Just as President Balmaceda went to nitrate and Presidents Frei and Allende went to copper, President Boric would dictate this policy that will mean the foundations of the future development model”.
Marcela Hernando, Minister of Mining in Chile
The Minister of Mining in Chile, Marcela Hernando, addressed the imminent announcement that the government will make to create a National Lithium Company, within the framework of the country’s policy to exploit said mineral. “It will be announced when the president deems it. This is good news and we hope that it will be at the best time in the next few days and in the best place”, said the Secretary of State about the announcement that the President of the Republic, Gabriel Boric, will detail in the coming weeks, surely in a mining commune in the north of the country.
Lithium and the mining royalty were the main topic of a new edition of “Government Reports”, which also included the participation of the undersecretaries of Finance, Heido Berner, and of Regional Development, Nicolás Cataldo, in addition to the presidential delegate of Coquimbo, Ruben Quezada.
Hernando indicated that Chile has competitive advantages with countries in the region to exploit the mineral, ruling out that “other countries would be leading us.” Thus, he recalled that the countries that have the largest reserves in the world are Bolivia, then Chile and then Argentina.
But he explained that “when one talks about production that is reversed and we appear second, but Bolivia does not appear because it has no industry. So, it is starting from a point with many more difficulties, we hope that in the future it will become a competitor and that this could mean a strengthening of this lithium triangle in the view that the world has with respect to these three countries”.
Regarding Argentina, the head of Mining indicated that “it also has its own difficulties, both regulatory and of another type, and it is still well below Chile in terms of production. Therefore, we are in a very virtuous moment and an opportunity that obviously this government does not want to miss out on”.
He emphasized that “we understand that this is a tremendously important policy, because it will probably be the saltpeter of the future and we do not want to make the same mistakes.”
Hernando assured that “just as President Balmaceda went to nitrate and Presidents Frei and Allende went to copper, we hope that President Boric dictates this policy that will probably mean the foundations of the future development model.”
The role of public bodies
The minister did not rule out that the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (Corfo) lease contracts with SQM and Albemarle, which were negotiated in 2018, are a model to follow. “Corfo has a fundamental role, because it owns the Salar de Atacama, which is the one with the largest reserves and in this context, just as Codelco has them over Pedernales, Corfo and Codelco have a special role in each salt flat, each salt flat has a particularity and in this context we are going to use all the tools that we have as a State to advance on the issue of lithium”.
