Bolivia pins hopes on world's lightest metal

“Lithium is the hope not just for Bolivia but for all inhabitants of the planet,” President Evo Morales said before meeting in Paris last month with Bollore Group, one of several companies vying to extract the metal from remote salt flats in the poor landlocked nation.

Bolivia has about half the world's proven lithium reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and Morales says he's ready to sink some US$200 million into mining it.

He just needs the right partner.

In addition to Bollore, suitors include Japan's Sumitomo Corp. and Mitsubishi Corp.

But Morales is insisting on requirements that could turn them all away, leaving the remote Salar de Uyuni flats as they have been for millennia — a vast crystalline dry sea, shimmering quietly in the fierce Andean sun.

For Bolivians, economic development and job creation are a must — the partner can't be like foreign companies who they say shortchanged the nation's hardscrabble Indians while extracting copper, silver and tin from vegetation-starved highlands. Morales wants lithium batteries manufactured domestically, and even hopes to assemble battery-powered cars.

“We don't even manufacture a pin here,” Mining Minister Freddy Beltran complained to The Associated Press. “It's a story that must change.”

But Bolivia lacks the expertise to even begin to compete with Chile and Argentina, which together account for more than half the world's 27,400 metric tons of annual lithium production. China and Australia also are major producers.

Since his 2005 election, Morales has secured for Bolivians the bulk of profits from their natural gas — South America's second-largest known deposits after Venezuela's. Now he sees lithium as a way to create an industrial economy.

“The state doesn't see ever losing sovereignty over the lithium,” Morales told reporters. “Whoever wants to invest in it should be assured that the state must have control of 60 percent of the earnings.”

A US$6 million pilot project managed by Comibol, the state-owned mining company, plans to begin some production next year. To accelerate the process, Bolivia has asked Sumitomo, Mitsubishi and Bollore to join a “scientific committee” to determine how best to mine the flats' estimated 5.4 million tons of lithium.

“Right now, most of the lithium that is used (industrially) is drawn from South America because it is the easiest to extract,” said Haresh Kamath of the Electric Power Research Institute in California.

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