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Bolivia Is the Saudi Arabia of Lithium
tcd004 writes "You can literally scrape valuable lithium off the ground of many Bolivian salt flats. The country is poised to be the center of world lithium battery production, reaping the benefit of the metal's skyrocketing value. 'The US Geological Survey says 5.4 million tons of lithium could potentially be extracted in Bolivia, compared with 3 million in Chile, 1.1 million in China and just 410,000 in the United States. ... Ailing automakers in the United States are pinning their hopes on lithium. General Motors next year plans to roll out its Volt, a car using a lithium-ion battery along with a gas engine. Nissan, Ford and BMW, among other carmakers, have similar projects.' However, the government fears foreign countries might exploit their natural resources, so for the time being, the salt flats remain untouched."
I generally lean towards advocating market based solutions and free trade in most economic situations. Coming from rural southwestern Virginia, however, and seeing the grip the coal industry has on politics in some areas around here I know how people can really be disadvantaged by mismanagement of natural resources. I also think back to the damage done by the informal imperialism in the Middle-East at the hands of BP (formerly known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and their like. In this case I can't help but be supportive of Morales' efforts to put these lithium reserves to work for the Bolivian campesinos. Having mineral resources has proven to be a curse just as often as it has been a blessing in modern history. Here's to hoping one Latin American government can get it right.
I got a catholic block.
"The previous imperialist model of exploitation of our natural resources will never be repeated in Bolivia," said Saul Villegas, head of a division in Comibol that oversees lithium extraction. "Maybe there could be the possibility of foreigners accepted as minority partners, or better yet, as our clients."
Well, I'm glad somebody's thinking with their head.
I also hope that money goes towards improving their infrastructure and fostering internal business instead of some bullshit palace for some bullshit dictator. All too often third world countries squander their resources on some nationalistic project in their capital or some aggressive military campaign when they don't even have electricity, utilities, law enforcement or running water in half their country.
Neither articles seemed to mention much about pollution. I also hope that they move forward with the caution of the scars of pollution that mining has left on other countries--even Canada. My coworker once commented at lunch (around the time of the Olympics) that we aren't exporting jobs or industry to China but rather just our pollution. Because it's cheaper to pollute there and the government doesn't care. Take precautions, Bolivia, develop standards now! Don't squander your resources!
My work here is dung.
There's a lot of concern from everyone about "peak oil".
Why is there not just as much of a concern about "peak lithium". If we really make a push to convert all cars to being electric, that's a ton of lithium required - and it's used in a lot of other applications too.
That's why solutions like hydrogen as truly alternative fuels make more sense to me that rushing to consume a metal which is truly a non-renewable resource, unlike even coal and oil (which are simply slow to produce but are produced over time).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I hired some guy with a truck to drop me off out on those salt flats once, just for the hell of it. Incredible lightning shows kept me up most nights. Spectacular place. You could walk in any direction and feel like you weren't moving. It was utterly featureless, aside from the geometric pattern on the ground. I was pretty glad that the truck actually came back a couple of days later.
On one hand, I'd be sorry to hear that the flats were being mined. On the other, Bolivians need something like this; I hope their government acts wisely and on behalf of all of their people.
I'll be watching these events with interest.
Probably will be. A very cursory web search brought up this. Seems likely that given some time, other reasonable deposits will be found. This actually makes it harder on Bolivia - they have a fairly small window of time (likely years) to figure out how to maximize revenue and hopefully minimize social and environmental issues.
Being the cynic I am, I'm sure it will come out helping some fat cats and mostly screwing over everybody else. But that's just me.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Lithium batteries are quite recyclable.
But there is certain to be some loss over time from repeated recycling. And recycling does not help if the total amount you need is greater than the total amount available. That's why it may be important to consider using a resource you can actually renew, as in create.
You may not think it's a big deal, but that's the problem - who actually knows if it's practical in the end to have all cars run off lithium batteries? If not, then it would make more long terms sense to direct efforts into fuel cell research for cars than improving batteries specifically for car use, which is a very different running scenario than smaller consumer batteries go through.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I mean, if metallic lithium is just lying around on the ground, wouldn't that be pretty spectacular?
