Bottled Lightning

by Seth Fletcher

  Roelants then acted blasé about such a big number. “[Total] reserves are not so interesting for us,” he said. “The salar is so huge and the quantities so big that it’s not important if we can verify 50 million tons of reserves or 100 or 120. It’s more than enough to work for 100 years or 120 years.” And this, Roelants said, is why Bolivia can afford to be particular about how it develops its resource. It basically has enough lithium to last forever. Why rush?

  Uyuni is a mud-colored village on a mud-colored plain seven hours south of the nearest sizable city. It is accessible by train or via one of Bolivia’s most notoriously uncomfortable bus rides, a bone-shaking overnighter on an unpaved byway that’s more like a dirt-bike track than anything suitable for passenger transport. The plains surrounding Uyuni are speckled with plastic bottles and bags for miles in every direction. On the village’s dusty streets, backpackers on their way to the salar mix with indigenous Bolivian women in their traditional bowler hats and a large contingent of surprisingly healthy-looking dogs, which prowl the town unattended. Amid the altiplano grit, however, is a surprising selection of restaurants and bars catering to travelers bound for the salar, including a place across the street from the train station called the Lithium Club.

  The so-called Lithium Triangle—the arid, high-altitude region where Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina meet—is home to a large number of salt flats that are exceptionally rich with the element.

  Upon my arrival in Uyuni, a message was waiting at my hotel: Francisco Quisbert, head of Frutcas, the Regional Federation of Peasant Workers of the South Altiplano, was looking for me. Roelants had arranged for either Quisbert, his daughter, or his son to drive me to the lithium pilot plant, which is located on the edge of the salar about an hour and a half outside the village of Uyuni. Our bus had been about an hour late, and Quisbert was ready to go. (As if trying to demolish the reputation of Bolivian people as unfailingly late for every appointment, every Boliviano I met was unfailingly punctual.)

  We drove out of town and across a brown, trash-strewn plain before ditching the official road for a series of makeshift 4×4 trails, which were much smoother than the brutally corrugated infrastructure. The landscape changed from brown rock and dirt to red rock and dirt and back again. Occasionally a small group of copper-colored vicuñas watched us from the barren flats alongside the road-trails, grazing on what looked like nothing but dust.

  After an hour and a half of off-roading, we arrived at a boron-mining camp alongside the river that gives the village of Rio Grande its name, a brackish brown stream that, by sliding beneath the salt crust from the southeast and replenishing the brine, is the greatest steady source of water near this corner of the salar. We cut through the camp, passing man-size heaps of white mineral powder, before turning north and continuing on toward the salar, a miragelike white streak in the distance.

  Finally, we approached the planta pilota. In May 2008, Evo Morales touched down here in a helicopter for the pilot plant’s groundbreaking ceremony. Wearing a ceremonial Aymara costume, he gave a mildly belligerent speech explaining the importance of the project. “Bolivia has the largest resources of lithium in the world,” he said. “That is why neoliberal governments and transnational companies sought to seize ownership of these resources.”

  The plant site sits at the base of a bluff several hundred yards south of the salar. During my visit, it was a near-comatose construction site. At 11:30 a.m. on a Friday, it appeared deserted, save an adolescent-looking military guard, dressed in fatigues and passed out on a bench beside the entrance gate. Our approach roused the guard, and soon two other young soldiers joined him in an exercise of standoffishness. Roelants’s phone call to the plant the day before hadn’t made much difference. It was obvious that they had no idea who we were or why we were there. Ivan, the man who should have been expecting us, was for some reason back in Uyuni; Quisbert gently pressed the guards for several minutes, and eventually they took our passports, handed us hard hats, and allowed us in.

