Chilean government acknowledges failures to better communicate the benefits of the lithium tender

The Chilean Minister of Energy and Mining, Juan Carlos Jobet, acknowledged that he could have “made more efforts” to better publicize the disputed tender for 400,000 tons of lithium that the opposition seeks to stop.

“What one receives are not necessarily questions that come out of curiosity, but rather they receive attacks, and that goes back to the original problem: in lithium, the conversation in general gets a little off track, but perhaps we could have been more proactive ourselves in having made an effort to disseminate”Jobet noted.

In the one-and-a-half hour presentation that the Secretary of State held before the Legislative Economic Commission, he emphasized, however, that the process was “completely open and transparent”.

For his part, the president of the Commission, the deputy of the Socialist Party Jaime Naranjo, criticized the tender presented by the Government of Sebastián Piñera in the same line of what was raised last week: it is a measure promoted during the last months of its administration while there is a constituent process still open.

“Obviously, the bidding seems inopportune starting from the basis that the Constituent Convention was constituted and, on the other hand, we have elected a new President of the Republic, then clearly the Constituent Convention can define a number of measures or actions in relation to the assets natural and strategic of the country”Naranjo affirmed.

Last Friday, it was Piñera himself who came out to defend the controversial tender, arguing that production in the country is “stagnant” while other strong competitors in the international market, such as Australia and Argentina, were advancing in the same area.

Last week a group of opposition deputies presented a motion to suspend the tender, projected for a total of 29 years, cataloging the Government’s action as “shameful almost a ruse to deprive Chile of one of its most important natural resources”.

“Chile is missing the lithium opportunity, while Australia, Argentina and other countries advance. In 2016 we were the largest producer in the world with 37%, today we fell to 31% and without new projects by 2030 we will be 17%Then answered Minister Jobet.

With more than half of the world reserves of the so-called “White gold”In the Atacama salt flats, the driest desert in the world, Chile is one of the key players at the international level to promote electromobility in China and Europe.

However, the country faces a titanic challenge: how to exploit the mineral without destroying its environment or undermining the indigenous communities that inhabit the desert.

The environmental impact of current extractive methods, classified as “primitive”By multiple scientists due to the loss of 95% of the water from the original treatment substance, is one of the points that have also been mentioned in the constitutional discussion, where majority sectors advocate a text with ecological principles and the nationalization of the means.