Beneath Bolivia's surreal salt flats sits the largest deposit of lithium in the world. And now Chinese and Russian energy companies are getting ready to mine it. The lightweight metal is known as white gold because it's essential for making rechargeable batteries that power things like computers, mobile phones and electric cars. Global production has nearly quadrupled over the last decade. But it's still not enough.
So battery manufacturers around the world are eyeing up the lithium triangle, the name given to the high-altitude salt flats in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. This is where over half of the world's known supply of lithium is stored. We have the best salt mill with a high percentage of lithium. The lithium here in Chile is locked away in underground saltwater, or brine.
Billions of gallons are pumped to the surface every year, where it is left to evaporate and concentrate. Mining companies also use millions of gallons of fresh water, and in one of the driest places on earth, locals are scared of what that will do to their already scarce water supplies. And they worry they won't get their fair share of the white gold rush unfolding in their own backyard.
Don't get me started. Because we also know when we get up. Mining the lithium triangle looks inevitable in the rush towards an all-electric future. But what is the true cost?
José Morales has lived near Bolivia's salt flats his entire life. He makes a living growing quinoa and selling wool from his llamas. There is very little rainfall and a nearby river that used to provide water is all but dried up.
So José now pumps groundwater from wells. Year after year the level goes down. Before families lived here with cattle.
There was drought, there was no grass, the water dried up, and they preferred to migrate through the work sources. In early 2023, the Bolivian government granted a mining licence here that would massively scale up lithium extraction. People like Jose are afraid that's just going to make the drought worse.
These plants consume a good amount of water. A good amount of water. And where will that water come from?
We'll come back to Bolivia, but for now neighbouring Chile might hold some answers. These are the Atacama salt flats, a natural wonder, one of the driest places on earth, and a vast source of lithium. The bright squares are pools of brine, where the water is left to evaporate and leave behind a mix of salts and minerals.
The more yellow the pond, the higher the concentration. At first we saw turquoise colors, where there was a small percentage of lithium. Here we have a large percentage of lithium. It can take more than 1,000 gallons of brine to produce enough lithium for just one electric car battery.
Two companies control the right to operate here, American Albemarle and Chilean SQM. In 2021, Chile exported almost $1 billion worth of lithium carbonate. And satellite imagery shows just how that has transformed the landscape.
It can take around 18 months for the brine to move through the series of ponds. The concentrated lithium brine is then processed into lithium carbonate, which is then taken to another factory near the coast, where it is purified into battery-grade lithium. The two companies suck out enough brine to fill an Olympic swimming pool every 20 minutes.
They also draw 32 gallons per second of fresh water from underground aquifers for use in the processing factories. That would fill an Olympic-sized pool in roughly five hours. It's no surprise that water usage is such a sensitive issue in one of the driest regions on Earth. Central Chile has experienced a mega drought since 2010, the region's longest on record.
Brine is far denser than fresh water, and the two rarely mix. But regulators worry that pumping so much brine too fast will increase the risk of freshwater contamination. And lithium isn't the only thirsty industry.
Since the 1980s copper mines have been responsible for around half of the region's freshwater use. The Chilean government blamed the copper and lithium industries for a 25 centimeter drop in the height of the water table. The copper mines plan to switch to desalinated water by 2030. Jorge Munoz Coca is concerned about the damage this use of fresh water could be doing.
to the environment. The mining industry always tries to say that they have sustainability, that they are always improving, a constant improvement. And the truth is that we can't contact that information. He is part of the Atacameño indigenous community and lives in San Pedro with his three children.
In 2015, he founded an activist collective to educate people about lithium mining. We didn't know much about lithium mining. At one point we thought lithium was extracted from rocks, like copper mining. Jorge says locals lost faith in the mining industry a long time ago. In the 1990s the Chilean government agreed to hand ancestral lands back to indigenous communities, including the Atacama lithium mines.
Some land was transferred, but crucially not the mines. Neither of the two lithium companies in Chile consulted with locals before starting their operations. At the time they didn't need to, but in 2008 Chile's government agreed to involve indigenous people in any decision that could affect them directly.
Still, it would take another eight years for one of the companies, Albemarle, to begin giving over 3.5% of its profits. That same year, SQM was sued for extracting more brine, than allowed. SQM recently committed to reduce brine and freshwater use and monitor their environmental impacts.
