Lithium overdose: market practices and symptomatology of lithium trade in Latin America

Abstract

This thesis examines lithium supply and trade in the Atacama Desert in Chile from stances of social studies of markets. It focuses on the contracts held between mining companies and the Chilean State that establish terms for mining lithium and supplying it to other companies.

The analyses are centred on three concepts: market devices, assemblages and value chains. These concepts are used to critically examine mining contracts, technology deployment, equity markets, physical material quotas and value added processes as constituents of networks and agency in global commodity supply. The thesis identifies the economic settings for lithium mining in Chile and discusses their similarities to past settings experienced in Chile for copper and saltpetre mining. These settings include: resource governance based on mining-development contracts, national development financing from export taxes, close-knitted oligopolies, lax customs, and resource overvaluations. The thesis examines the effects of past economic settings of mining in Chile on the negotiations held between the State and mining companies on contracts, infrastructure, shareholdings, metrics, prices and tropes. The thesis finds that the economic settings of mining in the Atacama Desert replicate State agendas that aim to separate economic growth from global dependencies but rely on mining law and practice based on private-sector capital structures established for nation-making. The thesis argues that past economic settings for mining are significant drivers for determining value of materials and for implementing tactics and forms of economy and development in a given country. The analytical content of the thesis is framed in a body-economy metaphor that highlights some toxicities of energy devices specific to material trade and use. This body-economy metaphor supports that the findings in the thesis about economic activities for lithium supply in Chile are systemic and part of a unified social metabolism.