Why can't they just collide a whole bunch of little hadrons?
Hi, I'm Boliva, I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
0. Evil Bolivian liberals start talking about using the proceeds from sale of lithium for things like national defense, highways, electricity, water plants, schools, research facilities, health care, a functional judicial system - all this first-world stuff they could only dream of affording previously
1. Coup
2. Generals clean out subversives who think Bolivians should own their own natural resources, and make country safe for U.S. and European mining co's
3. Generals sell off complete and exclusive rights for pennies on the dollar - no taxation or local businesses involved; Generals get rewarded with nice personal kickbacks
4. Generals provide local labor for cheap. Very cheap. After all, they have a virtually infinite supply of desperate people willing to work for subsistence wages
5. After 10-20 years as the locals revolt because of the total sell-out, generals escape to a first-world life in luxury
6. As the locals refuse to accept the previous BS deal they kick out foreign mining co's and nationalize the resources
7. U.S. decries evil commies and does its best to destabilize said evil commie government, by interfering with elections, supporting "freedom fighters" (read: insurgents and terrorists), and generally attempt to turn back the clock. The pretext is demanding "free elections", which of course can be rigged to practically restore the previous order
8. After a generation everyone eventually gets tired of conflict, forget what they were fighting over in the first place, and things are allowed to return to some semblance of where they should have been at point 0. Only with a lot of bad history.
Been there, done that. Got the t-shirt.
It's clearly time to bring democracy to Bolivia.
They could consider following the same model the Norwegian government used when oil was discovered in the sea outside Norway; create a lithium fund managed by the government, paid by taxes and exploration fees from the companies wanting to mine the lithium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Oil_Fund. It worked for Norway, it might work for Bolivia too.
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
I also hope that money goes towards improving their infrastructure and fostering internal business instead of some bullshit palace for some bullshit dictator.
President Evo Morales of Bolivia is many things, but "bullshit dictator" he is not. He was democratically elected in 2005, and won a recall election in 2008 by a two-thirds majority. The Bolivian government has been a democracy since the 1980's.
I am officially gone from
Yes, lithium may be scarce, but you've got a deep misconception that may be coloring your view and comparison with oil. Oil is a fuel. Allowing it to burn produces energy. Lithium in car batteries is not a fuel. It's a storage device.
Yes I know (although I worded my original post very badly in that respect).
My concern is simply, is there enough lithium that every car could be powered by lithium batteries - that is, is the total amount of lithium sufficient to provide batteries for all the needs we intend to use it for, in a cost effective way.
It could well be there is enough raw lithium that is not a concern. But car batteries require a great deal more lithium than laptop batteries, and a lot more people drive cars than have laptops when you consider the entire world.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"The previous imperialist model of exploitation of our natural resources will never be repeated in Bolivia"
No, instead we will us the new model of exploitation perfected in Latin America: corporate officials will skim 80% of the revenues and buy condos in Miami and Buenos Aires. Si muy bueno!
Considering how their silver deposits were basically stolen from under their feet by the spanish conquistadores and then the tin reserved stolen again by the multinational corporations, and yet they remain one of the poorest countries in America... I hope they keep some of the wealth to improve their conditions. Evo (and successors) seems to be a person that may really achieve that goal. Yes, some of the $$ will go into the wrong hands (do you really think that Irak's war did not produce magnificent profit$ for some groups closely linked to GWB et al.?), but as long as this is a small fraction things should be OK.
When do we start bombing the country?
Latin America has had a few goes at this sort of thing in the past. One common outcome is that leaders looking to better the the quality of life for their people by maintaining fairly tight controls on these kinds of resources are called communists. Certainly some of these efforts have been ill conceived or terribly implemented or blatant power grabs but their governments are often overthrown violently by dictators aided by outsiders in exchange for the right to pillage those resources.
