Large amounts of lithium lie deep in the mountains in southern Austria. The German-Australian mining engineer Dietrich Wanke wants to cover part of the European demand with it. About a man who is on a treasure hunt around the world.
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Silvia Liebrich, Wolfsberg
It’s quiet and cool in the mountain. Only a simple iron grating seals off the black gorge from the outside world. Whoever enters it, dives into a completely different world after just a few steps. Faint daylight gives way to total darkness, and only a faint gurgle can be heard from inside – water trickling through cracks in the rock into the tunnels. Dietrich Wanke knows almost every square meter here, he has walked this path so often. The gallery is his workplace. Lithium is soon to be mined here on a large scale, the substance that is so urgently needed not only by the car industry. Energy transition, electromobility, digitization, without the white gold all this is hardly imaginable.