Driving Development: The Lithium Trade in the Andes

Barandiarán’s Academy project, “Driving Development: The Lithium Trade in the Andes,” is a transnational history of the three oldest lithium brine mines located in Chile, Argentina, and the United States, with a focus on how stakeholders used economic and geologic expertise to promote lithium development. Whose expertise shaped global mineral markets, and what possible futures did political leaders imagine such resources could usher in? Barandiarán argues that these changes were driven by Cold War scientific and mineral diplomacy, military designs, global power asymmetries, and the troubled trajectory of nuclear-fusion technologies. Lithium is used in the batteries needed for electro-mobility and renewable energy grids as well as in nuclear fusion reactors. Batteries and nuclear fusion share a slow pace of innovation, few commercially viable technological breakthroughs, and (as yet) unrealized promises of cleaner energy futures. Barandiarán writes, “The history of lithium’s hopeful nuclear energy future is thus a reminder that non-carbon futures have been imagined in the past, with unequal social and environmental consequences – and draws attention to the interdependence of military, state, corporate, and scientific actors in making structurally unequal global mineral markets.” During her time in Berlin, Barandiarán plans to research German firm Chemetall, which, from 1998 to 2015, owned one of two brine lithium mines she studies in Chile’s Atacama salt flat. She will also explore German corporate governance norms, where workers are shareholders, and their impact on operations at Atacama and on Chemetall’s approach to lithium science and sustainability. She sees the German model of shared ownership as a potential solution to inequitable development. Her project will also benefit from interviews with the policymakers involved in the European Battery Alliance and in Germany’s efforts to champion electro-mobility.