In the main square of Peine, a village of low houses and dirt streets in Chile’s northern Atacama Desert, there is barely any movement. It’s midday and the sun beats down from a cloudless sky. At this hour, the streets remain largely empty. Every now and then, a truck interrupts the silence of its steep and cracked streets.
But it’s not always this quiet. Although this small town has just over 300 residents, its population can quadruple after 6 p.m. when workers from across the country return from mining lithium — the mineral that has turned this remote village into a crucial link in the global energy transition.
Peine sits on the edge of the nearly 1,200-square-mile Atacama Salt Flat, or Salar de Atacama. Sitting beneath its surface, dissolved in underground saline waters called brine, is one of the largest, most concentrated reserves of lithium in the world.
The mineral is used in everything from air-conditioning, computers, ceramics, and mood-stabilizing medication to, most recently, electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy storage. As countries and industries around the globe race to adopt more climate-friendly technology, demand for lithium has spiked. The Atacama Salt Flat is an epicenter of this growth. The region contains an estimated 8.3 million tons of lithium and now supplies 30 percent of global demand annually. Chile has a national plan to increase production even more.
But this boom has reshaped the fragile Atacama ecosystem as well as the life of the 18 Indigenous settlements — which are home to the Lickanantay, or the Atacameño people — that surround the salt flat.
Trucks, heavy machinery, and pipelines now crisscross the desert landscape, transporting lithium-laden brine extracted from underground wells to a network of evaporation ponds. Under the blazing Atacama sun, water evaporates from the mixture, leaving behind piles of salt and lithium.
After evaporation, the lithium chloride from the Salar de Atacama is loaded on to trucks and carried across the desert, kicking up dust along the route to the Chilean coast. In the town of Antofagasta, the material is delivered to a chemical plant to be refined into lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide. It is then bagged, sent 40 miles north to the Port of Angamos in Mejillones, and shipped off to destinations such as China, Korea, Japan, and the United States.
Peine — once a town of “peaceful and healthy living,” according to Sergio Cubillos, president of the community — has become a thoroughfare for contractors’ trucks and buses in the evening. Residents, newly concerned for their safety, have installed bars on their windows and gates around their patios. “There are truck thefts, and there’s drug and alcohol use. People tend to keep to themselves more,” Cubillos said. Black flags on the facades of some homes in Peine reflect the residents’ discontent. More of this article (Grist) - link - more like this (lithium) - link - more like this (Chile) - link
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