Bolivia's election on Sunday could shape global lithium
Bolivia's election on Sunday could shape global lithium
And other news in mining for clean energy
On Sunday, Oscar Choque and his family will make the public-transit-supported trek from Dresden to Berlin to vote in the Bolivian presidential election.
Choque is from an Indigenous family of miners in Bolivia’s mountains, and he runs Ayni, an organization in Germany that promotes sustainable resource development. At a local university, he’s helping design a curriculum that weaves an understanding of social and environmental impacts into engineering big industries. He coordinates with a network of NGOs to describe how actions in Europe impact his home country.
“Much of what is happening in our country is coming from the demand part,” he says, meaning the global North.
Bolivia, the high, landlocked country in South America, has so much concentrated lithium that it may top global deposits. But for more than a decade, the battery world has waited impatiently for production to start.
The global scavenger hunt for metals in the clean energy transition is set to change Bolivia. This presidential election may determine how that could happen.
Bolivia has been a country of mining since Spanish colonizers arrived and began shipping expensive silver back to Europe. Adding another mining industry isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
Bolivia’s lithium is locked mostly in the expanse of the world’s largest salt flat. The small-scale miners who pick up tools and mine their own ore can’t do the same for lithium. Even big companies are still trying to figure out how to make extraction economical. It requires heaps of investment and years of study, not least of the environmental impacts. Small-scale miners and other Indigenous people haven’t been blessed with the capital, know-how, or power to take the lead on this.
As a result, the development of a lithium industry is likely to follow the acute divide between the largely Indigenous political class in the mountains and the white economic elites in the lowlands. Over the last year, the rift across the aisle has only deepened.
Against this backdrop, Choque says voters are polarized between public or private-led industrial development. Public may mean greater control over who benefits from extraction. Private may mean greater foreign influence or technical know-how.
Luis Arce, the leading presidential candidate from the country’s leftist party, promotes a mix. With EV consultancy Benchmark Minerals advising his campaign, he has put faith in lithium to rescue the country from a deep Covid-19 recession. There are a lot of steps to transform lithium salts into battery lithium, and Arce says he aims to accomplish it all within the country with the help of foreign companies.
Choque is skeptical.
“If you are looking at development from the industrial point of view, it is a good plan, but for the Indigenous people, for the nature, for the flora and fauna, it [doesn’t matter] whether it is private or a state company, because the state companies behave like multinationals,” Choque says. Better that we have stronger regulatory enforcement in Bolivia, Europe and the US, he adds.
A partnership between a Bolivian state company and a foreign lithium producer from Germany was on track to be the first lithium hydroxide producer in the country. After local groups in the mountainous mining region of Potosí protested the deal, former president Evo Morales canceled it. Local politics in Potosí are complex, so it’s unclear whether the protests represented broader concerns of Indigenous people. One of the protest leaders joined a conservative candidate vying for Morales’ position.
Morales, accused of election fraud, fled the country in what has been called a coup. If fellow party member Arce wins, the contract will likely be renewed, Choque says. (A joint venture with a Chinese company is still going forward.)
Most experts aren’t expecting a lithium boom anytime soon, regardless who wins. Bolivia’s lithium deposits are massive, but they’re hard to separate from the minerals in the salt flats. The country’s institutions will likely continue to struggle to find the capacity to launch competitive projects. It may turn out that lithium is more sustainably extracted somewhere else.
Many people in Bolivia aren’t much concerned with lithium. The election will also be a referendum on the management of other resources like soya and quinoa, the management of deadly economic downturn due to the pandemic, and human rights abuses under the conservative interim government.
Read more:
The high-stakes fight over Bolivia’s lithium (Protocol)
Bolivia rethinks how to industrialise its lithium amid political transition (China Dialogue)
Bolivian lithium: why you should not expect any ‘white gold rush’ in the wake of Morales overthrow (The Conversation)
Eye on Industry
Australia’s parliamentary inquiry on mining in Indigenous lands is continuing, with two new accusations. An Aboriginal group in Australia requested a mining company inform them of plans to mine around sacred sites, and the miner, FMG, withheld $1.9 million in royalties owed to them. Additionally, Rio Tinto lawyers told Indigenous groups that they could not speak publicly about the threats to their sacred sites.
Mining covers more than 1/5 of Indigenous territory in the Amazon — across Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana and Peru. As a result, 30 rivers are being polluted.
Top battery makers South Korea’s LG Chem and China’s CATL have struck deals with Indonesian state miner Antam for the nickel products intended for a battery plant that many expect will be built in the country. The country plans to create its own EV battery firm.
Chile lithium producer SQM announced it would cut its water and brine use by 20% this year and by 50% by 2030.
Reads
Alcoa vs. the Amazon: How the ribeirinhos won their collective land rights (Mongabay)
Land Defenders Are Killed in the Philippines for Protesting Canadian Mining (Vice)
Mining Earth: From the Amazon to the ocean’s depths (Al Jazeera)
Can deep-sea mining help the environment? (The Economist Video)
Thanks for reading! I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.
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