Level 5 Reading 12B

Reading 12B

THE RUSH FOR WHITE GOLD ONE EARLY SATURDAY MORNING IN LA PAZ, Alvaro Garcia Linera— the silver-haired vice president of Bolivia—greets me in the spacious salon outside his office overlooking Plaza Murillo. The politician is known in his country as a Marxist ideologue, but today he presents himself as a capitalist pitchman. The pitch in question involves lithium. Garcia Lincra speaks of his countrys natural resource in a simultaneously factual and awestruck way. Lithium, essential to our battery-fueled world, is also the key to Bolivia's future, the vice president assures me. A mere four years from now, he predicts, it will be "the engine of our economy." All Bolivians will benefit, he continues, "taking them out of poverty, guaranteeing their stability in the middle class, and training them in scientific and technological fields so that they become part of the intelligentsia in the global economy." But as the vice president knows, no pitch about lithium as Bolivia's economic salvation is complete without addressing the source of that lithium: the Salar de Uyuni. The 10,000-square-kilometer salt flat, one of the countrys most magnificent landscapes, will almost certainly be altered—if not forever damaged— by mining the resource underneath it. "Have you been to the Salar de Uyuni?" Garcia Linera asks. When I reply that I'll be heading there soon, the vice president loses his air of detachment and seems full of nostalgia. "When you go to the Salar," he instructs me, "go there one night. Spread a blanket in the center of the Salar, and turn on some music." It takes a day to drive from the world's highest capital city to the world's largest salt flat. The route passes steadily downhill through small villages, until leveling out, at about 3,600 meters, into a mostly vacant stretch of land occasionally animated by llamas. By late afternoon, the salt flat can be seen across the plain. I reach the Salar—Spanish for "salt flat"—just before sunset, and for over a kilometer I drive along its smooth and firm surface until it becomes evident that this is the middle of nowhere. The spectacle seems unreal: kilometers of whitewashed level terrain, its starkness perfected by the cloudless blue sky and the Andean peaks in the distance. Motorcycles and 4x4s drive across the roadless surface, destinations unknown. Here and there solitary people wander about, gazing into what the Bolivian vice president calls "the infinite table of snowy white." Somewhere out of sight on infinity's edge, bulldozers are plowing evaporation pools in the Salar— long and precise excavations, like a grid of enormous swimming pools. The bulldozers will be moving this way soon—how soon, no one can say with any certainty. Here is what we do know. First, that underneath the world's biggest salt flat lies another wonder: one of the world's greatest lithium deposits—perhaps 17 percent of the planet's total. Second, that by exploiting its lithium reserves, the government of Bolivia—where 40 percent of the people live in poverty— envisions a pathway out of its economic misfortune. The salt flat had long been regarded by Bolivians as little more than a geographical anomaly. While surrounding mountains are celebrated in indigenous stories, "the Salar has never had cultural significance," says Uyuni's mayor, Patricio Mendoza. "People were afraid that if they took a walk on it, they might get lost and die of thirst or their llamas would damage their hooves on the salt." The Salar's fortunes changed in the 1980s, when a La Paz tour operator named Juan Quesada Valda laid eyes on it. Quesada was searching for a tourist destination to rival Lake Titicaca. When he beheld the Salar, he experienced a revelation, recalls his daughter Lucia: "You can find lakes anywhere," she says, "but you cannot find a salt flat like this anywhere else in the world. He knew he could sell this place." An architect by training, Quesada proceeded to build the first of several hotels made almost entirely out of blocks of salt in Colchani, a village at the eastern edge of the Salar. Adventurous foreigners began to show up to bask in the great pale desert. Weddings, yoga lessons, and automobile races would eventually be staged on it. Today the salt hotels are typically full and Uyuni has become a vacationland bustling with college-age backpackers. "Maybe 90 percent of our economy is tourism," Mendoza says. All of which is to say that in Bolivia's morose history of economic disappointments, the Salar provides a happy if modest exception. But now comes Bolivia's future, in the form of lithium. What gold meant to earlier eras, and petroleum to the previous century, lithium may eclipse in the coming years. Long used in medication to treat bipolar disorders— and in items as varied as ceramics and nuclear weapons— it has emerged as an essential component for the batteries in computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices. The global market's annual consumption of lithium in 2017 was approximately 40,000 metric tons, representing a roughly 10 percent increase year by year since 2015. Meanwhile, in the same period, lithium prices nearly tripled—a clear reflection of how fast demand has been rising. That will likely intensify as electric cars become more popular. One version of the Tesla Model S runs on a battery pack with about 65 kilograms of lithium compounds— the equivalent of what's in 10,000 cell phones. The investment firm also projects that every time electric-vehicle sales replace a percentage of all vehicles sold, the demand for lithium increases by 70,000 metric tons a year. Given that France and the United Kingdom have already announced that they'll ban the sale of cars running on gas or diesel by 2040, it would seem evident that a country abounding with lithium need never fear poverty. However, Bolivia first faces several hurdles, and the most daunting is a scientific one. Producing battery-grade lithium from brine involves separating out sodium chloride, potassium chloride, and magnesium chloride. This last is particularly expensive to remove.

Bolivia's lithium deposits have a relatively high magnesium content. "While the ratio of magnesium in Chile is 5 to 1, in Uyuni it's 21 to 1," says Bolivian chemical engineer Miguel Parra, "four times the concentration. So it's a much simpler operation for them. For us, separating magnesium from lithium is the biggest challenge." There are other issues, such as: What does Bolivia intend to do with the heaps of magnesium waste? The Bolivian government claims that it has a unique processing method that will somehow reduce waste, but just how much is speculative. "The environmental impact in Chile and Argentina is low," claims Bolivian geologist Juan Benavides, "but we're not able to extrapolate, really, because the magnesium content in Bolivian lithium is very high. All we know is... that the lithium regulations and laws in Argentina and Chile are more stringent than in Bolivia." Among the greatest concerns is how much water will be required to extract the lithium. Two rivers flow into the salt flat. One is thin enough to be a creek; the other, shallow enough to wade across. Both are crucial to the local growers of quinoa, of which Bolivia is the world's second largest supplier, after Peru. Though the Bolivian government insists that 90 percent of the water it uses will come from salt water rather than underground, some experts are skeptical. "Year after year, the water is going to be the major resource that is needed," says Oscar Ballivian Chavez, a Bolivian geologist. "They'lI need vast quantities, more than any other mine in Bolivia." And finally, there's the unspoiled natural wonder of the Salar itself. Though revered by human visitors for its boundless austerity, it is also a breeding ground for several animal species such as the Chilean flamingo. "Our plant is located far away from these sanctuaries," Garcia Linera says, adding, "This demonstrates our commitment to the environment." l thought about these unanswered questions as I headed once again through the colorless daydream of the Salar— an illusion of simplicity that apparently goes on forever, but in fact, cannot.

♪

♪