How one group in Chile is blessed and cursed with lithium

ATACAMA DESERT, Chile — On the high of a craggy path in Socaire, a hilltop village deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a black flag whips within the wind above Jeanette Cruz’s home.

The desert solar has bleached it to a darkish grey blur, however the defiance it represents stays robust.

Above every home within the village, shimmering within the night solar, these black flags signify the Indigenous Lickanantay folks’s resistance to the lithium mining that many say is tearing their communities aside.

The lithium within the brine beneath the sensible white Atacama salt flat, which stretches out throughout the valley flooring, has turn into a world useful resource.

It holds the important thing to the worldwide inexperienced power transition, however the Lickanantay communities which have inhabited the world for millennia are questioning what they themselves stand to realize.

“Our life is contained in that water,” says Cruz, gesturing forlornly out towards the salt as she stands within the low doorway to her residence. “The day it dries up, we’re dead as a culture, and we will have to leave.”

“They can give us all the money and resources they want, but we’ll never get back what we’re losing.”

Earlier than it may be refined, lithium-rich brine is pumped to the floor and blended with groundwater, then slowly transferred between turquoise swimming pools on the floor of the salt flat the place it evaporates.

The concentrated lithium carbonate salts are pushed in nice convoys of vans to town of Antofagasta on the coast, the place they’re purified and exported to be made into batteries — and find yourself in your cellphone or electrical automobile.

Three firms have now arrange operations on the Atacama salt flat.

SQM, a Chilean chemical firm, has been working there because the Nineteen Eighties. U.S.-based Albemarle Corp. has had a concession since 2015, and Chinese language electromobility big BYD are the newest to arrange operations.

All three have rental contracts with Chile’s state growth physique, CORFO, via which cash is put aside for the “sustainable development of the communities.”

“What I have seen in the area is that we are able to work, at least in some way, with each of the communities, which wasn’t the case before,” defined Javier Silva, who has been managing SQM’s relations with the communities across the Atacama salt flat for 3 years.

“We are seeing that perceptions are improving, although you always find a wide range of opinions.”

As a part of their contract with CORFO, SQM shares out $15 million per 12 months equally between 19 communities within the space; whereas additional funds are made in keeping with components comparable to inhabitants and distance from the mining operations.

SQM has agreements with 5 communities, via which it really works on well being care, training, cultural and infrastructure tasks.

Residents within the city of Peine on the far finish of the salt flat, in the meantime, say that they’ve had an settlement in place with Albemarle since 2012. Among the cash was used to put a model new soccer discipline on the foot of the city.

ByD declined a request for remark.

Chile is the world’s second-largest producer of lithium and has the most important identified reserves of the mineral, in keeping with the U.S. Geological Survey.

However there’s little consensus amongst locals as to what must be performed with the proceeds of the lithium growth.

Among the communities across the salt flat have accepted direct compensation from the businesses. Others are adamant that the harm being performed is irreparable and can’t be offset by funds.

“The lithium won’t last forever,” sighs 72-year-old Sara Plaza, a lifelong resident of Peine. “For the next generations there won’t be water and there won’t be work — there won’t be anything.”

“It’s the richness of the culture and community spirit that’s disappearing. It’s not like it was before, and it’ll never be like it used to be. I don’t see such a bright future anymore.”

Down on the plains, razor-sharp crusts of salty rock jut skyward like frozen waves, and tufts of powerful grass protrude between them.

Plaza walks with whole ease over the tough floor, mentioning locations on or simply over the featureless horizon which are not apparent to international eyes.

She remembers the place animals would graze and the Lickanantay folks would swim or coat their pores and skin in thick mud to ease joint pains. Others would come right down to hunt for flamingo eggs, however only a few birds go to these elements any extra, Plaza says.

As she talks, a tanker pulls as much as pour diesel right into a generator powering a water pump extracting lots of of liters of water per second from the marshy space the place she as soon as got here to graze animals or swim.

One current examine carried out by scientists on the College of Chile linked the extraction of groundwater by the mining business to the collapse of the Atacama salt flat, which they discovered was sinking by as a lot as one centimeter per 12 months.

But the exploitation of the salt flat is ready to extend additional nonetheless.

Beginning in January 2031, a public-private partnership will take over the lithium contracts, with nationwide copper mining firm Codelco holding a majority share, making the state of Chile the bulk shareholder.

“It’s an unprecedented step for the Chilean mining industry”, stated President Gabriel Boric of the public-private partnership on the time.

“We can’t repeat the same formulas of the past,” Boric stated. “We need a state that not only collects the revenues, but also participates in the whole process of extraction, production and generation of value-added lithium products.”

Nonetheless, many residents within the space don’t agree.

“The extractivist, profit-minded mentality is already present in our communities,” says Rosa Ramos Colque, a Lickanantay activist within the city of San Pedro de Atacama who works in ecotourism. “The social and cultural fabric has already broken down.”

And on the different finish of the salt flat in Peine, activist Sergio Cubillos urges warning.

“We don’t know enough about what the impact [of further extraction] will be on the Atacama salt flat, or whether the hydrology of the area fits with the national lithium strategy,” he says.

Each night, the slim, cracked earth streets of Peine turn into a racetrack for contractors’ automobiles as they thunder as much as the highest of the city.

Cubillos says that there was friction within the city as extra folks have arrived to work within the lithium business, stretching Peine’s assets and driving up rental values.

There have even been a handful of truck thefts and other people have began to place safety fences up exterior their houses. The tranquility has gone from Peine, he says.

“We could quite easily disappear,” says Cubillos sadly as he sits in a small park funded by an settlement with one of many mining firms.

“This is the fear, and I think we all share it. Quite simply, our culture could cease to exist.”