New York Times Backstory: Bolivia's lithium reserves

New York Times' Simón Romero on Bolivia's massive reserve of lithium, the mineral needed to power electric vehicles.

This is Backstory, a daily conversation with New York Times reporters on the stories they’re covering. I’m Jane Bornemeier, editor of New York Times Radio. Today I’m talking to Simón Romero about Bolivia and its new found strategic grandeur as the owner of almost half the world’s supply of lithium. Lithium of course is the mineral that’s needed to power the batteries of the next generation’s electric vehicles.

JB: Simón thanks so much for talking to me today.

SR: Jane it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

JB: Did Bolivia just now hop upon this knowledge that it has this large store of lithium?

SR: Well, actually this history of Bolivia’s lithium reserves is fascinating. It goes back years, in fact, decades. Back in the early 90’s there was a sort of original frenzy around the lithium reserves and there was a concession that was extended to an American company called Lithco at the time and it didn’t quite turn out as expected. There was a national opposition to developing these reserves at that time and it lied dormant, and while that happened other countries moved forward to tap their own reserves like Chile and Argentina and also China with a large salt flat in Tibet, so now Bolivia is really realizing that is playing catch-up.

JB: And what prompted the country to change its mind to...I guess...how to deal with lithium?

SR: Well, the market conditions have evolved incredibly quickly in the past year or so, with a lot of attention on the electric car industry and developing batteries that can store more power using lithium. You have companies like GM, Ford, BMW, Mitsubishi that are fast developing, you know, electric car prototypes that’ll be available in the market in about a year so those cars present a huge new market opportunity for countries with lithium reserves to develop them and to provide them to the automobile industry.

JB: Where exactly in Bolivia do these reserves lie? Are there in mountains areas? I mean... how do you extract lithium?

SR: Ha! It’s an incredibly, remote and beautiful place in Bolivia where the lithium is found. It’s a place called Salar de Uyuni and it’s a salt desert, an incredibly big salt desert which I believe I think to be the world’s largest salt flat. You have to drive about 11 hours from La Paz to southern Bolivia. It’s a really, a stunning drive in some ways, you know, along dirt roads and you end up in a tiny little town called Uyuni, and then you drive more, you drive two more hours you know into the salt flat onto the margin of the salt desert and they’re building a facility there, where they’re processing the lithium or they hope to process the lithium by the end of this year. This is a place that’s incredibly underdeveloped, you know, up until know, there are still people who live there extracting the salt, earning next to nothing. Some of them are Quechua-speaking Indians and they…they actually, you know, carry back salt blocks that they put on llama caravans and they take to warmer regions to trade for maize. So the development of the lithium industry, if it materializes, is likely to change life a lot in that part of Bolivia.

JB: And just to be sure it’s clear, the lithium is extracted, it’s a metal, it’s extracted from the ground?

SR: That’s right, it’s a metal, it’s a mineral and you have to mine it from under the salt flat. It’s in a brine apparently, and it’s not a simple process and it’s not an inexpensive process either. Apparently the altitude in Bolivia makes it even more difficult so it really, you know, remains to be seen whether Bolivia can quickly develop the expertise and have the resources to create a large lithium producing and processing industry.

JB: Well, that kind of leaves a question I was going to ask you which is... Is this going to be done by a private industry in Bolivia or is the government involved in some way or who would actually do this work?

SR: Well, you know, that’s really a key question. In the past year there’s been a real nationalist sentiment building around the lithium resource in Bolivia. You have the creation of this pivot plat to start tapping the lithium reserve in the Salar de Uyuni and you have a state mining corporation that is really taking care of that project. Sort of in the background through all of this you have a handful of private companies, you have Mitsubishi and Sumitomo of Japan, you have Bolloré of France that apparently met with Bolivian government with the hope of eventually taking part in the extracting process or perhaps taking part in industrializing the lithium or processing it or making batteries from it. There’s certainly a lot of interest of the private sector but certainly it’s not entirely clear what type of role they can play and, you know, one has to remember that Bolivia is going through a great deal of political change at this point. You know, Bolivian President Evo Morales is a nationalist, you know, he’s just easily had a new Constitution approved that expands the state’s power to a certain grade of control over certain parts of the economy. He’s nationalized the oil and gas industry, he’s creating a new national airline, he’s just created a new daily newspaper that’s controlled by the government so it seems that Bolivia would really like to control this resource on its own if it could.

JB: Are lithium stores thought to be being depleted elsewhere in the world? Is that what makes Bolivia’s supply of lithium so much more important?

SR: Well, you know, according to United States geological survey, you know, Bolivia has the largest reserve base in the world, about half of the lithium everywhere. You have other countries with large lithium reserves such as Chile, Argentina, there’s China, there’s…you know a couple of smaller reserves in places like Zimbabwe, Brazil and of course a much tinier amount in the United States itself which it’s long been the world’s largest lithium producer up until recently. So that is, you know you just have a limited number of countries with, you know, accessible lithium deposits and one of those countries is Bolivia of course and it happens to be one of the poorest, least developed countries in Latin America and, you know, going through sort of this revolutionary process of change and, you know, it’s really going to be interesting to see how it works out for them.

JB: Simón thanks so much for your time.

SR: Sure Jane, it’s my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

And that was The Times’ Simón Romero on the nascent lithium industry that may mean a brighter future for Bolivia. For New York Times Radio I’m Jane Bornemeier. I’ll be back again tomorrow with another edition of Backstory. To subscribe to the Backstory Podcast go to nytimes.com/podcast and you can also find us on iTunes.