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Bolivia Is the Saudi Arabia of Lithium
Posted by
Soulskill
on Wed Apr 29, 2009 12:01 PM
from the also-the-nepal-of-strontium dept.
from the also-the-nepal-of-strontium dept.
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."
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Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Informative)
If you're from Virginia, have you had a chance to witness any of the mountain top removal strip mining operations [youtube.com] in West Virginia? There's an informative series on it at VBS.tv [youtube.com]. Don't worry, they don't leave the non-fertile shale rock bare after they're done. They spray a grass seed in mutant green nitrogen fertilizer shit all over it so it can look unnatural for a year before transforming back into a Martian landscape.
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Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Insightful)
My father actually works at one, funnily enough. It was a matter of economics and not ideals which is rather disheartening, but we had mountains of debt and there aren't exactly a lot of good paying jobs to go around.
I don't mean to attack you or your father (or even the region as a whole) but how self sustaining is strip mining? I mean, has a generation or two of jobs and income been worth something that will forever be exposed rock? It's plain to me that even the timber industry would have lasted longer.
... and now maybe we see them differently. Bolivia should be wary of losing their salt flats and deserts even if they think they are wastelands. Limit strip mining and plan for the future, even if it's just setting aside funds to deal with inevitable environmental impacts. Even if it's using 10% of your strip mining income to plant/repair forests in other parts of your state.
... possibly nothing for a long time. The world has been making poor decisions for far too long, think about your future.
I don't want to sound preachy a la The Giving Tree (I realize I do) but our ancestors saw those mountain top ecosystems as worthless
The money is drying up for West Virginia and what is left? West Virginia has many areas where there once were trees and snow and water runoff but for the sake of a few decades of jobs there is nothing ow but heavy metals in their drinking water
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, Bolivia has other resources. Heck, I'm betting that one of the problems with opening up the salt flats for lithuim harvesting, is the cocaine industry there. I'm guessing they don't want the competition for US dollars?
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Bolivia has other resources. Heck, I'm betting that one of the problems with opening up the salt flats for lithuim harvesting, is the cocaine industry there. I'm guessing they don't want the competition for US dollars?
The cocaine industry is already pissed at the lithium industry, ever since they convinced GM to cancel their cocaine-powered vehicle, the Chevy White Horse, and their proposed cocaine-heroin hybrid, the Saturn Speedball (to be called the Belushi in the North American market), in favor of the Volt.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Usually having your source of materials close by gives you a competitive advantage in making something... just history talking that nonsense again. It is, however, perfectly possible for Bolivians to price themselves out of the market as it stands now, but in a decade or two their prices might seem quite reasonable. And depending on what the difference is, it may make sense for them to leave the Lithium where it is, collecting interest as an investment of sorts... but that's not what people who want to e
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Insightful)
"it may make sense for them to leave the Lithium where it is, collecting interest as an investment of sorts"
What needs to also be remembered is that what is valuable today may not be valuable tomorrow.
Lithium may be valuable today for batteries, but what happens when a new battery technology is invented that is based on something other than lithium?
It would be smart to sell your lithium resources before that happens.
So just waiting and saving your natural resources may not always be the smartest move. Like stocks, you want to sell them at their peak value. Will lithium be more valuable or less valuable in the future? That is the question to ask here.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine what West Virginia would be like _without_ coal mining, however. Very pretty, I'm sure. But certainly far poorer.
Same goes for Bolivia. They want to preserve the natural beauty of their salt flats or stick it to the developed countries or whatever, they can do so. But that lithium will do them no good in the ground.
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Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine what West Virginia would be like _without_ coal mining, however. Very pretty, I'm sure. But certainly far poorer.
Well, if WV coal deposits [wvgenweb.org] correlate at all with per capita income [wvdhhr.org], I'd say it's probably negative. The only real exception seems to be Kanawha County, but that's simply because Charleston is there.
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Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Insightful)
Morales has no intention of leaving the lithium on the ground. He has example after example of resource rich developing country gaining no benefit from allowing foreign firms come and extract said resources. That lithium is a Bolivian resource and Morales government has every right to negotiate the best price he can for the Bolivian people, and to keep the extraction process from causing negative externalities. Practicing sound economics does not mean giving into to corporate imperialism.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When West Virginia runs out of coal it will be ugly and poor (there's a "your mom" joke in there somewhere...), just like other ecologically devastated places.
The lithium can't do them any good in the ground, and they can get some fairly well-understood value by taking it out. But it's impossible to value now what could potentially be lost by the processes that remove it -- we don't know what damage could occur or whether it will be possible to mitigate effectively. And, to be sure, any foreign company th
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, poorer and much emptier. BUT. Nowadays those resources are not as important to survival anymore. Nowadays, you can simply offer services over the Internet. Any service. You can live in the most remote pampas, and still make good money this way.
I always wished, this would happen to poor countries without anything else to sell. But then I learned that whole Africa is full of rich resources. But it hasn't helped them a bit, because there are other forces at work.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They should follow Norway's example. Norway had a nationalised oil industry where all of the profits went to the country and people, and thus they're rich and can retire early with big state pensions.
Britain, exploiting the same sea bed, didn't do that, and we're all poor with naff pensions ahead of us.
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we haven't constrained ourselves to Latin America, but we've done that sort of overthrowing and bullying to a majority of Latin American governments: Argentina, Cuba, Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatamala, Haiti, Hondurus, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, and Venezuela (including very recently if you believe Hugo Chavez) have all at one point or another had military coups with US involvement.
