View of the surroundings of the town of Bacanuchi, Sonora, an area rich in lithium.Teresa de Miguel
The Mexican State has just reserved the exploitation of a promise.
Congress approved on Tuesday that the granting of concessions to private parties to extract lithium be prohibited by law.
The nationalization of this mineral has been sold by the Government as a historical moment, almost on a par with the oil expropriation of 1938 or the nationalization of the electrical industry in 1960. For now, everything is wishes and hopes.
There are still no deposits in operation and plans to create a parastatal company in charge of the activity are surrounded by doubts about the lack of technical capacity.
Lithium is the mineral in fashion in Mexico, a fever that has burst onto the public agenda.
It is the future, says the Government.
Silver and gold represent the model of the past, monopolized by foreign miners, especially Canadians.
References to "white gold" follow one another, as well as rumors that Mexico "could" have the largest lithium deposits in the world.
“They do not know (…) the ambition that it arouses in the great powers because it is a strategic mineral for the development of the future,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said this week.
The morenista senator Alejandro Armenta, one of the promoters of the nationalization, has even said that the benefits derived from its extraction would help pay all the country's external debt.
There is no doubt about the value of the material in question.
The price of lithium soared 400% last year, thanks to the push for electric cars and the agenda to combat climate change.
Tech companies, led by automaker Tesla, are desperate to secure a stable supply for their batteries and avoid outages.
Production of the mineral would have to increase 500% between now and 2050 to meet demand, according to the World Bank.
“Instead of buying lithium from China, Tesla will buy it from Mexico,” Armenta projected this Tuesday during the debate in the Senate.
Despite high hopes for lithium, Mexico is a minor player in this field.
The US Geological Survey places it as the tenth country with the largest reserves in the world.
However, their numbers pale in comparison to those of the
ranking
leaders .
The amount of ore identified in Mexico amounts to 1.7 million tons —2.3% of world reserves—, compared to 21 million in Bolivia, the leader, or 19 million in Argentina.
Whatever the number, for now everything is untapped potential.
There are 31 concessions to companies for lithium, but only eight are in force and only one has produced results.
It is a field belonging to the Chinese company Gangfeng that plans to start producing at the end of 2023 —the nationalization does not affect it as the concession was granted before the approval of the measure—.
The largest discovery of lithium in rock in the world, according to the specialized portal
Mining Technology
, contains a mineral deposit estimated at 243 million tons, of which 4.5 million could be lithium.
That deposit was the one that aroused the interest of the Mexican Government for the exploitation of this mineral at the end of 2019.
"That's where the whole problem started," says chemist Carlos Rius, a professor at UNAM.
“The politicians mixed one thing with the other.
There was talk that there were 243 million tons.
Upon hearing that, they thought that it must all be lithium, but it was 243 million tons of clay that contains a small amount of the mineral.
How much lithium they have is still being quantified.”
The ghost of Uramex
With the prohibition of new concessions, the State is left without its greatest source of information on potential deposits.
The Mexican Geological Service obtains data on mineral deposits from the companies that prospect for future exploitation.
“Private initiative is left to make the investment and assume the risk.
If the concessions are not given, where are they going to get the information from?” asks Rius.
“They would have to give millions of pesos in budget to the Geological Service to do a job that now is not costing the Government.
They are edges that have not been considered in the reform”.
The Government will create, according to the changes to the mining law, a new state-owned company to deal with this activity.
The budget that will be allocated to it is still a mystery;
the spending law approved by Congress for this year did not include the agency.
The Government also does not have the specialized technology to exploit this resource, found in rock, clay or salt flats, and bring it to a level of purity sufficient to be able to use it later in industry, in the manufacture of batteries or other devices.
The ambition to nationalize "the exploration, exploitation and use" of lithium, as approved in Congress, threatens to deprive the Government of access to the necessary technology.
“It is extremely expensive.
Each project in Chile is more than 11,000 million dollars, practically the entire investment budget of the Federal Electricity Commission”, explains consultant Gonzalo Monroy.
“That technology is not licensable.
You have to associate with the companies that own it to carry out the development.”
The reform also proposes that the State manage "the economic value chains" of the mineral.
It is not clear whether that ambition includes the new company's intervention in the manufacture of electronic devices.
Monroy believes that it is most likely that the State will limit itself to exploration and extraction tasks.
“The most that could be done is to extract the raw material, market it to a third party, but the third party is the one that is going to be able to extract the value.
Mexico would not capture all the wealth,” he points out.
In any case, it will take several years before the State manages to start producing, according to experts.
Fly over the failed precedent of Uramex.
Created in 1979 by President José López Portillo, the parastatal company sought to extract uranium for the government's nuclear energy program and thus reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
However, the lack of financial support undermined its potential until, a few years later, during the administration of President Miguel de la Madrid, a pioneer of economic liberalism in Mexico, the development of nuclear energy ceased to be a priority and Uramex hill.
Beyond the debate on the economic sense, the haste with which the initiative was debated seems to respond to a more political logic.
On Sunday, the government suffered its most important parliamentary defeat in three and a half years, when the constitutional reform on electricity, which included the nationalization of lithium, was rejected.
That same day, López Obrador presented the changes to the mining law as a plan B, a way to save face.
It remains to be seen if the ambition takes off from the paper.
subscribe here
to the
newsletter
of EL PAÍS México and receive all the informative keys of the current affairs of this country