Salar de Atacama

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A salt flat of roughly three thousand square kilometres in the Antofagasta Region of northern Chile, at about 2,300 metres altitude, holding brine with among the highest lithium concentrations known and sitting in one of the driest places on Earth. Lithium is recovered here not by mining rock but by pumping brine into a sequence of evaporation ponds and letting the Atacama sun concentrate it over many months before chemical processing — a method that is cheap in energy and capital but slow, and which consumes very large volumes of brine in a closed basin whose hydrology is contested. The salar is the core of the so-called lithium triangle spanning Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, and it is where the sharpest form of the transition's central tension appears: the water and land questions raised by indigenous Atacameño communities and by Chilean regulators concern the local, present and certain, while the benefit is global, future and diffuse. Chile also demonstrates that resource endowment is not the same as supply — Australian hard-rock spodumene, mined and shipped for refining elsewhere, overtook South American brine as the largest source of mined lithium during the 2010s despite far higher energy intensity, because it could be scaled faster.