Lithium

Salt-encrusted lake beds, called salars, are scattered across the high, dry, and windy Puna de Atacama. Formed from the concentrated remnants of vast ancient lakes, the salars hold many soluble minerals, like potassium salts, lithium salts, and table salt. The Salar de Olaroz lithium mine is a new facility that will be capable of producing 17,500 metric tonnes of lithium carbonate per year by the end of 2015. Wikimedia Commons

By Rose Schreiber

Where the flamingos are, in briny lakes, high up on the Andean plateau—that is where you find it, huge reserves of it. Not so much white gold, as white petroleum: an element that sits in the contested crosshairs of a battery-powered future. Lithium. An area known as the ‘Lithium Triangle’ stretches across northern Chile and Argentina and into southern Bolivia. Here, under highland salt flats, in one of the driest places on Earth, lies a vast percentage of the world’s known reserves of this coveted metal. The method of extraction: drilling and pumping underground, mineral-rich salt water to the surface, where it sits in brightly colored evaporation ponds, aquamarine, turquoise, neon yellow. This region has the highest solar radiation levels in the world and yet, even here, the evaporative stage can take years. A water-intensive process in a place where water is uniquely scarce.

“Latin America is the region of open veins,” wrote Eduardo Galeano, poet and journalist, in his famous 1971 book, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina. He was speaking about the warp and weft of imperialism and extraction that has so powerfully shaped this region. He was speaking about metabolic rift—the removal of resources from one part of the world to be metabolized in another. Present-day debates and tensions over lithium extraction are, in many ways, the latest expression of this divide. Who will get rich? Foreign investors, transnational mining corporations? Who will bear the consequences? Local communities, fragile highland ecosystems? And what, given our present-day energy crisis, are the alternatives? The debate around mining in the Lithium Triangle reverberates in the United States, too: recent bids to build lithium mines in Nevada have been met with fierce resistance from Indigenous communities, activists, and environmental groups. With lithium, an energy crisis is pitted against a water crisis, each with their attendant colonial histories. Billions of dollars are pressing down on the scale.

There is not much lithium on Earth or, indeed, in the universe. Despite being one of the earliest elements synthesized from the Big Bang, it is surprisingly, confoundingly, absent from the cosmos. It makes up a mere .002% of Earth’s crust. That said, because lithium ions are soluble, Earth’s lithium is concentrated in salt water. Thus, we find lithium in the ocean or, as in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, the remnant crust of ancient, salt lakes.

Lithium: the lightest of all metals. The lightest, under standard conditions, of all solids. Atomic number 3. This element is foundational to rechargeable batteries and renewable energy technologies. It is a medicine, too: an antidepressant, a mood stabilizer, used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The use of lithium carbonate in ceramic studios makes up a truly infinitesimal fraction of lithium use overall. In our small corner of the world, it is a low-expansion flux, considered ‘powerful’ because of its lightness (one gram of lithium will contain more atoms than one gram of sodium or potassium). Its low thermal expansion means that other lithium sources, such as spodumene or petalite, are a helpful ingredient in flame- and ovenware. Its small ionic size—which refracts less light—makes for highly transparent glazes.