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Re:The problem with leftists (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Where Will the Money Go? Pollution Concerns? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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 [google.com]. 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!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Where Will the Money Go? Pollution Concerns? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where Will the Money Go? Pollution Concerns? (Score:5, Funny)
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. ;)
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Imperialist exploitation? (Score:3, Informative)
"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!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see why l
Re:Where Will the Money Go? Pollution Concerns? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Uyuni (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Bolivia's new future (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You forgot step 9... (Score:3, Interesting)
9. saintly American companies that never do anything wrong PROFIT!!
Norwegian oil model (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. It worked for Norway, it might work for Bolivia too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bolivia cannot possibly pull that off, not in a million years. That country is way too corrupt, even by Latin American standards. And the current president is, to put it mildly, a populist idiot who thinks it's better to bedazzle the masses with short-term bullshit than to try to create foundations for long-term growth.
It's stupid to claim that the wealth is "staying here" when it's just being "stolen here" anyway.
Now most countries are corrupt, including mine of course. But Bolivia is especially special (s
Great news! (Score:4, Funny)
crap (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Maybe Bolivia can use this, maybe not. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
that could explain (Score:3, Insightful)
Chile vs. Bolivia (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Chile vs. Bolivia (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, Bolivia doesn't have access to ocean ports because Chile took Bolivian coast by force.
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Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Did not say recyclable, said renewable (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Did not say recyclable, said renewable (Score:5, Interesting)
Fuel cells suck. Barring true nanotechnology (as in, molecular assembly) they will probably always be energy-intensive to produce. Batteries suck, too. In fact, everything is pretty lame if you have very high expectations. In the mean time, try only to realize that hybrid cars are total boondoggles which consume vastly more energy in production to give you less mileage for more money than just buying a car with a small turbo diesel engine; meanwhile diesel has more energy than gasoline, and takes less non-free energy to produce, especially if you talk about biofuels but even when talking about dino juice. We need full-electrics so we can centralize power generation, and we need batteries which are at least twice as good as what we have now (as in, twice as favorable a price:performance ratio) in order to make them feasible for the mass market. Fuel cells are also disadvantaged because liquid fuel is harder to transport than electricity. Their only real benefit today is refueling time.
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Re:Did not say recyclable, said renewable (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, a linux analogy for a car on slashdot? I think I've seen it all now.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://gas2.org/2008/10/13/lithium-counterpoint-no-shortage-for-electric-cars/
^ that's why.
The big point of the article is this: lithium can be extracted from the ocean for as cheap as $30 / kg, and there are 238 *trillion* tons of lithium in the ocean. Considering that a lithium battery uses about ~3 pounds of lithium, we're not going to be seeing a shortage for a long, long, time.
Not to mention that lithium is not a *spent* resource like oil: the total amount of lithium we'll *ever* need is pretty constan
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As for promoting hydrogen, I've always understood fuel cells to be just simply to inefficient. Plus, batteries are recyclable, so I'm not sure how non-renewable of a resource you can consider them.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oil is an energy source. Lithium isn't. We are still deluding ourselves if we think we can burn oil to mine lithium so we can drive electric cars (on roads built and maintained by oil-powered machinery) that get their electricity from burning coal in most cases. Lithium can be recycled, but only in an oil-powered economy where cars and trucks can haul the batteries to factories where enough energy exists to recycle them.
Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just ignoring that the energy needed to produce batteries is far less than the vehicles consume in their lifetime... are you saying that electric-powered freight trucks can't exist? That's big news! You better inform Balqon, Modec, Smith Electric Vehicles, and ElectroRides that their products are impossible.
And do we really have to *yet again* cover the "long tailpipe" argument? Why won't this zombie die?
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Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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.
Comparing it to a gasoline system, you should think of it like the steel that makes up your gas tank. It stores energy, which must be produced elsewhere (like through burning oil or coal, for example). If we run out of oil, we need a new energy source. If we look to be running out of lithium, we can take worn out batteries and pull the lithium out of them to make new batteries.
Hydrogen, as you point out, is plentiful. However, it is also just another gas tank, not a fuel. Hydrogen is produced by cracking methane. Two years ago I interviewed with the company that does 90% of the hydrogen production in the world. They pointed out that per mile on the road, more CO2 is produced by hydrogen production than gasoline consumption.
Both hydrogen and lithium will be used as STORAGE for energy. Both can be reused basically unlimited times - managed well, we should never run out of either. Oil and coal, on the other hand, generate the power we can then store in lithium batteries or hydrogen, but that generation breaks the oil and coal permanently.
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Concern is not consumption but simple totality (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Lithium isn't the only thing that batteries can be made from.
Electric cars need electricity, which can be stored in many forms. If there's not enough lithium perhaps we'll use NiMH batteries, or flywheels, or ultracapacitors, or superconductors, or...
And unlike with oil, lithium running out shouldn't be a huge problem. Existing car batteries won't stop working. All that will be needed is to figure out a new system for new cars, and a compatible way to replace worn out batteries.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because there's A LOT of lithium. Nope THERE'S A LOT OF LITHIUM.
It can be mined _extremely_ cheap in Bolivia, literally for several dollars per 1 kg. And a car will probably need just 10-15 kg of lithium for the lifetime of its battery. Which then can be recycled. So, not many problems at all.
If you are prepared tp pay slightly higher price, say $30 per kg, then you'll have so many options, you'll have a hard time choosing which one to use.
Oh, and no-one performed geological surveys to specifically search f
Re:I for one... (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably will be. A very cursory web search brought up this [webelements.com]. 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.
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