  The pilot plant consisted of the shells of three buildings: a two-story office building, a similarly sized lab, and the center of it all, the plant itself. Or what would one day be a plant. At the time it was a structure of rustic-looking wooden beams, two of its three stories covered with dull red brick. No one was working on the building that day, but Roelants had told me that this would be the case; work on the building had paused for the rainy season and would resume in earnest next week. (Of course, the fact that construction work had to pause for the rain raised questions about the ability to mine lithium year-round.) Quisbert pointed to the top of the bluff, where a Bolivian flag flew next to the multicolored, checkered flag of the Aymara tribe, and we scrambled halfway up the bluff to get an overhead view of the site.

  It was impossible to draw any firm conclusions about the likely success or failure of the project simply by looking at these buildings. The buildings weren’t really the issue. This small construction project, which was several months behind schedule, would eventually be finished, as long as the money kept flowing in, the Morales government remained in place, and the locals didn’t burn the place down in an effort to chase Roelants out of the country. But the real question involved the technology that would go inside the buildings and into the evaporation pools out in the distance, on the salar. Without any technical assistance from companies that specialize in projects like this, could the Bolivian initiative manage to overcome the problems unique to the salar—the high magnesium content of the brine, the fact that a rainy season would dilute the brine when it should be evaporating, and that the salt flat surrounding the evaporation ponds would be covered in water for months each year? Perhaps more important, even assuming the Bolivian initiative solves all these problems by its 2014 deadline, will carmakers and governments and trading houses be interested in buying lithium from the salar? Or in the meantime will they find what they’re looking for elsewhere—across the border in Chile or Argentina, or in the clays of Nevada or the pegmatites of Australia?

  We gave our hard hats back to the guards and retrieved our passports, and then we drove north to the edge of the salar, where the pilot plant’s evaporation pools are located. The sky was broodingly overcast, and it began to rain. As we approached the southern rim of the salt, the mudscape gradually became frosted white. The white thickened, then the mud gave way to salt. We drove on a rock-and-salt road into the salar; two Doric-looking pillars composed of stacked slabs of salt stood at the end of the road, a pointlessly dramatic gateway to a sheet of white that appeared to extend to infinity.

  Because of the constant influx of minerals from the Rio Grande, this corner of the salar is the richest in lithium, potassium, and boron. It was also covered in several inches of water, giving us a glimpse of what the whole place looks like during the rainy season, when the salar floods to a depth of about one and a half feet throughout. Shallow pools near the edge of the road glowed a faint chartreuse color, a hint at the myriad minerals dissolved in the puddles. Quisbert signaled to his son to stop the truck, and the two of them hopped out, grabbed a blue nylon tarp from the cargo bay, got down on their backs, and set to shielding the engine from water. Apparently, we were getting ready to drive into what looked like an ocean.

  Finished with the engine, Quisbert stood up and pointed to the horizon: “The piscinas are out there.” We got back into the car and rolled toward the water. As the younger Quisbert guided the vehicle onto the salar, Francisco turned to the backseat with a massive grin on his face. “Una aventura, no?”

  We eased into the water and drove ahead, as if navigating a hovercraft over a shallow sea. The pillars at the end of the stone-and-salt road receded into the fog, and after a few hundred yards, as the water grew shallower, we approached two cobalt-blue test pools that the Bolivian initiative had cut into the salt. Several minutes later we arrived at a series of bulldozed salt dams, which together walled off what would one day be the pilot plant’s evaporation pools. We climbed up onto the salt dam to survey th
e handiwork of the government project. The pools were large, but they were, at the moment, only walls of salt. Before they could be filled with brine and used for evaporation, they would have to be lined with sheets of PVC plastic. According to the official schedule, next year these would be filled with salmuera, and when that brine was sufficiently concentrated it would be piped back to the completed pilot plant to our south. Although the ponds under construction were impressive, it wasn’t at all clear how well they would work during the rainy season, when water would lap at the lip of the wall we were standing on.

