Chile's Lithium Mines Hold Trillions in Value and Hidden Costs

This place where I'm standing is the actual most valuable plot of land in America. That site behind me made $9 billion of revenue in 2022, and there could be trillions more buried under this salt. Cuz more than 50% of all the lithium in planet Earth is within a few miles of where I'm standing right now. This carbon neutral world that we're trying to build depends on our ability to dig all this lithium out. But as we flew and drove hundreds of miles to get here, we discovered the other side of this story. A story that's hidden in the desert salt. The metal that can transform our world for the better is also destroying their world. So, maybe you guys have seen this video by Morning Brew.

This area in the middle of nowhere might just be the most important plot of land in America right now. Morning Brew, but this video has two facts wrong. First, I know that you guys Americans, people who live in the US, are officially called Americans, but also the entire continent is called America. And then this video talks about the McDermitt Caldera. That's a 40 million ton reserve of lithium. But where we're headed, there are 57 million tons of lithium up for grabs. All righty guys, welcome to the Atacama Desert. Atacama is truly the driest and oldest desert on Earth. It gets under 1 mm of rainfall per year. By the way, nobody warned me about the insanely cold breeze that you get out here in

Antofagasta from the ocean, but that's actually part of the reason why the desert even exists. I didn't think you could see it so clearly. There are actual clouds here that kind of look like rain clouds. And then they're coming from the ocean, but they all get stopped by this barrier of mountains. That's the Chilean Coastal Range. And that's the east barrier of the desert. That's the reason why none of these clouds can get there and why it's never rains on the other side. That's man, man. It's It's so and it's cold, too. Even during the day like it was not as hot as I would have expected. And so red like this full of sand is red.

Crazy. Every so often in El Niño years, like every five or seven years, it rains. And when it does, this incredible thing happens. It's called the desert in bloom. But beyond those days, all you really get is sand. When we driving south of here, there's nothing. Like not a single plant, nothing for miles and miles. Yeah, they got plants here in this area, which I guess is nice. Not green, not pure green, but life at least. Now, the other fact that Morning Brew got wrong is that they talk about this potential mine that the potential value of this plot of land, but this place is real. Like it's operating. It makes up

like 4% of Chile's GDP. And that's what we're trying to find. Now, after driving through the desert for like two or three days straight, like seeing some green and water, like it's not something that you think you would miss, but you do. So, that town that we just passed is called Calama. In the local language, it means town in the middle of the water. There's this river that comes down from the Andes and forms this bit of an oasis in the middle of the desert. And now we're we're headed south now to San Pedro de Atacama, which is I think the closest town that we could find to the lithium mines. From what I can see in maps, there's like a 20-mile, maybe 30-km drive like into the salt flats. And I there's a service road

that I could see. So, yeah, I think that tomorrow we just have to give it a shot. But then, I mean, we didn't have any plans line like there's no script for our time Atacama. It's just a place where we're going to crash, but we've been eating car food for all this trip like sandwiches and like snack and so on. So, uh Trying to find We're trying to find a good meal. Actually, I hate like food review YouTube channels cuz I can't have the food. Like I can't just watch people eat and not want to eat the thing. So, no, you're not getting a you're not getting a food review from me. But this is good, though.

So, I did some digging around lithium last night and I have some stuff. We're standing in this lithium triangle, which extends from Chile up to Bolivia and then to Argentina. So, the story here is that we're in this high plateau that has these bowls where water kind of accumulated and flow out to the ocean. What happened was that these volcanoes would erupt and they would put all these metals into the water through millions of years. As the desert became a desert, water started to evaporate. All these metals were left at the bottom and that's what eventually became the salt flats. Now, Chile has just moved a lot quicker extracting this stuff. As we were driving around, you could see all these huge mining operations. Honestly,

I had never seen so much mining in my life, honestly. For example, I was in Bolivia a couple years ago with the family on the Uyuni salt flats and you could see that they don't have any operation, nothing compared to what you see here. It's all very artisanal, kind of like salt extracting stuff like that. I hear I read that they're starting to develop that there and then Argentina as well. But yeah, like these Chileans are kicking everybody's ass at it. So, let's see if we can find those salt flats then. I'm a nerd for these types of stories of like super materials or like hidden industries in the middle of nowhere. And I get my daily dose of that stuff from The Hustle Daily Newsletter, who also pitched in to the production of

today's video. So, The Hustle Newsletter is not about breaking news. It's not about the latest update. It's not about politics. It's about deep dives and case studies on stuff that entrepreneurs really care about. It's about what founders and hustlers need to grow their own businesses. Subscribing is completely free. You can find a link here with this QR code. I'll just going to drop it in the description, too. And well, thanks to The Hustle for partially funding this video. Don't go now. I think we're on the side of the salt flats. And I didn't expect to see like towns here. I don't think they're even on the map, man. I don't I didn't see them. Oh, it is a river. Yeah.

