Energopolitics of Transition: The Political Ecology of Anticipation in the Portuguese Lithium Rush

ABSTRACT: This article examines the current mining revival in Europe, focusing on the dispute over lithium mining projects in Portugal. Lithium's growing role in energy storage explains its global speculative boom and its popularity in the socio-technological imaginary of the energy transition. In Portugal, lithium mining applications have skyrocketed in the last decade following the European call for the internal supply of critical raw materials. In 2018, the Portuguese government launched the National Lithium Strategy to assess potential resources and the feasibility of industrial development projects. The lithium rush has quickly become a controversial topic in national debates on energy transition and sustainable development. Community participation has also become an issue, as a highly centralized decisionmaking process has turned a politically sensitive issue into a technocratic matter, triggering opposition from local communities who remain aware of the socio-environmental legacy of past mining booms and busts. The analysis focuses on a specific case in 2019, when the lithium rush came to public attention, to unpack the politics of time underlying the mining revival and opposition to it in the context of the energy transition. The latter is examined as a field of negotiation, friction, and conflict through which the different temporalities of the European periphery are articulated. Highlighting the relevance of internal and external unequal relations for understanding the conflict over lithium, the article argues that while the case of Portugal exemplifies lithium onshoring in the Global North, it also shows that the making of internal resource frontiers for the energy transition builds on—and reinforces—historical dynamics of dispossession and peripheralization; and that such stratification of unequal relations finds temporal refraction in the ways socio-ecological futures are anticipated and imagined in the dispute over the energy transition.