I don't see why lithium should be any different but for their sake I hope so.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
So does this mean that the next president after Obama should start practicing holding hands and kissing cheeks or whatever men do in Bolivia? I'd actually have to compliment Obama on his reserve, only "bowing" to the sheik instead of playing kissy-face like Bush did.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
9. saintly American companies that never do anything wrong PROFIT!!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I wouldn't really call lithium mining "exporting our pollution". It's pretty tame -- you take salt flat brines, selectively precipitate out the salts you want, and return the remaining salts. It's not like you're ripping off mountaintops or contaminating freshwater with lead or something.
Anyway, as with all discussions of "reserves", this whole discussion is incredibly misleading. The concept of a reserves figure also has a market price and technology level associated with it. As market prices change and technology changes, what "reserves" are available in each country changes dramatically. For example, at high oil prices, Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia. The same sort of thing is true with lithium. For example, one the Kings Valley, Nevada mine owned by Western Lithium Corp, which they're currently developing, has 50% more "reserves" at the minimum concentration they're planning to recover than the figure this articles gives for the entire United States. The entire Kings Valley was estimated back in the 70s/80s to have 11m tons LCE (lithium carbonate equivalent, the standard form for trading lithium).
By a scallop's forelocks!
Besides batteries, there will be a huge demand for Lithium if fusion ever becomes practical. It is used to capture the neutrons and also generate more He.
No offense to Bolivia, but their current state of poverty indicates that they haven't had a government in a while that could properly take advantage of a windfall like this. The current government looks like one of the worst of the lot with little respect for law, incompetent with respect to economic matters, and implementing slightly worse than normal racist policies (classic leftist move, implement racist policies to hypothetically and ineffectually undo endemic racism).
My view is that even the most impoverished of countries can greatly improve their well being with a couple of decades of competent government. There are simple things that government can provide to improve the lot of life and increase the value of economic activity in a country without requiring a great outlay of funds. For example, they could implement rule of law and limit the government's ability to subvert said law. Even an amoral, greedy multinational corporation should have rights. Second, public health is important, low-lying fruit. You can't magically eradicate disease, but a lot of countries, like Bolivia, have made no serious attempts at public health. Finally, there's education (both k-12 and college). It sounds like this Bolivian government is serious about that (with a greater expenditure of their GDP on education than the US had) so that's in their favor. And once these basic needs have been met, any competent government will have the revenue to build more sophisticated infrastructure.
My view is that Bolivia has made little serious effort on the first two things with potentially a good investment in education. So why should we expect them to be able to properly manage these lithium deposits well? My view is that the current salt deposits would probably go fast, if they were exploited by developed world technology (rather than by people with pick axes). It'd provide a nice short term windfall, but Bolivia is not prepared to receive that windfall. It will most likely be squandered unless there are serious changes in how the government does business.
the recent attempt at Morales' life and the struggle of some of Bolivia's provinces to get full autonomy...
I live in Chile.
Yea, Chile might have less but it is cheaper and safer source to get at.
1. Bolivia is a really dangerous corrupt unstable country (nearly been killed there myself), that no one is really in control of.
2. It has no access to ocean ports.
Until both of the above are solved, don't bet on Bolivia.
Living in Chile
Democracy is so much more than just elections...
Pick it Up!!
Is this sounding like a familiar political system?
I read about such a thing in school. I hope they bring it to the USA one day. ;)
Their own governments are just as guilty, if not more so, than foreign corporations.
In many cases that is certainly true. In other cases of governments that were not corrupt (or at least, wanted to keep power and wealth inside the country rather than sell it out to a foreign company), the government of the country the foreign company was from would overthrow the insufficiently corrupt government and install one that was sufficiently corrupt. In which case the guilt of the foreign corp and their government is not just exploiting a poorer nation's national resources, but subverting their sovereignty itself.
The enemies of Democracy are
How shocking, that, whenever you have a permanent class that decides how money is allocated, that they should allocate it to themselves.
That fact is central to socialism; anyone who claims to be socialist in order to gain support for such policies is a liar and a hypocrite.
Nick