Jorge feels there has never been real transparency. It's not a real community relationship where we have someone from mining to say our complaints, even our complaints to the mining company. But demand for lithium shows no signs of slowing down. It is the ideal metal for batteries because it is extremely light and stores energy very efficiently compared to traditional batteries. It would take around four lead-acid car batteries to get the same amount of energy as one lithium battery of the same size.
This makes them perfect for maximising power without adding much weight or taking up too much space. A booming electric vehicle industry has roughly tripled lithium prices in the last three years, while companies scramble to ramp up production. So now all eyes are on Bolivia and its wealth of white gold. At more than 4,000 square miles, the Uyuni salt flat is over double the size of the Grand Canyon and clearly visible from space.
More than 90,000 visitors come from all over the world each year to photograph the shimmering sea of salt. Antonio Cabrera moved here back in 2009. That was when Bolivia announced it would invest $900 million in the lithium industry. Why did I emigrate from my community?
Because my children wanted me to study. I don't want them to be like me. Antonia had high hopes that would bring jobs and prosperity. We have all come here happy, that we are going to work in lithium, but that has not happened. A state-controlled company built a small pilot plant, which opened in 2013, but Bolivia lacked the technical know-how to scale up.
Almost a decade later, the pilot plant was only producing a few hundred tonnes of lithium carbonate per year. A tiny fraction of Chile's exports. For Antonia, the industry's failure to take off meant the promises of work came to nothing and five of her six children left to find jobs in other cities.
Today she lives with her daughter and grandson. She says even the local school only has one teacher left. To make things worse, the pandemic hit the tourism industry hard. Adon Morales is also disillusioned.
after years of high hopes for Bolivia's lithium industry. He's an active leader for his community and lives 60 miles from the pilot plant with his daughter. He worked for the lithium company as community liaison back in 2019. He was supposed to help recruit workers locally.
But in the end, he says, most workers were brought in from Bolivia's large cities instead. Now with the Chinese and Russian companies moving in, he's worried about his precious water supply. There are municipalities that in order for the plant to work, they will have to give water.
They will have to keep their cattle, themselves, without water. He says water levels have dropped more than two metres over the last two years because of droughts. Here, when we first started, we went over five metres.
This water is from the winter. This time, there is little water. Ardón is not against lithium mining. He just wants any company that comes in to extract the metal to be open and honest. If you look at Bolivia's history, you can understand why local communities might be suspicious of international interest in their natural resources.
Zoom out and you can see how, for more than 500 years, silver mining has left its scars on the landscape. It was the Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century who laid claim to what's now known to be the largest global silver deposit. An estimated 8 million.
enslaved miners lost their lives in the mines. Mercury, which was used to refine the silver, polluted streams and poisoned local ecosystems. These ancient mines have created untold wealth.
Yet the region of Potosi remains the poorest in Bolivia. The government is nonetheless optimistic for the next chapter of its lithium story. Almost three...
billion of investment from Chinese and Russian companies will build an array of new lithium plants capable of processing an estimated 100,000 metric tonnes of lithium carbonate each year. The Bolivian government says that it will bring infrastructure and employment, but with the touted rewards come risks. They're gambling on a relatively new technology.
It's called DLE, or direct lithium extraction. Instead of pumping brine to the surface and waiting for the water to evaporate, this method separates out the lithium using a range of filtration techniques. It can take only a few hours, but it's unclear how water or energy intensive the process will be.
There are small operations testing this method in the US and Argentina, but it hasn't yet been proven to work at scale. For many Bolivians, this uncertainty breeds concern. We don't know what this agreement says, this agreement with the consortium, the Chinese consortium says. And this is incredible because the natural resources are from us, are from all Bolivians, but we have no access to this agreement. The agreement is closed.
Just on the outskirts of Uyuni, lies a stark reminder of what can happen if grand mining projects go wrong. The carcasses of over a hundred trains lie in the sun, rusting away, some dating back to the early 20th century. The town was once a transport hub, linking the Pacific coast with tin and silver mines of the high plains of the Andes. The industry and the local economy collapsed after the Second World War, and the trains were left to rot. The lithium industry here will need to promise a better future than that for local communities and the environment if it is to overcome doubts that it is anything more than a mirage.