A favourable conditional opinion on the ‘Aurora Lithium’ project – promoted by GALP and Swedish company Northvolt – for a lithium refinery in Setúbal has been approved by the local municipality, as part of the environmental impact study currently undergoing public consultation.
The document states that as a result of the analysis carried out, (the town hall) considers that the Environmental Impact Study (EIS) “is well structured” and “responds to a large part of the mitigation needs of the main impacts identified”.
Even so, fit is “necessary to formalise issues raised by the analysis of the Environmental Impact Study in this opinion”. This project, costing over €1 billion, is already substantially delayed, now not scheduled to start before 2028.
According to reports, the Aurora project, to be sited in the Mitrena Industrial Park, will have the capacity to produce enough lithium hydroxide to equip 700,000 electric vehicles, with an initial production capacity of between 28,000 and 35,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide, “an essential material for producing lithium-ion batteries”. Initially, the Portuguese-Swedish consortium wanted to start the operation by the end of next year.
