Rio Tinto may have mothballed its proposed $3.6 billion lithium project in Serbia's Jadar Valley, but opponents have vowed to keep fighting until the mining giant leaves the area for good.
The ABC has obtained an internal memo from the multi-national company, saying the project will be move to a "care and maintenance" phase, meaning Rio Tinto will keep and maintain the land it owns but pause all work towards turning it into a mine.
The memo says the decision has been made as the company simplifies its operations and prioritises other projects under new chief executive Simon Trott, who has embarked on a restructure and cost-cutting exercise at Rio.
It also points to difficulty in gaining permits from the Serbian government.
"We continue to believe Jadar is a tier one deposit with the potential to play a significant role in Serbia and Europe's energy transition," the Rio Tinto memo says.
"However, given the lack of progress in permitting, we are not in a position to sustain the same level of spend and resource allocation."
There has also been strong community opposition to the project, with tens of thousands of Serbians turning out to protest in recent years, concerned that the mine would be an environmental and agricultural disaster.
After finding Europe's largest and most valuable deposit of lithium in the Jadar Valley, Rio Tinto was hoping to build an underground mine to extract 2.3 million tonnes of the mineral.
The company, which is headquartered in the UK and Australia, said that the amount of what many call "white gold" would have been enough to make batteries for 1 million electric vehicles a year for several decades.
"We've got enough for at least 40 years of mining, and that would be the largest, longest-life, highest-grade deposit in all of Europe," managing director of Rio Tinto's Jadar Project, Chad Blewitt, told the ABC when we visited the site in October 2024.
At the time, the mine had not yet been rubberstamped, and Serbian Mining Minister Dubravka Ðedovic Handanovic said the approval process would take another two years.
There was strong support for the project outside the country, with the German government, the European Union and big car manufacturers all standing to benefit if the mine was built.
Germany is home to Europe's largest car manufacturing industry, and production is crucial to its economy.
Even though the Jadar project has now been paused, those who have vigorously opposed it are cautious about celebrating it as a win.
Marš sa Drine, which translates to "Get off the Drina River", is one of the activist groups opposing the project, along with a collective of local residents who have refused to move out to make way for the mine.
The groups have promised to keep up their fight as long as Rio Tinto has a presence in Serbia.
Marš sa Drine is calling the company's planned pause a "temporary retreat" and believes it will pursue the project in the future.
Bojana Novakovic´, a Logie-nominated Serbian Australian actor who is one of Marš sa Drine's leading figures, told the ABC that since the news broke last week that the project had been halted, her group was "not seeing any difference on the ground".
"Until they pack their bags, close their offices, and sell the land back to the locals, there's no reason for us to think that they've gone away," Novakovic told the ABC from Serbia's capital, Belgrade.
"Care and maintenance is not the cancellation of a project.
"We will absolutely keep fighting this company and any government in Serbia that supports them through every and any means necessary and available."
The memo obtained by the ABC outlines that Rio Tinto plans to protect its rights to the area in case it wants to pursue the project in the future.
A pause in this project is also something opponents have seen before.
After mass demonstrations about the Jadar Valley mine across Serbia ahead of the 2022 general election, it was the government that decided to bring it to a halt.
But in July 2024, Serbia's Constitutional Court annulled that decision, saying it was unconstitutional and illegal.
Less than a week later, the government announced the project could proceed, subject to environmental, regulatory, and legal conditions.
Two days after that, President Aleksandar Vucic, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and EU energy commissioner Maroš Šefcovic signed a deal in Belgrade granting EU car makers access to raw materials mined in Serbia, including lithium.
The EU — a trading bloc Serbia is a candidate to be a member of — hailed it as a "historic day", with the deal aimed at reducing the union's dependency on imports from America and Asia.
But since then, the Serbian government has faced significant challenges and growing national anger.
In January, then-prime minister Miloš Vucevic resigned following weeks of protests, including one that brought one of Belgrade's major intersections to a standstill for 24 hours.
Serbians were furious over the collapse of a railway station canopy that killed 15 people, saying rampant corruption and shoddy construction work caused it.
The protests have evolved into a wider uprising against corruption, negligence and power.
There have been calls for populist president Mr Vucic to quit too.
Activists believe that if the political climate calms down, Rio Tinto will be back.
"So as long as there's lithium in the ground, as long there are multinational companies and corporations who are making profit from selling lithium, producing batteries from lithium, we're going to have to protect this land and that's something that we don't shy away from," Novakovic said.
Gavin Mudd, the director of the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre at the British Geological Survey, said lithium's value was undeniable, but there was more to consider when it came to mining it.
"If you look at it from a global perspective, it's gone from a few hundred million dollars in about 2010, to now being worth several billion dollars annually," he said.
"It's been growing very, very rapidly, and we still need it to grow rapidly into the future to make sure we can achieve both the energy transition and our net zero climate ambitions globally.
"Lithium is increasingly important … but we need to make sure that we are mining lithium in the most responsible way and not leaving legacies for future generations, and I think that's a really important part of the whole debate about lithium, making sure we do it right."
The mine's opponents do not believe there is a responsible way to mine in the Jadar Valley despite Rio Tinto's assurances that its underground facility would not disrupt the forests, farms and families on the surface.
"This would be the first-ever lithium mine built on fertile soil and populated land and so it would open the floodgates, I think, if we allowed it to happen," Novakovic said.
Rio Tinto declined the ABC's requests for an interview.
