Chile’s lithium dreams raise water concerns in the desert

Diego de Almagro: As night falls in Chile’s world’s driest Atacama desert, drilling machines extract brine to measure levels of lithium – a mineral critical to the global clean energy transition, but which is naturally harmful.
The desert has the main deposits of minerals in Chile, part of the “lithium triangle” of Latin America with Argentina and Bolivia.
Demand for lithium, which is used in electric car batteries, has increased in recent years as the world tries to move away from fossil fuels to prevent global warming.
In the salt flats of Aguilar and La Isla in the Altoandinos desert area-at 3,400 meters and 4,400 meters, respectively-the temperature is close to minus zero and the wind blows in the south.
They hurriedly finished taking samples of the brine that were sent to the laboratory to measure the amount of lithium.
“We are drilling around the clock,” said Ivan Mlynarz, executive vice president of the Enami National Mining Company, which is trying to start mining the “white gold” mineral by 2030.
Aguilar hopes to mine 60,000 tons of lithium annually from Enami between La Isla and Grande salt flats.
The project is key to Chile’s plans to regain the position it lost to Australia in 2016 as the largest lithium producer.
Cristian Moreno, an Enami employee, told AFP that the lithium quality of the sample was “very good”.
Chile’s leftist president, Gabriel Borich, launched plans to create a national lithium company similar to Codelco, the state-owned copper company created in the 1970s from nationalized mining companies.
Last month, Codelco struck a deal with lithium miner SQM to double the private mining company’s mineral output in the Salar de Atacama, north of what is now the Alto Andinos.
Competitors Australia, which extracts lithium from rock instead of salt, now produces 43 percent of the mineral, while Chile produces 34 percent.
The Codelco/SQM alliance will add approximately 300,000 tons per year to Chile’s lithium production between 2025 and 2030, and 280,000-300,000 tons per year from 2031 to 2060.