- Bolivia sitting on one of world's largest reserves of lithium Archived Message
Posted by margo
on November 11, 2019, 3:25 pm, in reply to "The US footprint in Bolivia's 'revolution'"
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Was Morales planning to nationalise and use lithium for his own country, rather than play nicely with foreigners? "In a future battery-powered world, lithium may replace oil and emerge as one of the most important commodities on earth. That prospect is driving Bolivia, which is considered to have the largest reserves of the metal, to keep lithium under strict state control." Bolivia's lithium dream One of the world’s poorest nations is sitting on the second-largest amount of the mineral needed to power electric cars. extract Bloomberg -- Operations At The Salar de Uyuni As Bolivia Aims To Become The World's Biggest Exporter of Lithium [...] the government is eager to tap into the global hunger for a mineral essential to power electric cars and build storage batteries. The ambition is to ultimately transform Bolivia into a manufacturer of the rechargeable batteries inside Tesla Inc.’s all-electric cars and the nearly 300 EV models expected to reach the market by 2022, according to Bloomberg NEF. “Bolivia will be a relevant actor in the global lithium market within four or five years,” said Juan Carlos Montenegro, general manager of state-owned Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos, or YLB. “And we don’t plan on stopping there.” The Bolivian government—South America’s longest-standing populist regime—is vowing to make itself into a mineral-and-battery player using mainly its own engineers. Its pilot plant in Uyuni has produced close to 250 tons of lithium carbonate this year, and YLB said it can bring production to 150,000 tons within five years. This would make Bolivia one of the top-producing nations and the source of about 20 percent of the world’s lithium by 2022, according to Bloomberg NEF projections..../ continues at LINK https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-03/bolivia-s-almost-impossible-lithium-dream Nov 4 - Bolivia scraps joint German deal on lithium DW LINK https://www.dw.com/en/bolivia-scraps-joint-lithium-project-with-german-company/a-51100873 |