In southern Bolivia, there is a mountain called Cerro Rico—“the hill of wealth.” It is a pale, bald rock, crisscrossed with dirt roads that climb the slope like shoelaces. More than four thousand mining tunnels have so thoroughly riddled its interior that the mountain is in danger of collapse. Its base is ringed with slums that spill into the old city of Potosí, a World Heritage site. Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia, recently told me that he and his countrymen see Potosí as “a symbol of plunder, of exploitation, of humiliation.” The city represents a might-have-been Bolivia: a country that had capitalized on its astounding mineral wealth to become a major industrial power. Such a Bolivia could easily have been imagined in 1611, when Potosí was one of the biggest cities in the world, with a hundred and eighty thousand inhabitants—roughly the size of London at the time. Although Potosí began as a mining town, with the saloons and gaming houses that accompany men on the frontier, it soon had magnificent churches and theatres, and more than a dozen dance academies. From the middle of the sixteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth, half the silver produced in the New World came from Cerro Rico. Carlos Mesa, a historian who served as Bolivia’s President from 2003 to 2005, told me, “It was said throughout the Spanish empire, ‘This is worth a Potosí,’ when speaking of luck or riches.” Potosí is now one of the poorest places in what has long been one of the poorest countries in South America.

Across the divide of the industrial revolution, there is another city whose promise of greatness now lies in ruins: Detroit. Even before the Curved Dash Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line, in 1901, becoming the first mass-produced American car, Detroit was a showplace of labor, its huge factories producing iron, copper, freight cars, ships, pharmaceuticals, and beer. Following Oldsmobile’s lead, carmakers such as Ford, Packard, and Cadillac transformed the American economy. But Detroit’s triumph was remarkably short-lived. The city is half the size it was fifty years ago. Two of the Big Three carmakers, General Motors and Chrysler, went bankrupt in 2009, and all of them have cut their workforces drastically. Unemployment in Detroit is at fifteen per cent; the murder rate is the fourth highest in the country; and about a third of its citizens live in poverty. An estimated seventy thousand structures—houses, churches, factories, even skyscrapers—stand empty, many of them vandalized or burned. Parts of town are being farmed. Like Bolivia, Detroit is hoping for a second chance. And both of them are looking to a treasure that could revive their fortunes, and, incidentally, lead the world to a cleaner environment. That treasure is lithium.

The lightest of any solid element, lithium has, until now, played a modest role in industry. Silvery in color, and softer than lead, it has been used mainly as an alloy of aluminum, a base for automobile grease, and in the production of glass and ceramics. It is so unstable that it is never found in its pure form in nature. Lithium floats on water—or, rather, it skitters wildly about, trailing a vapor cloud of hydrogen, until it dissolves. Oddly, given its frantically reactive nature, lithium has powerful tranquillizing effects; it has long been used as a drug to treat mood disorders, especially mania. In the nineteen-fifties, the U.S. government created a market for lithium when an isotope of the metal turned out to be useful in building thermonuclear weapons. But demand for lithium, which has corrosive qualities, along with a tendency to spontaneously ignite, otherwise languished. That suddenly changed with the proliferation of cell phones and laptop computers; lithium is ideal for making lightweight batteries. Now, with the emergence of electric cars, lithium could challenge petroleum as the dominant fuel of the future. And nearly half the world’s known resources are buried beneath vast salt flats in southwestern Bolivia, the largest of which is called the Salar de Uyuni. Bolivians have begun to speak of their country becoming “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

Yet it’s not clear that Bolivia is capable of making money off its trove. Morales, who is closely aligned with the populist socialism of Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, is prone to revolutionary declarations: “Either capitalism dies or else Planet Earth dies.” Such rhetoric tends to scare away the kind of foreign investment that would facilitate the development of the Salar. Then there is Bolivia’s lack of infrastructure: electricity, water, and gas are sparsely distributed, and few of the country’s roads are paved. Before Bolivia can hope to exploit a twenty-first-century fuel, it must first develop the rudiments of a twentieth-century economy.

