We drove to a small management building and gathered in a conference room, where coffee, sandwiches, hard hats, boots, safety vests, and a PowerPoint presentation were waiting for us. Yaksic gave us an overview of the business. SQM has been working in the Salar de Atacama since 1996, when it started pulling potassium from the salar’s brine to make fertilizer. That year the company began selling some lithium (which it was already extracting in the process of producing potassium), but it didn’t expand its lithium business until 2008, when the market began to warm up. Even now, however, lithium is a small portion of SQM’s total business; they supply 31 percent of the world’s lithium, yet that provides only 8 percent of the company’s revenues. Their main market is “specialty plant nutrition,” a business in which they command as much as 50 percent of the world market share. SQM’s nitrogen-based fertilizers still come from saltpeter, or caliche. SQM supplies a quarter of the world’s iodine, which it also extracts from caliche. But the caliche sources are to the north of here; in the salar, it’s all about salt and the potassium, boron, and lithium extracted from it.
The saga of SQM’s effective owner was not part of Yaksic’s PowerPoint presentation. The head of SQM’s biggest shareholder, Pampa Calichera, is a man named Julio César Ponce Lerou. Ponce has been accused of being the beneficiary of blatant nepotism. A forestry engineer, Ponce married General Augusto Pinochet’s daughter Veronica four years before the dictator took power in a 1973 coup. A year into Pinochet’s reign, Ponce returned from Panama, where he had been living, and rocketed to success, holding jobs at the head of a succession of large state-owned companies. He was appointed the director of Corfo, the agency in charge of selling off state-owned assets, and along the way he acquired a massive herd of cattle and a four-thousand-acre estate. In 1988, he led the group of investors that bought SQM from the government. After Pinochet, a government investigation found that the state sold parts of SQM for less than a third of what they were worth. In what might just be a case of purple prose, a Chilean newspaper compared Ponce to Kaiser Soze, the vanishing villain of the film The Usual Suspects, a man so secretive and skilled that he almost convinced investigators that he didn’t exist.
The presentation did explain what is so special about the Salar de Atacama. Geologically speaking, it is a basin of a little more than a thousand square miles, formed by the movement of the Nazca Plate beneath the South American Plate—the same geological phenomenon responsible for the earthquake that devastated southern Chile a few months before my visit, and that also caused the strongest such event ever recorded, the Valdivia earthquake of 1960, which measured 9.5 on the Richter scale. As in the Salar de Uyuni, freshwater flowing down from the mountains through mineral-rich volcanic rock is what puts the lithium underneath the salar’s surface. SQM says that because of this geological accident, there are 40 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent reserves here; that’s the measured, economically extractable part. The unrealistically optimistic number is 190 million tons as resource. SQM’s current capacity here is 40,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent per year.
The lithium concentration in the Salar de Atacama averages 2,700 parts per million. That’s one natural benefit of the Atacama. The other is that this desert hellscape is the perfect environment for extracting evaporative minerals. The quasi-Martian sun toasts the brine in these evaporation ponds more harshly than at any other lithium-bearing location on the planet. Water evaporates at a rate of 3,500 millimeters per year here; the next highest evaporation rate in the lithium industry is found on the Argentine Puna, several hours to the southeast, where water evaporates at a rate of 2,600 millimeters per year. In Uyuni the rate is 1,300 to 1,700 millimeters per year. Unlike the Salar de Uyuni, the brine of the Salar de Atacama also has a very low magnesium-to-lithium ratio, which makes processing Chilean brine into the finished lithium product easier and cheaper than brine from the Salar de Uyuni. All these benefits, combined with the existing infrastructure (much of which was put here for the copper-mining industry), make SQM comfortable boasting that, if they really wanted to, they could deliver three to four times the total global demand for lithium.
After the presentation, we met Álvaro Cisternas, a manager of harvesting operations. In his pickup truck we drove out among the vast field of evaporation pools. An autumn breeze made for a comfortable day, but the sky was the same as it always is in the Atacama: blazingly clear. The sunlight felt unfiltered, like a warm, tangible fluid that puts active pressure on the skin.
