State firm to control world's largest lithium reserves, Reuters reports. The announcement poses a fresh challenge to electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers scrambling to secure battery materials.
This will increase the price of Lithium to those buyers.
Longer-term, the natural next step for Chilé after this would be to focus on building domestic industry to create batteries and sell those, just how several other countries are pivoting. Combined with the US' increasingly protectionist policies around cars, tech, and batteries, this will actuslly divert supply to other markets, decreasing their relative competitiveness, and therefore sales and profits. Basically, their imported lithium will become harder to come by and more expensive while their competitors' cars get more supply and (comparatively) cheaper batteries.
This is why those protectionist policies are actually going into place, btw. The entire US auto industry was going to get crushed by this tendency so long as EVs are ascendant, and the only version of addressing climate change that is currently workable in the US is about propping up EVs in a way that tries to keep it on the tippy top of its flagging hegemon.
This will increase the price of Lithium to those buyers.
Longer-term, the natural next step for Chilé after this would be to focus on building domestic industry to create batteries and sell those, just how several other countries are pivoting. Combined with the US' increasingly protectionist policies around cars, tech, and batteries, this will actuslly divert supply to other markets, decreasing their relative competitiveness, and therefore sales and profits. Basically, their imported lithium will become harder to come by and more expensive while their competitors' cars get more supply and (comparatively) cheaper batteries.
This is why those protectionist policies are actually going into place, btw. The entire US auto industry was going to get crushed by this tendency so long as EVs are ascendant, and the only version of addressing climate change that is currently workable in the US is about propping up EVs in a way that tries to keep it on the tippy top of its flagging hegemon.