Resumen de Time to shine
There's nothing quite like seeing the sun hitting the Altiplano first thing in the morning. The air is cold and still, heavy with silence. Every rock and plant and crevice is shrouded in darkness and then the sun lifts to reveal the fawn brown of the mountains in the distance, the piercing blue of the sky. And, depending on where you are standing, you could be looking at the brine pools of several lithium producers in the so-called lithium triangle. These pools cover thousands of metres and are, I think, actually quite pretty. Extracting the lithium from the pools using the evaporation process means that they also vary in colour - from a clear swimming-pool blue, to a mucky green-brown hue.
Lithium doesn't begin and end with South America, however. Companies such as Pure Energy ( p25 ) and Lithium Americas ( p11 ) are exploiting the lithium plays in the US, in their varying forms. And in Australia, an expanding market, newcomer Lithium Australia claims to have developed a propriety process which can extract lithium from mica, keeping processing costs low ( p45 ). In Russia though, the lithium story is not a positive one and exemplifies the impact politics can have on an industry. As Vladislav Vorotnikov, IM Correspondent, finds, while the country has the resources, demand and, in fact, the facilities in place to create a viable lithium industry, sanctions placed on the country mean that this is not an industry that will be quickly invested in, despite its potential Menos
