Bolivia Is the Saudi Arabia of Lithium 291
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."
Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:5, Insightful)
Can lithium really power all cars? (Score:2, Insightful)
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).
Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (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: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.
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.
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
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.
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:2, Insightful)
You'd almost think that US corporations had a long history of using the US government to bully or overthrow Latin American countries in order to improve their profit margins.
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.
Re:Where Will the Money Go? Pollution Concerns? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see why lithium should be any different but for their sake I hope so.
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:2, Insightful)
What about making lithium batteries in Bolivia? Or making fair trade practices part of any extraction contracts.
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.
Re:Can lithium really power all cars? (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.
that could explain (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Chile vs. Bolivia (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, Bolivia doesn't have access to ocean ports because Chile took Bolivian coast by force.
Re:Where Will the Money Go? Pollution Concerns? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Norwegian oil model (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 (sorry) in that department.
Re:Bolivia's new future (Score:3, Insightful)
You should read a bit about history of Latin America =). Just one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre [wikipedia.org] (there are more)
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:3, Insightful)
but so too is there evidence linking piracy and global temperatures.
You and I are looking at different things here. You're looking for proof. I'm looking for evidence. You're not going to get proof. But you can find evidence. Evidence is something that logically suggests but doesn't prove a conclusion. There is no logical connection between piracy and global temperatures.
As for the rest of your post, I'm at a loss as to how that defends the stance that coal is making West Virginians wealthier than they would be otherwise.
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.
Re:Bolivia's new future (Score:2, Insightful)
You are missing the point - for some people no nation can EVER be as bad as the US. Most of those people also were born and live in the US and have benefited from it's history and economy.
Were they to think that way about themselves such self loathing would be treated as a pathology.
Re:They need to wake up. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Chile vs. Bolivia (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask in Bolivia if they have forgotten.
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.
Re:Can't Help but be Supportive (Score:3, Insightful)
"Well, ideally the Bolivian government would negotiate the best price they could for selling off the lithium to foreign firms that hold a comparative advantage in producing batteries"
What you propose seems akind to sell the goose so others get the golden eggs.
"If foreigners had to buy lithium batteries from Bolivia that were much higher priced due to Bolivia's high cost of producing batteries en masse would depress demand for the lithium in the first place, leaving Bolivia no better off."
Bullshit. If the header is right, Bolivia would hold a near-monopoly comparable to that of middle east regarding oil so it hardly suffers the pressure of other producers taking away its market so they *will* sell their batteries almost no matter how high the price as much as Arabia is selling its oil almost no matter how high the price.
And while it's true that Bolivia holding such a grip on the market would depress demand at least for a while, till they get to speed, that would be bad for everbody else *but* Bolivia which even if it sells just one battery will earn more than with current status -not selling anyone, that is.
Eventually, being the major worlwide provider it will be Bolivia itself the one with "a comparative advantage in producing batteries" so in the end they will get the cake and eat it too which would never happen if they sell off that market for an easy start.
It is not as if it were the first time that South America tries the strategy of giving raw materials to foreign third parties to manufacture and I don't think they are glad with the remembrances.
"The best thing for Bolivia to do is to negotiate the best trade deal possible and take the gain from that deal and invest it in infrastructure and education making the Bolivian economy that much more sustainable."
That seems to me awfully shortsighted. While it's true that it would mean an easier and better start for Bolivia, they have the obligation to think not for a ten years timespan but fifty or even a century. There's no way they can squeeze an overall better deal by subcontracting than holding themselves the whole vertical market.