Rio Tinto’s Serbia lithium mine project faces fresh protests
The troubles highlight the challenges to building new mines in Europe.
Rare earth and lithium boosters beware. Ken Fisher, chairman and chief executive officer of Fisher Investments Inc., recommends Fiat since the company’s management is not pursuing its own electric car.
“They understand the trend that so many other automakers are making that the money they put into electric cars is just a bottomless pit that goes nowhere and loses billions of dollars. They have committed themselves instead, in a very forward looking way which is technically quite correct, to be focused on the natural gas engine as the future technology,” said Fisher in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday.
Interest in rare earth and lithium has been driven by the belief that more and more cars are going to go electric. Orocobre, a lithium miner in Argentina, has grown substantially due to major investments by Toyota, Mitsubishi and Magna International, a Canadian car parts manufacturer.
Fisher believes that advances in hydraulic fracturing, a process to stimulate the recovery of oil and gas in rock, will result in cheap and abundant natural gas. The technology has advanced in recent years and has opened up more and more areas to oil and gas drilling previously considered uneconomic.
“We have a huge amount of global reserves of natural gas based off recent technology. And that technology shift will make natural gas engines the driver of the future and not electric.”
Fisher says that people believe that electric cars are a green technology but the cars are “. . . actually very anti-environmental.”
Fisher Investments Inc. has 24,000 clients and $41 billion in assets under management. Investment Advisor named Ken Fisher one of the industry’s most influential people over the past 30 years.
Fisher believes that Fiat is playing its cards correctly.
“Management is foreseeing the world correctly when others aren’t.”