The Salar is approached from a single-lane dirt road that winds down from the Andes, twisting through bright canyons and dry plains where llamas and vicuñas graze. Flamingos high-step through shallow ponds. Until recently, glaciers covered Bolivia’s mountaintops, but global warming has caused much of the ice to recede, diminishing the country’s water supply. Just outside Uyuni, a mud-brick town perched on the perimeter of the salt flat, the scrubby landscape fills with litter, and colorful plastic shopping bags flutter in the branches of queñua trees.

Entering the town, you encounter a welcoming committee of baying dogs. The local airport has been closed for years. Uyuni, which has a population of ten thousand, is only two hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, but for more than a century Bolivia’s access to the sea has been blocked by its historic enemy, Chile. The country is landlocked and isolated—“an island surrounded by land,” as Fernando Molina, a journalist and one of Bolivia’s best-known intellectuals, described it to me. “A third of the country is above three thousand metres, and the rest lies below, at a really strong pitch. Our capacity to transport things is terrible. The geography makes it hard to produce anything, because we can’t move it.”

“Go back to bed or we’ll make you watch Jay Leno.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

The Salar looks like a frozen sea. Blindingly white and covering four thousand square miles—twice the size of Delaware—the Salar is visible from the moon. (Neil Armstrong mistook it for a giant glacier.) One legend among local Indians is that the Salar was created when the goddess of a nearby volcano angrily pulled her baby from her breast, and her milk, mixed with her tears, spilled forth. The Indians, who are mostly Quechua or Aymara, use the salt to make bricks and to feed their animals. Occasionally, a llama caravan carries salt to cattle herds in the Bolivian lowlands. In the brief rainy season, a motionless sheet of water covers the salt flat, forming an endless mirror of the sky. Each winter, interlocking polygonal crystals, resembling oversized bathroom tiles, form on the salt flat’s surface. Underneath the thick crust is a layer of brine, where dissolved lithium is found.

For years, the Salar has been a destination for adventure travellers, but there has been little else to support the region’s economy. “We’ve known since 1985 about the lithium,” Francisco Quisbert, the head of the campesino federation in Uyuni, told me. The campesinos in the area repeatedly petitioned the government to mine the Salar, and in 1990 President Jaime Paz Zamora agreed, in principle, to a multiyear contract with the Lithium Corporation of America (now F.M.C. Corporation), which would have allowed the company to take all the lithium it could, giving Bolivia only eight per cent of the profits. Many Bolivians were outraged over the deal. When campesinos launched a campaign against it, the Lithium Corporation announced that it was setting up its operations in Argentina, a country that also has lithium reserves. “Everyone blamed us, saying we lost an opportunity and it was the only one,” Quisbert recalled, then cited a Spanish proverb: “They said we were ‘the gardener’s dog’—we can’t eat, so we won’t let others eat, either.”

Eric Norris, an executive at the mining company, told me that Bolivia was initially considered because of the vastness of its lithium deposits, but that the initiative soon “became undoable.” He explained that, in addition to concerns about the lack of infrastructure and the difficulty of extracting products from the Salar, “the political environment was not favorable.”

In 2005, Morales became the President of Bolivia. Once again, the campesinos came forward with a proposal for mining the Salar. Morales agreed to set up a pilot project for extracting and processing the metal. This time, he promised, Bolivians would remain in charge. As he has put it, “The state will never lose sovereignty when it comes to lithium.”

