ALMA Reviews Blog: Litio en América Latina

Litio en América Latina. Demanda global contra daño socioambiental (Lithium in Latin America. Global demand vs. socio-environmental harm)

By: Aleida Azamar Alonso

Published in December 2022 in Mexico City with the financial support of the Mexican Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana.

Available at:  CD007830.pdf (semarnat.gob.mx)(link is external)

In 2018, there was a media sensation in Mexico when reports claimed that a single lithium project would catapult the country to become the largest lithium producer in the world. The exploration site is located in the northwest of the country, on the border with the United States, explains much of the interest in the project, as agreements were made at an early stage to supply the gigafactories of Tesla not far away in the US. Meanwhile, the extraction of lithium from clay there is currently posing significant technological challenges, entailing higher costs and uncertainties compared to the already well-proven methods of extraction from brine in South America. This, together with political discussions about nationalising lithium extraction, has led to a significant delay in the project. In this compilation of essays compiled by Aleida Azamar Alonso, the editor casts doubt on the high expectations, given the lack of economic and technological capacity in the project, as far as both the Mexican government and the transnational companies are concerned. These doubts are reinforced by the case of Bolivia, where a government-led national industrialisation strategy has failed to materialise for more than two decades, despite the fact that the largest reserves of lithium are estimated to be under Bolivian territory. A mixture of technological and regulatory deficiencies has also prevented lithium extraction in Peru, despite similar claims of huge deposits associated with uranium in rock. This delay has to some extent been achieved by the anti-mining resistance movement in Peru, which, like Bolivia and Mexico, has a long mining tradition. This mining history dates back to the first decades after the Spanish conquest and has resulted in heavy sacrifices on the part of the local population and extensive environmental damage, a fact that is highlighted in all the chapters .

The aim of this publication is to analyse the situation of lithium exploration and extraction in six Latin American countries (Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil), which contain 61% of the world’s lithium reserves. The book is divided into three parts: First, the global context of the energy transition and the related demand for lithium is presented. Commonly, the energy transition is understood as a set of economic and entrepreneurial actions leading to a controlled transition process by a technologically advanced society to replace all primary energy supplies from fossil fuels with sustainable renewable resources, while maintaining a sufficient level of final energy services per capita. However, Azamar critiques this definition for failing to capture the negative impacts of the energy transition on the Global South. In the next part, the contexts in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru are examined as examples of lithium projects still under exploration. In the third part, the specific circumstances of lithium mining and its consequences throughout the last three decades in Argentina, Brazil and Chile are analysed in greater detail.

The authors of the three chapters on Argentina, Chile and Brazil agree that the region has consolidated itself as one of the world’s main lithium exporters. However, despite discourses promising sustainable development and creating fantasies of a new El Dorado based on lithium reserves, the added value in terms of job creation or infrastructure development in rural areas appears very limited. Instead, it is the large corporations of the global North, including Asia and especially China – as a centre of production, origin of technological innovation and source of capital – which are the beneficiaries of this so-called corporate energy transition.

The chapter on lithium and copper mining in Chile highlights the negative impacts of mining on water use in an arid environment such as the Atacama desert. Subterranean brine consisting of salty lagoons that contain high concentrations of lithium are part of this landscape. Thanks to this water source, the socio-ecosystem has maintained a delicate balance of agricultural and pastoral activities for more than 10,000 years. Droughts and floods, manifestations of climate change, threaten this balance and are directly and indirectly provoked by extractivism, which is exacerbated by the lack of regulations in Chilean mining law to protect these special ecosystems. As a result, the companies SQM and Albemarle alone are allowed to extract more than 2,000 litres of brine and more than 250 litres of freshwater per second. The latter is particularly important in copper mining. Other concrete social and environmental impacts include the displacement of many families, the exposure of nearby communities to loud noise, and the contamination of the surrounding air and water, causing serious health problems, such as respiratory diseases and an increase in cancer.

The book offers an important perspective on current debates surrounding the global energy transition, where the external costs and harms associated with the transition, which are mostly borne by the global South, are often overlooked in the imperative to find much-needed solutions to climate change. The case studies presented in the book enrich the discussion by providing detailed insights from the regions where these harms are most severe.

The authors in the book point to the need to analyse such productive processes at different scales, including the power relations involved. They all agree on the argument that lithium mining in the region reveals a lack of national sovereignty and strategic governmental planning in the use of this resource. By intertwining distributive conflicts and socio-environmental harms with the demands of the so-called corporate energy transition, the volume concludes that the current situation of lithium production  contributes to the expansion of tensions between the global North and South, reinforcing already existing inequalities within and beyond national and regional scales. Therefore, they propose a cooperative integration of the value chain with neighbouring countries in order to avoid reproducing the centuries-old patterns of extractivism in Latin America. Then again, the analyses put forward in the book e.g., by proposing the nationalisation of lithium, do not seem to lead toward a successful reduction of dependencies on the capital and technology from the Global North and Asia.

Reviewed by: Rafael Hernández Westpfahl