.
This week’s conference, the 10th hosted by Industrial Minerals, was, by all accounts, the best-attended ever, with a notably strong contingent of finance types. Lithium has been on a quiet tear, as some of that Muskian aura around electric vehicles has lit up prospects for the metal embedded in the batteries. Since I wrote this column in early 2016, prices have roughly doubled: