Copper and lithium
Every electric motor is wound with copper and every battery holds lithium. Chile sits on a great deal of both — which makes it less a supplier than a test bench, because this is where it gets decided how to take them out without wrecking what is around them.
Why here
What is the energy transition made of?
Both minerals are children of the other two lenses. The same subduction that shakes the country raised the Andes and the copper porphyries with them; the same dryness that gives the Atacama its sky is what left lithium dissolved in the brine under the salt flats, evaporated down over millions of years.
Which is why the interesting scientific problem today is not extracting more but extracting differently. Direct lithium extraction aims to put the brine back instead of drying the salt flat out; microorganisms from the brine itself are being studied for that process; and there are materials moving lithium ions far faster than anyone thought possible.
And around the mine there is an engineering culture that rarely gets told abroad: steels that survive more blows inside a crusher, laser spectroscopy to know what is in the rock before milling it, remote operation and the retraining that comes with it. It is applied research with the plant next door.
The numbers, with their sources
of copper reserves: the highest figure in the USGS table, ahead of Australia (100) and Peru (85). The USGS publishes the number, not the ranking — the comparison is ours, read off that table.
of lithium reserves, again the highest figure in the table, with Australia at 8.4 and Argentina at 4.4.
What we have on this
Scientists
If you work with any of this
Instruments, fieldwork, a programme that needs one of these conditions, or simply a story that is better told from here. That is the conversation we are interested in.
What we can do together →