The Lithium Trade in the Andes

• In Event: STS Underground - I: Mining Knowledge Practices

Abstract

As the great recession of 2008 unfolded, lithium industry consultants speculated about global reserves. While geologist R. Keith Evans argued lithium was plentiful, technology consultant William Tahil portended a problematic shortage. The price and demand for lithium were rising with consumer interest in electric cars, prompting business journalists to herald a new “Persian Gulf” focused not on oil, but on lithium. Just as the Persian Gulf has a high concentration of easy-to-access oil, so South America’s “lithium triangle”–located in the high-altitude desert straddling the borders of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia–has cheap brine lithium deposits. Geographic concentration coupled with the use of lithium in electric vehicle batteries seemingly justify the comparison with oil. A century of oil dependency has accustomed us to this kind of speculation, with its political and economic consequences (Mitchell 2011). But lithium is also profoundly different from oil: consumers buy it once a decade with their car battery, not daily at a filling station, thus lowering the political stakes of everyday global flows. Its market is opaque; lithium is not publicly traded and is pumped from underground by relatively unknown companies. This talk will explore the epistemic and political work that metaphors do and necessitate, with the goal of presenting a framework that bridges STS and global production network approaches to the study of mineral resource wealth and politics. This framework will then be applied to the case of lithium from the world’s top producers: Chile, Argentina, and the United States.

Author

• Javiera Barandiaran, University of California, Santa Barbara