One of the miners that extracts lithium in Catamarca recognized that they use a large amount of fresh water

Paul Graves, current CEO of Arcadium Lithium, The most important lithium mining company in Argentina, gave a long presentation to investors in New York City, with details of the business and technical details of the process that the company deploys in the salt flats of the provinces of Catamarca and Jujuy.

The executive’s intervention takes place at the Evercore ISI World Summit on Transition Technologies and Clean Energy. There, Graves pointed out in several passages the quality of the product obtained by the mining company during a technically complex process, and mentioned as a disadvantage the use of a “large amount of fresh water” and “the need for energy to heat the brine.”

“The truth is that all processes for producing lithium carbonate from brine have limitations,” said the executive, and then explained: “Most places are not suitable for processes based on evaporation, the ponds are very Expensive to maintain and build, they are difficult to control and have very low returns. “You probably only keep 30% of the lithium you extracted.”

“Now we have a 90% return on what we extract. We use very little land, in fact we are slowly largely removing our pond structures for a lot of environmental reasons and achieve a very pure product. There are disadvantages, it uses a large amount of fresh water and needs energy to heat the brine and it cannot be produced like this everywhere,” he said.

In another passage of his presentation, the executive mentioned that the variations in the price of the mineral in recent years were influenced by geopolitical factors and he trusted that the price of lithium will continue to rise in the future. “I don’t think it will exceed $40 (per kilo), but I don’t think it will stay below $20,” he said.