Marcelo Castro, the head engineer of the pilot project, drove me to see one of the test sites in the Salar. He wore wraparound sunglasses to block the glare; the whiteness of the landscape was interrupted only by jagged Andean peaks, on the horizon. “The lithium can be processed economically, because we use the evaporative process,” Castro told me as we walked across the Salar in hiking boots, the salt crunching underfoot. There was a pickup truck and a steamroller; they looked like children’s toys left on a sprawling beach. Nearby was a kind of Toonerville Trolley, where the workers at this remote research station were living. A shallow square pool had been cut into the salt crust and flooded with milky blue brine. Left exposed to the wind and the sun, the brine would turn into a pile of manganese, potassium, borax, and lithium salts, which would then be filtered and placed into another pool, then another. After about a year and a half, it would be possible for lithium carbonate to be chemically separated from the remaining elements. The process was overseen by a ministry of “evaporative resources.” Castro, an expansive and passionate man with wild flowing hair, who repeatedly stopped to marvel at the progress that had been made, said that the project would eventually involve about thirty acres of such pools. “Before, the pilot plant was a dream,” he said. “Now it is being lived.”

The pilot project is a crucial test for the government, but it is only a portion of what Morales has promised. Early one morning last November, I joined the President on the campaign trail; he was running for reëlection. (On December 6th, he won, by an overwhelming margin.) Morales was headed to the northeastern province of Beni, in the Amazon basin. He normally flies in a twenty-year-old Fokker passenger plane, but today he was taking the Vice-Presidential craft, a six-seater that could land on the short dirt strips where we would be alighting. The little plane rose over La Paz, the capital, which nestles high on an Andean slope. The mountains quickly fell away as we flew over the largely trackless interior. Morales, looking out the window, vowed that the Salar “cannot be another Cerro Rico.” Bolivia, he said, would no longer export its raw materials without benefitting from the additional value that the industrialized world gained from them. Not only would the country mine and process lithium on its own; it would also make batteries—and, eventually, cars. “From this brine, there will be lithium cars coming out of Bolivia,” Morales told me. “This is the dream. Without dreams, what’s anything worth? Dreams become reality.”

The battery, which was invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta, is a seemingly simple device. It is typically composed of two differently charged electrodes—an anode and a cathode—immersed in an electrolyte, a material that allows a current to flow between them. When you switch on a battery, you complete a circuit that allows negatively charged electrons to flow from the anode toward the cathode, generating energy.

For decades, cars have contained lead-acid batteries, which power the ignition and the electrical systems. Such batteries can also propel an electric car, but they are bulky and, compared with gasoline, pack less punch. A decade ago, G.M. produced an electric car, the EV1, which used twenty-six linked lead-acid batteries; the car had to recharge every seventy miles. A second version, using a nickel-based battery, extended the range to a hundred and ten miles, but the battery was extremely heavy.

Another option was lithium, which is eight times lighter than nickel. In the nineteen-seventies, scientists at Exxon had developed a battery that had an anode of lithium aluminum oxide and a cathode of titanium disulfide. The battery was relatively weak, and there were some mishaps in the lab. “They had a few explosions, and decided to get out of the alternative-energy business,” John Goodenough, a material scientist at the University of Texas, recalls. Goodenough decided to give the lithium-ion battery a try. He built a prototype, using lithium cobalt oxide as the cathode, and it provided double the energy of any other similar-sized battery.

In 1991, Sony used Goodenough’s insights to produce the first commercial lithium-ion battery, provoking a revolution in the consumer-electronics industry. An early cell phone, the Motorola DynaTAC, weighed twenty-eight ounces when it appeared, in 1983, and allowed only thirty minutes of talk time per charge. In 1996, using lithium-ion technology, Motorola introduced the StarTAC, weighing three ounces and lasting an hour. Lithium-ion batteries soon became standard in laptops and P.D.A.s.

“Nice little touch of humility!” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

In the past decade, lithium technology has migrated to the auto industry. In 2006, a group of California entrepreneurs unveiled the Tesla Roadster, a sports car fuelled by a battery consisting, essentially, of sixty-eight hundred lithium-ion laptop batteries. The Roadster can travel two hundred and fifty miles on a single charge, and accelerate from zero to sixty in under four seconds. More recently, G.M. has staked its future on the Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid with a lithium-ion battery, which goes on sale later this year.