Oh, nice. That road there supposedly leads into the salt flats. It's like a 20-mile, 30-km drive into the flats that maybe gets us to the mines, but I don't know, man. Haven't seen a single car drive out of there. Some white things against the dark background and some black things against the clear background. I don't What are those things? Trying to find a vantage point so we can see like we can see the pools, but they're like these red patrol cars that already pulled us over once. They don't they don't want us to be here. So, we made it. We've we made it to like the mining area.

Okay. Uh got it. Pools are here. I'm going to I'll explain in a sec, but I think at least we got a chance to see them. There's too much wind. I can't The drone's struggling to get back. I'm shaking a little bit. Like I was trying to fly back, but it like it was stuck in the same place cuz the wind was so strong, but we have the footage. Like the wind here is crazy. Ah, we got it. I think we got it. We have the footage. Let's get out of here.

So, what these guys are trying to do is they're trying to evaporate brine. They're basically pumping this water from underground. They're pouring it over all these pools and they're waiting for the water to evaporate, which can take up to two years. And you can kind of see it in the color of the pools. The more yellow the pool becomes, that means that more water has evaporated and therefore lithium is more concentrated. And then apparently, it's it's so much lithium that you can make mountains of it. Mhm. Guys, it's it's so much water in the pools. If this is the driest place on Earth, like where does that water come from? And isn't it like running out?

They're so crazy. They're like they're super sharp, spiky. The lady at the restaurant told us that this isn't edible like this salt in the salt flats isn't edible. Now I get why. It's getting late. We should go. She called the guy. So, maybe we got lucky. So, the little town is called Paine, we found out. Uh it's just on the side of the salt flats. Feels a little bit like walking into the lion's den cuz every car here is like this red truck that was chasing us earlier. But, we found a place to stay.

Like we had to ask around a little bit. It's better than nothing or than driving back for another 2 hours. So, I'll I'll take it. It's like an open house where they're kind of negotiating reparation and compensation of the salt flat region. In Paine, we met with Judith Cruz, a local tour guide who's agreed to walk us to Paine's biggest treasure. A series of cave paintings that's estimated to be close to 3,000 years old. As we arrive, Judith sets some coca leaves in the rocks next to the cave. From what we could see, Paine's small economy is strictly tied to the mines.

Even people from Bolivia travel for work. But, Paine's relationship with the mines is complex. Their fight is not to block mining altogether. It's to create a balance that allows desert communities like Paine to live where they've existed for thousands of years. And here in the desert, the cycle of water going from the Andes to the rivers to the underground deposits is everything. The desert can't keep up with the speed at which water is being extracted for lithium mining. Lithium extraction at the Atacama salt flats is licensed to a US company and to a Chilean company that's actually partly owned by a Chinese conglomerate.

Representing actual billions of dollars, 4% of the country's GDP, it's no surprise that this relationship is one-sided. Man, it's been crazy to see this contrast of a complete drought of seeing how water is this precious resource to these communities, a resource that they have rituals around. Well, at the same time, you have like these giant pools of water just evaporating into the air in the middle of the salt flats. But, on the other hand, lithium is key to renewable energy cuz we need to store that energy somewhere. It's key to this better world that we're trying to build with what with slowing down climate change. Paine's hopes are now set on new technologies and the mines adopting them. A 2024 paper, for example,

proposed a method that uses an electric filter that extracts lithium out of the water without having to evaporate it. It's called RCE or redox couple electrodialysis, if you want to look it up. Saving our world should not come at the cost of destroying their world. And there are ways to do it. This story very much reminded me of Nosara in Costa Rica, this small town that was kind of invaded by gentrification. While at the same time, a local community organized itself to preserve what the town was originally attractive for. We did that video a couple years ago and it's one of my favorite videos in our channel, also from our home country. So, you should check it out.

Thanks all for watching.