Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is not only the largest salt flat in the world, but is also home to one of the world’s largest lithium deposits.

| Loredana Habermann/ stock.adobe.com

2025-04-01 VDE dialog

Lithium: White gold

There is so much lithium in the Bolivian Andes that it could meet global demand for decades. However, the South American country has had little success in mining it to date. Cooperation with international investors promises to change this in the future – but whether Europe will benefit is questionable.

By Katja Dombrowski

The white desert stretches far beyond the horizon – Salar de Uyuni, with an area of more than ten thousand square kilometers, is the largest salt flat in the world and Bolivia’s main tourist attraction. This unique landscape, located at an altitude of 3653 meters in the Andes, attracts several hundred thousand visitors every year. Salt is also mined; but the greatest treasure lies dormant in the brine – lithium.

This light metal is a globally sought-after raw material (see p. 26), and nowhere is there as much of it as in Salar de Uyuni. According to the US Geological Survey (USGS) in 2025, 115 million tons have been identified worldwide and Bolivia has the world’s largest lithium resources at 23 million tons – 21 million of which are in Salar de Uyuni alone – together with Argentina, which has equally large deposits. Around half a dozen other salt flats in the Bolivian Andes are also earmarked for lithium extraction, and there are plans to investigate numerous others for possible deposits. Chile follows behind Bolivia and Argentina with eleven million tons of lithium. Together, the deposits of the three countries in the Andes form an area referred to as the lithium triangle, which hosts around half of the world’s lithium.

However, a resource is far from being a usable reserve. Unearthing the treasure stored in its salt flats promises to offer rewarding prospects for Bolivia. Leading politicians see this as a possible solution to two of the country’s biggest problems: the economic crisis and the lack of foreign currency. But although it has been talked about for decades and various attempts have been made, to date lithium extraction has hardly progressed beyond pilot plants. It was not until the end of 2023 that the state-owned company Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) commissioned the first industrial plant in Salar de Uyuni for lithium extraction using evaporation. However, it is plagued by various problems in construction and operation and only produces a fraction of the intended quantity.

Evaporation basins in Salar de Uyuni in Potosi extract the coveted lithium. However, the method is time-consuming and uses a great deal of water, so the aim is to concentrate on direct lithium extraction in the future.

| picture alliance / Reuters | Claudia Morales

Under Evo Morales, who was president from 2006 to 2019, Bolivia’s lithium deposits were declared state property. Unfortunately, the country lacks the money, technology and know-how for extraction and processing. It is therefore dependent on cooperation with foreign companies. This requires joint ventures with Bolivian companies that each hold at least 51 percent of the shares.

According to the government in La Paz, it reached agreements in 2023 and 2024 with Chinese and Russian companies to build lithium extraction plants on several salt flats. This time around, it is concentrating its efforts on a different process, because the evaporation process takes a long time and consumes a great deal of water – a resource that is scarce in the Andean mountains. As a result, the authorities are now promoting direct lithium extraction (DLE). In this process, the raw material is extracted directly from the brine using an adsorbent and the water is then returned. This method is considered water-conserving and environmentally friendly, it is much faster and requires less space than the evaporation process. The lithium extracted is also of high purity.

In addition to the agreements to build DLE plants, according to the Bolivian Ministry of Energy there is an agreement with an Indian company to build the technology to manufacture lithium-ion batteries in Bolivia as well as with a Chinese interested party that wants to build a factory for electric cars in the country. However, just as resources are not yet reserves, agreements are not yet contracts – but these in turn are the prerequisite for production to actually take place one day.

Negotiations and agreements with various interested parties have so far resulted in two contracts for the construction of industrial DLE plants in Salar de Uyuni: one with the Russian company Uranium One, which belongs to the state-owned Rosatom group, and the other with a Chinese consortium. Together, the plants are expected to produce 49,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year, with a total investment of around two billion US dollars. This would put Bolivia on a par with Chile for second place in global production, while only 1.64 percent of the reserves in Salar de Uyuni would be used.

According to Bolivian law, such contracts must be approved by parliament. This has so far failed due to political disagreement and criticism of the procedure and content of individual contracts. At this stage, it is unclear whether the contracts will be approved at all and when construction can begin.

National flags on the Salar de Uyuni, a tourist destination that includes a hotel built entirely from salt.

| Credit: Nicholas Hollmann

Bolivia’s declared goal is to establish the entire value chain for lithium-ion batteries in its own country. Under no circumstances do they want to sell the valuable raw material to foreign companies, which could possibly enrich themselves without Bolivia benefiting to any significant extent. The country already had bad experiences with this type of exploitation in the colonial era, when the Spanish built their wealth on the silver deposits of Cerro Rico, which were the largest in the world at the time.

For Bolivia, the balancing act is to retain sovereignty over resources on the one hand and to attract foreign investment and achieve technology transfer on the other. The country now believes this can best be achieved with countries with which Bolivia is on friendly terms, such as China and Russia, following an initial attempt to extract lithium with a US company in the early 1990s and the conclusion of a joint venture between YLB and ACI Systems from Baden-Württemberg in 2018. However, Bolivia terminated the latter in the political crisis year of 2019.

In the meantime, La Paz would like to emancipate itself from the West, especially the USA and the “dictatorship of the dollar”, as President Luis Arce puts it. The country is looking elsewhere – this year it became an official partner of the BRICS alliance, which now also includes Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia in addition to its eponymous members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Bolivia and the alliance share the goals of creating a counterweight to the West and a new, multipolar world order and making world trade and the global financial system independent of the US dollar.

However, this does not mean that the door is completely closed to interested European parties. Bolivia is keeping all options open for foreign investment. Last December, YLB concluded agreements with three international companies that had applied for a tender to explore the possibility of lithium extraction in the Bolivian salt flats of Coipasa, Pastos Grandes and Empexa. They are an Argentinian and a French-Bolivian company as well as a consortium consisting of the Australian mining company EAU Mining and the German-Australian company Vulcan Energy Resources.

“Our role in the consortium is to deliver the technology,” says Francis Wedin, CEO of Vulcan Energy Resources. A test phase is currently underway. If this is successful, a joint venture with YLB is planned to build an industrial DLE plant. There is still a long way to go though: “Such large projects can be quite complex to finance and build,” explains Wedin, “and we are still at the very beginning.” He believes there is a great deal of interest from YLB. However: “Bolivia has not yet benefited from its large lithium deposits like other countries. It needs to move faster.”