  After leaving the piscinas, we took the salt road back to Uyuni, heading straight across the salar. We exited the salar in a village called Colchani, which is, truly, the salt mines. Its residents make a living by raking salt from the salar into mounds, and then loading it into trucks that haul it to a processing plant on the eastern edge of town. The other line of business here is making salt into shot glasses and candleholders and statuettes to sell to tourists. Small hotels made of salt stand on the edge of town. That pretty much covers the various ways to make a living from the salt, which explains why the lithium project, the biggest opportunity to arise in this area for decades, has become such an incredible source of hope, frustration, and controversy. The greatest concern is that it will become yet another dashed hope, another opportunity to pull the people out of poverty that, for whatever uniquely Bolivian reason, did not work out the way it was supposed to.

  After seeing the world’s greatest stash of untouched lithium, I crossed the border into Chile to visit the world’s purest and most productive lithium source: the Salar de Atacama.

  The corridor between La Paz, Bolivia, and the port city of Arica, Chile, is well paved and well traveled. Down in the Lithium Triangle, however, crossing from Bolivia into Chile is like traveling into the future. Instantly the gravel roads give way to immaculate pavement. Within minutes you descend thousands of feet in elevation, and the brain breathes a sigh of relief.

  What you don’t see much of, however, is life. This is the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. Rain falls on the Atacama desert in millimeters per decade. Some weather stations here have never detected rain, and some riverbeds have been dry for tens of thousands of years. Corners of this desert are so nearly devoid of life that NASA finds them ideal for practice runs of bacteria-detecting Mars robots.

  Chileans have put this parched swath of earth to use by mining its minerals since before the arrival of the Spanish. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nitrate mines of the Atacama just about supported the entire country, much as the region’s copper mining does today. Oddly, for all its superlative desolation, the Atacama is now a high-end vacation destination. San Pedro de Atacama, the oasis town that is the hub of the era, is like a miniature Santa Fe, New Mexico, a sixteenth-century adobe village with luxurious hotels where rooms cost hundreds of dollars a night. Artisanal jewelry galleries and expensive restaurants and bars dot the just-so downtown area, whose dirt streets have been treated with a salt derivative called vichufita for maximum charm with minimum danger of dust storms. Dozens of tour companies offer stargazing tours and horseback trips and sand-boarding expeditions to the crowds of gringo backpackers who clog the town square.

  Andrés Yaksic, a marketing manager with the Sociedad de Química y Minera—SQM, or as it is sometimes called, Soquimich—had flown up from Santiago to meet me. SQM is the world’s largest supplier of lithium and runs the bigger of the two lithium operations located on the Salar de Atacama. The night before my tour of SQM’s operations, which were located about an hour and a half to the south, we went to dinner at a hip open-air bar-restaurant in the center of town. Locals and travelers stood around an open fire pit, drinking beer and cocktails. A few tables away were four men wearing SQM jackets, workers out for a night on the town—an option that wouldn’t be as attractive for Rio Grande–based Bolivian lithium workers.

  I was thrilled to be sitting at that table. Although only 280 miles separate Uyuni and San Pedro de Atacama—even considering the horrible state of the roads, it should be only about an eight-hour drive between the two towns—there is essentially no way to travel between them except to take one of the popular three-day jeep tours of the Salar de Uyuni and Bolivia’s stunning Eduardo Avaroa Andean Flora and Fauna Park. Yet Bolivian tour operators are forbidden from crossing into Chile, and vice versa, so the tour involves a handoff between companies at the barren, almost-three-mile-high mountain pass that serves as the border. When we arrived at the border that morning, no Chilean bus was waiting for us. Our guide suspected that the inch or two of snow that had dusted the mountain roads might have inspired Chile, which is overcautious about bad-weather driving, to close the road leading to the border. But we had no way of knowing; the small immigration office on the Bolivian side of the border had no phone, no radio, no form of communication with Chile. Word spread among the stranded travelers that no bus had come yesterday, and most likely no bus would be coming today; the only two reasonable options were backtracking and hoping to find room in the hostel on the other side of the volcano—and then return to the border every day until finally making it to Chile—or pooling cash to hire a driver to haul us the seven hours back to Uyuni. Finally, a Chilean highway inspector arrived and told us that within a couple of hours a bus should be there. The authorities had decided that the road, which had not a flake of snow on it, was safe for driving.

