Make ore break: Latin America’s commodities
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 17 August 2023
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
The region is home to most of the world’s known lithium. Given the mineral’s usefulness in batteries and electric vehicles, could it be on the cusp of a commodities boom? Germany’s auto industry is at risk. Volkswagen, one of its biggest carmakers, should be worried (10:27). And, England’s World Cup successes could change the face of women’s football (18:06).
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Intelligence, from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. |
| 0:08.0 | And I'm Aura Ogumbi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:18.0 | The car industry, as we keep talking about, is changing. Not only what kinds of cars are being made, but which countries are making them. |
| 0:26.0 | So what does that mean for the biggest car firm in the world and the country that defines itself as a carmaker? |
| 0:34.0 | And is it coming home? Is it? England is rallying around the line-esses as they head to the World Cup Final. |
| 0:42.0 | Should the team successes encourage more girls to take up and keep up the sport? |
| 0:49.0 | But fast. |
| 1:04.0 | Recently I visited the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. |
| 1:08.0 | Analanca is the economist Latin America correspondent. |
| 1:12.0 | And the landscape there is really striking. When you land in Calama Airport, it looks a bit like Mars. |
| 1:18.0 | The sand is quite reddish. And then we drove two hours across the desert to get to salt flats that contain lithium, which is the ore for the soft light metal used to make high capacity batteries. |
| 1:30.0 | And as you get closer to the salt flats, the earth becomes pock marked with white crystals. And it starts to look like the surface of the moon. |
| 1:39.0 | And I was there to visit a lithium plant run by Chilean company called SQM. |
| 1:44.0 | I met with the head of operations at the plant whose name tells you Adonis. |
| 1:50.0 | He told me the plant I was in was the biggest in the world. |
| 1:57.0 | SQM pumps up mineral-rich brine out of those salt flats. |
| 2:05.0 | And what happens with the brine is that they put it in a series of evaporation ponds, which Mr. Adonis showed me. |
| 2:16.0 | And where that brine forms like a patchwork of emerald and blue. |
| 2:20.0 | And after several months you get a solution called lithium chloride, which is like an oily type of water with a higher concentration of lithium in it. |
| 2:29.0 | And that lithium chloride is then lugged hundreds of kilometers across the desert to a refinery near a port town called Antofagatha, which I visited. |
| 2:38.0 | And where that lithium chloride is filtered and cleaned and processed. |
| 2:47.0 | And it's refined into a powder called lithium carbon equivalent. |
... |
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