Place

Salar de Atacama

A salt flat in the driest desert on Earth, holding a substantial share of the world's economically recoverable lithium.

A salt flat of around three thousand square kilometres in northern Chile, underlain by brine unusually rich in lithium. It is the largest and highest-grade of the brine sources, and it is productive because of the climate: the Atacama's evaporation rate is extraordinary and its rainfall is close to nil, so lithium is concentrated by solar evaporation in ponds over a year or more rather than by any energy-intensive process.

That is the cheapest route to lithium there is, and it is available in very few places.

History

Exploited for nitrates and borates long before lithium mattered. Lithium production from the salar begins in the 1980s and became strategically significant only with the rechargeable battery, which is a recent and abrupt change in what the place is for.

Economic significance

Brine extraction competes for water in one of the driest inhabited regions on Earth, and the effect of pumping on the aquifer and on the Indigenous Atacameño communities and wetlands around it is genuinely contested rather than settled. The industry's position and the communities' are supported by different hydrological models of the same basin.

Hard-rock spodumene mining, principally in Australia, is the alternative and has the opposite profile: more energy, more waste rock, less water, and a faster response to price. Which is preferable depends on what is being counted, and neither is the obvious answer.

Medium confidence Weak evidence

How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

produces

Lithium — element · concentrated by solar evaporation over a year or more, which is the cheapest route there is and available in very few places

is a source of

Spodumene — mineral · not here — the salar is brine, and spodumene is the hard-rock alternative with the opposite environmental profile

Sources

Wikidata
Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)
Material World
Our own writing

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Salar de Atacama back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

Salar de Atacama → produces (concentrated by solar evaporation over a year or more, which is the cheapest route there is and available in very few places) → Lithium → is produced by (the majority of world supply, concentrated over a year or more in ponds on the Andean salars from a few hundred parts per million to a few per cent) → Brine evaporation → takes as input (and the pond sequence is run so that the less soluble salts crystallise out first, leaving the sodium chloride to be harvested on its own) → Salt → is sourced from (by solar evaporation, which needs a dry sunny coast and is the cheapest route there is) → Seawater → is composed of (about 96.5 per cent by mass — seawater is 3.5 per cent dissolved solids and the rest of it is this) → Water
Salar de Atacama → produces (concentrated by solar evaporation over a year or more, which is the cheapest route there is and available in very few places) → Lithium → is produced by (from molten lithium chloride, after concentration from brine or spodumene) → Molten salt electrolysis → takes as input (after concentration, as one of the two routes to lithium chloride) → Lepidolite
Salar de Atacama → produces (concentrated by solar evaporation over a year or more, which is the cheapest route there is and available in very few places) → Lithium → is extracted from (the principal hard-rock source, against brine — the two routes differ in cost, speed and carbon rather than in product) → Spodumene
Salar de Atacama → produces (concentrated by solar evaporation over a year or more, which is the cheapest route there is and available in very few places) → Lithium → is extracted from (the second lithium ore after spodumene, less used because its fluorine complicates processing) → Lepidolite
Salar de Atacama → produces (concentrated by solar evaporation over a year or more, which is the cheapest route there is and available in very few places) → Lithium → is produced by (the majority of world supply, concentrated over a year or more in ponds on the Andean salars from a few hundred parts per million to a few per cent) → Brine evaporation → takes as input (the feedstock for solar salt and, in the salars, for the far stronger brines that lithium comes from) → Seawater → is composed of (about 96.5 per cent by mass — seawater is 3.5 per cent dissolved solids and the rest of it is this) → Water
Salar de Atacama → produces (concentrated by solar evaporation over a year or more, which is the cheapest route there is and available in very few places) → Lithium → is produced by (the majority of world supply, concentrated over a year or more in ponds on the Andean salars from a few hundred parts per million to a few per cent) → Brine evaporation → takes as input (and the pond sequence is run so that the less soluble salts crystallise out first, leaving the sodium chloride to be harvested on its own) → Salt → is sourced from (mined as rock salt from bedded deposits, or dissolved in place and pumped up as brine — which is what the chemical industry wants anyway) → Evaporite → is composed of (precipitated early, when the water has reduced to roughly a fifth of its volume) → Gypsum

These are the most distinct paths back. Salar de Atacama can be traced through others besides.