Lithium for 4.8 Billion Electric Cars Lets Bolivia Upset Market

The wind whips across a 3,900-square- mile expanse of salt on a desert plateau in Bolivia’s Andes Mountains. Plastic washtubs filled with an emerald-colored liquid rich in lithium dot the Uyuni Salt Flat, all the way to the volcanoes on the horizon.

Waist-high slabs of salt are piled around a pond that’s shimmering in the sun. Francisco Quisbert, an Indian peasant leader known as Comrade Lithium, sits inside a crumbling adobe building on the edge of the desert. He’s explaining how Bolivia, South America’s second-poorest country, will supply the world with lithium, which will be used in batteries that power electric cars.

“We have this dream,” Quisbert, 65, says. “Lithium could bring us prosperity.”

The world’s largest untapped lithium reserve -- containing enough of the lightest metal to make batteries for more than 4.8 billion electric cars -- sits just below Quisbert’s feet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. (more)