  Andrés asked me about the Bolivian pilot plant, so I described my impression of it in broad strokes. He was curious, not concerned. “Aren’t they making it out of bricks?” he asked. They are, actually. Is that strange? “Yes, that’s pretty strange,” he said.

  I understood what he meant the next day when he drove us to SQM’s enormous operation in the Salar de Atacama, a dusty-brown, rocky-looking flat that lacked all of the beauty of the Salar de Uyuni but offered the highest lithium concentrations of any known salar on the planet. Here the plants, the actual machinery used for turning heaps of raw material into industrial chemicals, looked like plants—refinery-looking productions made of metal pipes and tubes and smokestacks that hummed and emitted pneumatic pffts and hisses, signaling that industry was indeed at work.

  If the Bolivian pilot plant was the lithium-mining equivalent of a subsistence farm under construction, SQM was an agribusiness giant. Dozens of buildings and trucks and plants and evaporation pools and hills of white mineral sprawled as far as I could see. Giant rolls of black plastic, used to line the evaporation ponds, stood alongside the roadway. Satellite images of this place show a collection of large blue squares carved into the coffee-colored salar, like the world’s greatest swimming facility, located in the middle of nowhere. This is SQM’s collection of more than one hundred evaporation pools, where the brine that’s pumped up from underneath the salar is left to bake in the desert sun, concentrating the solution and starting the process of extracting potassium, boron, magnesium, and lithium. From the road that enters the salar—a firm, smooth surface coated with magnesium chloride, a waste salt extracted during lithium production that SQM is now marketing as a product for treating unpaved roads—white mounds of processed salt stand in the distance.

  All of this land, from the salar to the mountains in the east to the Pacific three hours to the west, once belonged to Bolivia. The War of the Pacific, sometimes referred to as the Saltpeter War, changed that. The conflict began in 1879 over rights to mine sodium nitrate, a fertilizer suddenly in great demand, from the Atacama Desert. Bolivia had discovered that a contract that supposedly allowed the Antofagasta Nitrate and Railway Company to avoid paying taxes on sodium nitrate (Chile saltpeter) was incomplete. When Bolivia attempted to levy taxes on the company, the company refused, and Bolivia threatened to seize it. Chile responded by sending five hundred troops to occupy Antofagasta, and the war began. By the time the fighting ended in 1884, Bolivia had lost its coastline. Chile gained the territory that is still home to vast supplies of nitrates, the world’s largest
copper industry, and the mineral deposits dissolved in the brine a few meters below Yaksic’s rented pickup truck.

  According to the terms of the 1904 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Chile must allow Bolivian commerce to pass through its ports, and a functioning railway connects Uyuni to the Pacific city of Antofagasta, passing within five miles of the pilot plant in Rio Grande. But that doesn’t change the intimidating reality that the Bolivian lithium project, once operational, will have to compete with a large corporation that sits nearly three hundred miles closer to the coast, at a far more comfortable altitude of seven thousand feet, in a wealthier and more stable nation. The fact that this Chilean salar and the port city that delivers its bounty to the world once belonged to Bolivia—that’s the insulting part.

  The insult is still fresh in the Bolivian mind. The Bolivian government still claims a right to the coastline and even maintains a navy, which is stuck patrolling Lake Titicaca. An annual holiday, Día del Mar, commemorates the loss of its access to the sea. A martyred soldier from the war, Eduardo Avaroa, is honored with the eponymous national park and with a statue in the square across the street from parliament in La Paz. Since negotiations between the two countries over renewed access to the sea failed in 1978, Bolivia and Chile have had no diplomatic relations. Among Bolivians there is widespread resentment of and distrust for Chileans, which helps explain why the reaction among the Bolivian public to the natural-gas pipeline through Chile was violent enough that it cost approximately a hundred lives and the jobs of three Bolivian presidents.