At a llama farm outside the picturesque desert town of Tilcara in the mineral-rich province of Jujuy, Santos Manfredi was recounting a story about local protests against lithium mining when he suddenly stopped, listening. There was a distant rumble.
“The river!” he said. “Let’s go see.”
He took off for the bone-dry river basin next to his farm. It had finally rained up in the mountains, and the river was filling with water so powerfully that boulders tumbled in its path.
In the spectacular multicolored mountains of the lower Andes, el agua es vida — water is life. During Carnaval, women poured spirits on the ground as offerings to Pachamama — mother earth, in Quechua — and performed a protest anthem on reed flutes.
“For the territory, for the water, for life,” they sang.
Lithium is a crucial ingredient in electric car batteries. On a global scale, that’s good for the planet, and demand is only likely to go up in the coming years. But at the local level, lithium mining dries out the land, and it’s facing pushback from communities in the so-called “lithium triangle” of the Andes.
Water was precious in this arid land long before mining companies began pulling salty brine from the aquifer so they could extract lithium carbonate. The most common method involves pumping the water into vast evaporation ponds, allowing the sun to do the work of concentrating the mineral. The process can take up to three years, but there is another method.
“The thing about direct extraction is that it's much faster,” said geologist Ayelen Francos.
But just how much faster are we talking?
“Hours,” she said. “Days.”
Interest and investment in direct lithium extraction has been on the rise in recent years, including from giants like ExxonMobil. The method allows for water to be pumped back into the earth once the lithium has been obtained. Better for the environment — but that’s not all.
“It’s more expensive,” she said.
And there’s the rub. Proving that the technology is efficient and economical enough to work at commercial scale has been an obstacle to widespread adoption. Francos worked for California-based Lilac Solutions, one of several companies leading the charge to improve this technology. But lithium prices are down more than 80% from their 2022 peak because of a global oversupply. So it’s fair to say companies are risk averse.
“So, for now, we are on the cheap option,” Francos said.
But rising demand for electric vehicles and battery storage is projected to catch up to the oversupply. And when that happens, the painfully slow speed of old-school lithium extraction will be a problem.
Meanwhile, there’s momentum against lithium exploration. In January, a summit in Jujuy drew more than 200 representatives from communities affected by lithium mining in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru. In Jujuy, a January Supreme Court decision upheld the communities’ right to be consulted on any lithium exploration in the watershed.
“If there is no agreement between the community and the government, you can’t do it,” Eloy Quispe said, standing on the vast, windswept salt flats known as las Salinas Grandes. Quispe is a sixth-generation representative of the Kolla Pozo Colorado, one of several Indigenous communities in the area.
“What we have here is something worthy and wonderful for our future generations,” he said. “That is what we fight for.”