We stopped at a small wellhead, which draws brine from 120 feet below the salt through a tube about the girth of a firehose. But it was hard to pay attention to anything except the evaporation pools all around us, massive sheets of cerulean water bordered by salt-white banks. For an industrial-scale chemical-processing tool, the evaporation pools were gorgeous. As the water evaporates, the salts that are dissolved in the brine precipitate out in an orderly series. First goes the sodium chloride, or halite (table salt), which solidifies and settles to the bottom of the pool. The brine is transferred through a series of pools until it’s concentrated enough that the next essential salt falls out: potassium chloride, or potash, a key ingredient in the plant-food pellets we feed our hydrangeas. After that a mineral called carnallite, a salt of magnesium and potassium, begins to settle. Next comes bischofite, the magnesium salt that coats the roads leading through the salar.
In the majority of these pools, the process is stopped when the desired potassium-based salt precipitates out in good measure. Then the pool is drained, leaving behind a mass of wet, blinding-white salt. In one such pool an employee in a blaze-orange vest walked about on a field of salt, measuring the remaining water levels. This potassium-based salt would be fed into an on-site potassium chloride plant, which would transform it into market-ready fertilizer.
Before long we began to drive past a series of pools of deepening shades of chartreuse. These were the lithium pools. As the brine reaches ever-higher concentrations of lithium, it yellows, eventually reaching the glowing orange color of Tang. (The magnesium and the lithium provide the yellow hue.) The final product, a solution of 6 percent lithium, is a sickly yellow-green that probably resembles the urine of someone who’s been stranded for a couple of days in the middle of the Salar de Atacama. It takes roughly fourteen months of being transferred from one evaporation pond to another for the lithium concentration to rise from 0.2 percent to 6 percent; any higher and the lithium begins to precipitate.
At the end of this series of evaporation pools, tanker trucks pull up to the plataforma despacho litio, fill up on the yellow brine, and then haul it to SQM’s lithium carbonate plant, three hours away on the Salar de Carmen, just outside Antofagasta. There it’s processed into lithium carbonate, a white powder that looks so much like cocaine that I didn’t dare try to fly back to the United States with samples.
While most of the mounds of salt scattered throughout the facility are made of feedstock for further refinement, one of them is set aside for the purpose of gawking at SQM’s sprawling salar operation from above. To conclude our tour, Cisternas drove us to the top of the hill, parked at an overlook, and proudly urged us to take in the view. Evaporation pools, tractors, trucks, outbuildings, and hills of valuable salt stretched for what appeared to be miles, although the air there was so dry and clear and the view so staggeringly uninterrupted that getting a firm perspective on the operation’s size was difficult; for instance, the mountain range seventy miles away that marks the edge of Bolivia looked close enough to jog to.
The contrast between SQM and the three-building Bolivian pilot plant was so great that it’s almost not fair to compare them, but Guillermo Roelants all but challenged me to do so. As our meeting the week before in the La Paz café came to an end, I mentioned that my Lithium Triangle tour would involve a visit to SQM in the Salar de Atacama. “Ah, good,” he said. “Then you will see where we will be in four or five years.” Standing at the SQM salt-mountain lookout, I realized that Roelants was b
eing outlandishly optimistic.
After a day of rest in Chile and a twenty-hour series of bus rides back to La Paz, I sat down in a café on La Paz’s tree-lined El Prado for a conversation with the Bolivian writer Juan Carlos Zuleta, who has earned a reputation for his close and critical coverage of the Bolivian lithium initiative. In the months before our meeting, he had turned against Guillermo Roelants, whom he suspected of intentionally delaying the Bolivian initiative for personal gain. The government had “no strategy,” he said, which he felt was a tragedy. Zuleta fiercely believes that lithium is essential to the future of the Bolivian state.
