THE SALAR DE UYUNI, a salt flat in southern Bolivia, is so vast and so white you can see it from the moon. It spans 10,000 km² , roughly the area of Kosovo. The top layer consists of salt hexagons, thick enough to withstand the weight of Jeeps and igloo-like buildings made of blocks of salt. Underneath, a layer of brine holds the world’s largest deposits of lithium, a light and volatile metal used in batteries for smartphones, computers and electric vehicles.
Demand for lithium doubled between 2015 and 2020 to around 360,000 tonnes per year. Benchmark predicts it will soon outstrip supply by some 240,000 tonnes. The lithium market is highly speculative; past predictions of shortages have proven wrong, in part because people were slow to start buying electric cars. But the idea that sooner or later plug-in wheels will go mainstream has led to renewed interest in Bolivia. It has 21m tonnes of reserves, says the US Geological Survey.
In some ways, extracting lithium from Bolivia is harder than in other countries. As in Argentina and Chile, Bolivia uses solar evaporation to extract the metal. The process consists of digging a series of huge pools, the biggest of which has a surface area of 30 hectares . As the lithium-rich brine is transferred from one pool to the next, evaporation helps isolate different salts.
Another problem is that some of the deals Mr Morales was willing to strike with foreign firms have been unpopular with activists. In 2018 the government hired Maison Engineering and CMEC, two Chinese firms, to build an industrial-size lithium carbonate plant with a capacity to produce 15,000 tonnes each year. It also signed a deal with ACI Systems, a German firm, for a joint venture to manufacture lithium hydroxide from the brine left over after the evaporation process.
“We’re still stumbling a bit,” admits Mr Rocha, the director. He says he is under “a lot of pressure” to open an industrial-sized plant next year. It currently consists of little more than a steel shell. Experts warn that moving from small-scale to industrial production will require the development of new processes in addition to the purchase of new machines. According to Benchmark, lithium factories take seven years on average to reach full capacity.
Industrial-scale battery production is much harder to imagine, for reasons largely beyond the government’s control. Bolivia is landlocked and has terrible roads. It would have to import many components and exporting the batteries would be costly, even hazardous. A better option, though currently far-fetched, would be for South America to develop regional electric-vehicle supply chains, which might perhaps include Bolivian batteries.
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