As evening falls in Chile’s Atacama desert, the world’s driest, a drilling machine extracts brine to measure ranges of lithium—an important mineral for the worldwide change to cleaner power, however dangerous in its personal manner.
Chile is looking for to retake its place because the world’s prime lithium producer, however environmentalists worry extraction within the Atacama desert will hurt fragile ecosystems there.
The desert holds the primary deposits of the mineral in Chile, which is a part of Latin America’s “lithium triangle” with Argentina and Bolivia.
Demand for lithium, utilized in electrical automobile batteries, has grown strongly in recent times because the world seeks to maneuver away from fossil fuels to curb international warming.
Within the salt flats of Aguilar and La Isla within the Altoandinos desert area—at an altitude of three,400 meters and 4,400 meters respectively—the temperature is minus zero and the wind biting on the method of the southern winter.
There’s a rush to complete the work of taking brine samples, that are despatched to a laboratory to measure lithium content material.
“We are drilling day and night,” mentioned Ivan Mlynarz, govt vp of the Enami Nationwide Mining Firm, which is looking for to begin mining of the “white gold” mineral right here by 2030.
‘Constructive outcomes’
Between the Aguilar, La Isla and Grande salt flats, Enami hopes to have the ability to mine 60,000 tons of lithium yearly.
The venture is essential to Chile’s plan to retake its place because the world’s prime lithium producer, which it misplaced to Australia in 2016.
“We’ve had very positive results,” Enami employee Cristhian Moreno advised AFP, describing the standard of lithium they have been getting from samples as “very favorable.”
Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Boric got here to workplace with plans to create a nationwide lithium firm much like state-owned copper agency Codelco, fashioned within the Seventies out of nationalized mining corporations.
Final month, Codelco signed a cope with lithium miner SQM to just about double the personal mining agency’s present extraction of the mineral within the Salar de Atacama, north of the Altoandinos.
Competitor Australia, which extracts lithium from rock relatively than brine, right this moment produces 43 p.c of the mineral and Chile 34 p.c.
The Codelco/SQM alliance would add some 300,000 tons to Chile’s lithium manufacturing between 2025 and 2030, and one other 280,000-300,000 tons per yr from 2031 to 2060.
In 2022, the South American nation produced some 243,000 tons.
‘It will not rain anymore’
In Chile, lithium is produced by means of the evaporation of brine in ponds or swimming pools full of water pumped from beneath salt flats.
Specialists say the tactic places a number of animal and plant species in danger with the lack of tons of water in one of the vital arid locations on Earth.
“These fragile salt flats of Atacama are a refuge for a diversity of Andean life, biological corridors,” mentioned professional Cristina Dorador, a professor on the College of Antofagasta.
“They are not mines, they are ecosystems,” she mentioned.
Mining within the Altoandinos area of the southern Atacama area additionally threatens the Indigenous Colla individuals, some 20,000 of whom name Chile house.
Dwindling water sources within the space have already been forcing them from the mountains, the place they historically reside as shepherds, to the cities—unable to deal with their animals or themselves.
“If we dry the salt flats it won’t rain any more, it won’t snow anymore and… all the biodiversity will decline,” Colla consultant Christopher Castillo, 25, advised AFP.
“It is to… exterminate the little biodiversity that we have left.”
A analysis article revealed in 2019 within the Worldwide Journal of Utilized Earth Commentary and Geoinformation, discovered that the “water-intensive production process” used within the Atacama desert “has increased concerns around hydrological disruption” in a area with minimal rainfall.
It reported “significant” environmental results from brine extraction, “including the degradation of surface vegetation, elevating daytime surface temperatures and decreasing soil moisture levels.”
© 2024 AFP
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