I had first met Zuleta at the Lithium Supply and Markets conference in Las Vegas, where he closed the conference with a talk that was highly skeptical of the Bolivian government’s approach. There were at least three challenges to the Bolivian initiative, Zuleta explained. The first was political. The second involved the array of logistical problems unique to Uyuni—the low evaporation rates, the high magnesium-to-lithium ratio, the lack of easy access to the sea. The last one was social. The local communities were demanding that the government do something about the region’s endemic poverty as a condition for harvesting the lithium that lies on their land. So far, the government wasn’t meeting those demands, and Zuleta’s comments that January turned out to be prescient when the communities around Uyuni erupted in protest and paranoia.
Now, a little over three months after I heard him speak in Las Vegas, Zuleta explained why he had taken such a critical turn in his thinking. Just before Zuleta left for Las Vegas, he said, Roelants gave an interview to a Bolivian business publication in which he spoke of prioritizing potassium over lithium—basically the same approach that Roelants had explained to me the previous week. To Zuleta, a true believer in lithium, this was a “gross error.”
Then Zuleta began thinking that it must be something more than an error. “I started to search for answers,” he said. “I thought there was something else.” Zuleta soon found out that Roelants also had a concession at a salar called Pastos Grandes, which Zuleta believes may in fact contain the highest lithium concentrations in the world. How did Roelants acquire such a concession? Through Tierra. And wouldn’t it be convenient for Roelants if the Tierra project began producing lithium before the perpetually delayed Uyuni project did? Or if the Bolivian initiative prioritized potassium so heavily that it left a market opening for the lithium that Tierra would perhaps soon mine from Pastos Grandes?
Zuleta’s theory was speculative, but it was a clearheaded version of the thinking of many of the people who live in the region around Uyuni. Pieces published in El Potosí and El Diario that April make it clear that plenty of the villagers in the department of Potosí see Roelants and Tierra as the latest in foreign interests that are out to steal Bolivia’s mineral riches from the people.
The most generous view Zuleta holds is that Roelants and the government simply don’t know what they’re doing. The consequence of this ineptitude, he believes, could be Bolivia losing its chance to enter the market of the future. “I know that lithium is a big thing—not just for Bolivia, but for the whole world,” he said. “Otherwise, how do you explain that all the automakers in the world are betting the next twenty to thirty years on this?”
The night before I left La Paz, I ran into Oscar Ballivian. We hadn’t yet been able to get together there, but the week before I had seen his picture in La Razón, above the story about the pressure that Bolloré was putting on the Bolivian government. The Bolloré proposal included plans for a Bolivia-Bolloré consortium that would build lithium-ion batteries and, eventually, even electric cars in Bolivia. Bolloré had been courting the Morales government hard for well over a year. The company was clearly tired of waiting for an answer.
As the geologist involved with the lithium deposits of Uyuni since the beginning, Ballivian seems to desperately hope that some sort of agreement can be reached, that the salar’s riches can finally be tapped. He feels that the salar was meant to produce the lithium that would help transform technology in the new century. “The salar is my life,” Ballivian said.
The next morning, Ballivian was leaving for Argentina, where Bolloré was drilling for lithium in a small salar near the city of Salta.
11
THE GOAL
In the quest to rid our cars of oil and our grid of coal and gas, battery scientists have at least two essential duties. The first is to continue to grind through the periodic table in search of the incremental advances that will steadily make the technology a little better every year. The second is to chase ideas that may be decades from commercial reality, because while everyone else is arguing about state tax credits for pack assembly plants and the price of separator material, somebody has to.
Three and a half decades after Exxon built and then killed his breakthrough rechargeable lithium battery, Michael Stanley Whittingham is still at it. Since 1988 he’s been a professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton, on the banks of the meandering upper Susquehanna River. After a detour with another oil company and then a few years spent on (what else?) high-temperature superconductors, Whittingham has been back at battery research since the funding returned in the early 1990s.
