The Argentine lithium belt is a 300-mile stretch of salt lakes and scattered herds of wild vicuña, with occasional arrays of solar panels shimmering on the horizon.
Solar is becoming de rigueur for remote lithium operations. It is ruinously expensive to truck in diesel, and you will not be able to export to Europe after 2026 without a lithium carbon passport. “Everyone is thinking about alternatives with solar as a Plan B,” said David Guerrero, an Argentine lithium entrepreneur.
The extraction of volcanic lithium brine is in itself elegantly simple. Galan has 15 ‘bombas’ that each pump the green liquid from 350 feet underground at a rate of eight litres a second. “It is exactly like pumping water from an aquifer, except it has a density 1.2 times higher,” said Ordenes Moraga.
The brine is evaporated in a series of ponds for 18 months, removing sodium, magnesium, and boron along the way, until it reaches the global benchmark concentration of 6pc lithium, or 32pc lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE). The sun does the heavy lifting.
Galan Lithium is an Australian-listed company, founded and run by Chileans, world leaders in brine extraction. It is building a plant at the site to convert the solution to lithium hydroxide, preferred for electric vehicle batteries because of a higher energy density than standard lithium carbonate.
The process has nothing in common with the extraction of lithium from spodumene rock in Australia or China, which has a carbon footprint seven times higher, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
“Spodumene is very dirty. It has to be cooked in ovens and takes a huge amount of energy. Getting lithium this way costs $9,000 (£7,200) a tonne and creates a huge amount of waste,” said Ernesto Calvo, Argentina’s ‘Mr Lithium’ and a professor at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research. He estimates that lithium from the salt lakes has a break-even cost of $3,000-$3,500 a tonne.