Industrial Science and Desert Brines in Nevada and Chile

Before Nevada's Clayton Valley was developed in the 1960s, lithium came from hard rock deposits.Brines transformed this industry, and chapters 4 and 5 recount how the US Foote Mineral com pany, working with dif fer ent partners in Nevada and Chile, built the world's first brine lithium mines in the Clayton Valley and Atacama.Foote was not quite a Goliath to Chile or Nevada's David.These two mines certainly gave Foote a global platform as it mastered the chemical and operational know-how needed to mine brines.Still, compared to big oil or mining conglomerates, Foote was small and did not have the power to dictate terms over weaker parties, at least not without a fight.Foote depended on local partners-in Nevada, the even smaller Leprechaun Mining and Chemical com pany of Las Vegas, and in Chile, the Mixed Salts Committee (CSM in Spanish) of the State Development Corporation, known as CORFO.The story of how these groups collaborated and disputed over the conditions of lithium mining between the 1960s and 1990s provides a win dow into global economic transformations, showing how finance and globalization marginalized small "mom-and-pop" companies like Leprechaun and state initiatives like CSM, and fundamentally changed the owner ship and structures of specialized mining companies like Footewith consequences for wealth and inequality, and also for who has the information, experience, and expertise needed to produce and regulate lithium.Lithium's ontological fluidity posed some difficulties: Separating lithium from its host brine, both in nature and in law, took work. 1 Liquid mines are not homogeneous and neither is the brine itself (figure 1.2).Brines are a chemical cocktail of many ele ments-water, salts, and other ele ments, some of which may be valuable.Just as each salar is geologically and biologically unique, so each brine has a unique chemical composition (figure 1.1).