Whittingham’s domain, the Institute for Materials Research, is located in a faux-Bauhaus classroom building in the middle of the campus. When I visited one autumn day, we sat in his cluttered office and talked about his time in the field. Early in our conversation he smiled, reached over to his desk, and handed me a block of clear plastic. Inside it was embedded a vintage Exxon lithium titanium disulfide battery and a digital clock display. The clock wasn’t accurate, but after more than thirty years, it was still running.
I asked him what major challenges battery scientists had to overcome. “Everything, almost,” he said. “How can you make new materials cheaper? Then you need a good electrolyte. You need a better separator than they’ve got right now. And you need totally different materials for them. One area of interest is better geometries for cells …” His response reminded me of something Jon Lauckner once said: “The ideal goal will be to have the same energy density as gasoline or diesel fuel. That’s where we’d say, okay, we’ve arrived.”
Whittingham’s lab, in the basement below his office, focuses on electrodes, on finding the revolutionary material that will push things forward in a significant way. In places, the lab looks impressively high-tech, sanitized, expensive. In others, it looks like a tire shop. Workbenches are topped with brutal iron devices that pound powders into pellets suitable for annihilation in a furnace, where Whittingham’s students study the composition of materials by torching them and taking detailed measurements of their oblivion.
Searching for new electrode materials is a matter of first synthesizing the raw active material you want to test and then building tiny batteries in which you can try it out. The process starts with measuring spoonfuls of chemicals out of hand-labeled canisters, as if making a cake for some arsenic-based life-form from another planet. This recipe is then baked into the active ingredient under examination.
To get a portrait of the inner structure of the molecules under study, battery scientists use X-ray diffractometers, which determine the molecular shape of a material by bombarding it with rays and analyzing the pattern of the ones that bounce off. These rays carry information about the atoms that reflected them—the number of atoms they’re bonded to, the length and angle of those bonds, the behavior of the electrons flitting around them. In Whittingham’s graduate school days, you had to take the measurements from the XRD and piece together a picture of these structures by hand. “Something like that”—in his office he pointed to a waist-high ball-and-dowel model—“would have been an entire Ph.D. thesis.” These days, computers do the work, but it still takes days even for a machine to “solve” the structure of a single crystal.
The test batteries that use these materials are built by hand using a tabletop version of the process employed in the battery factories. Mix a cou
ple of teaspoons of the powdered battery material with binder, an equal measure of carbon black, and a solvent. Paint that concoction onto a sheet of aluminum foil. Bake it in a miniature curing oven. Transfer it to a vacuum chamber that extracts every trace of moisture. Remove the film of cathode material and use an industrial-grade hole punch to slice out a quarter-size circle of pencil-lead-gray electrode material.
Next, the battery cells are assembled in a glove box, which looks like a giant aquarium with inside-out plastic gloves extending like udders from its front. The glove box is filled with either helium or argon, inert gases that won’t react with the pure lithium metal inside. Hands inserted into those udder-gloves, a scientist has at his or her access all the ingredients of a small experimental battery—a coin cell, as it’s called, because the finished product looks like a blank half-dollar. First, using a pressurized air lock, you slide the cathode material into the helium chamber. Two casing discs, which each look like the half shell of a pocket watch, sandwich everything that goes in between. Take one disc. Lay the freshly baked cathode inside. Take the other disc. Squeeze in a circular gasket, which will keep the cell airtight once it’s finished. Slice a little lithium off the roll, and using a small die, cut a circle of metallic lithium, as if pressing a cookie cutter into rolled dough. Put the disc of lithium metal—the anode—into the left disc. Reach into the bag of circular ceramic separators and lay one on top of the anode. Take a dropper and soak the separator with five or six drops of electrolyte. Then drop in another gasket, squeeze the sides together, and slide the coin cell into a vise that presses it together. One small coin-cell battery, ready for testing.
Upstairs in the cycling lab, two wooden shelves are lined with these electrical half-dollars, each one wired to a power source and a computer. The idea is to charge and discharge each cell repeatedly while monitoring its behavior—how much energy it can store, how quickly it can dump that energy, how many cycles it can stand before beginning to fall apart, and so on.
Bottled Lightning Page 22