In January 1993, an American chemical company walked away from the largest single lithium deposit on Earth and drove south. FMC, formerly Lithco, had signed a contract on the Salar de Uyuni itself the previous February. Bolivia’s Congress then altered the terms, including lifting value added tax from 10 to 13 per cent, and the company cancelled. It moved its plans to the Salar del Hombre Muerto in Catamarca, Argentina, which has been producing lithium ever since.

Thirty-three years later the arithmetic has barely shifted. The US Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries for 2026 credit Bolivia with 23 million tonnes of identified lithium resources, behind Argentina’s newly revised 28 million and ahead of Chile’s 13 million. Argentina’s total is scattered across dozens of separate salt flats. Bolivia’s sits overwhelmingly in one basin, under a crust of 10,582 square kilometres at 3,653 metres above sea level, with smaller amounts at Coipasa and Pastos Grandes.

World lithium production in 2025 came to roughly 290,000 tonnes excluding the United States, a rise of 31 per cent on the year before. Bolivia’s state company, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos, produced about 2,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate in 2024 from a plant rated at 15,000, which leaves the country well under one per cent of global supply on a deposit it has been trying to develop since the 1980s.

What the brine actually does

Salar lithium is normally recovered by patience: pump brine into shallow ponds, let high-altitude sun take the water off, harvest what concentrates. The method has worked at Salar de Atacama for decades. Uyuni does not cooperate with it.

Bolivian brine carries lithium at roughly 0.7 to 0.9 grams per litre against 15 to 18 grams of magnesium, a ratio published variously between 12 and 22 to one. Atacama brine runs nearer 1,800 milligrams of lithium per litre with proportionally far less magnesium in the way, and a magnesium to lithium ratio above roughly ten to one has generally been treated in the technical literature as the point at which conventional evaporation stops paying. What that does in practice shows up in a 2014 paper in Resource Geology by Yasumasa Ogawa and colleagues at Tohoku University, who evaporated real Uyuni brine alongside a synthetic Atacama equivalent. The Uyuni sample peaked at 6,810 milligrams per litre after 31 days, then fell to about 4,130 by day 56, the lithium dropping out as lithium sulphate. The Atacama analogue climbed past 21,800 with no comparable loss.

Rain accounts for much of the rest: Uyuni floods across the wet season, which is why it is Bolivia’s most photographed landscape and also why an evaporation pond schedule there cannot be relied on.

Why resources are not reserves

The USGS gives Bolivia a resource figure and no reserve figure at all, which is not a clerical distinction. A resource is lithium known to be present. A reserve has to be extractable economically, by demonstrated methods, at prevailing prices. Uyuni’s 23 million tonnes have never cleared that second bar.

Direct lithium extraction strips the metal out using sorbents or membranes instead of waiting on evaporation, and it does not depend on sun or season. Both of Bolivia’s current contracts are built on it. It has not been demonstrated at commercial scale on Uyuni brine, and the reserve column stays blank until it is.

The contracts that have not started

In 2024 the government of Luis Arce signed two DLE contracts. One went to Hong Kong CBC, a consortium including the battery manufacturer CATL, for two plants with a combined capacity near 35,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year. The other went to Uranium One Group, a subsidiary of Russia’s Rosatom, for a single 14,000-tonne plant against an investment near US$976 million. Bolivia’s Ministry of Hydrocarbons and Energy has claimed DLE recovery above 80 per cent, against roughly 30 per cent for evaporation ponds, a figure that comes from the ministry promoting its own contracts rather than from any independent test.

Neither has produced anything.

Reporting by Dialogue Earth before last year’s election found both stalled in the Legislative Assembly, with the Uranium One agreement only partially approved on 12 August 2025 and the CBC document never taken up. The full texts have never been published: 145 pages in one case, 250 in the other, circulating in several versions. Indigenous communities in Nor Lípez, in Potosí, whose territory both projects would touch, filed a class action in a local court arguing they had not been properly consulted.

Bolivian economist Fernando Patzy of the Natural Resource Governance Institute has pointed out that the Uranium One contract, presented as a partnership, does not specify the quantity, quality or timing of the lithium carbonate with which YLB is meant to repay the investment.

Where the review stands

Rodrigo Paz took office on 8 November 2025 promising a lithium-driven recovery, but examining the contracts first. His senior economic adviser José Luis Lupo told Bloomberg the administration would “review what those companies have and see what can be salvaged”, adding that Bolivia has no certified reserves and no lithium law. Mining Technology reported in February that both contracts remain under congressional scrutiny.

Money is the harder constraint: the country’s foreign currency holdings have been running in the hundreds of millions rather than the billions, inflation passed 20 per cent in 2025, and fuel shortages have been recurrent. Financing a billion-dollar plant from that position is difficult whoever signs the paperwork.

Rodrigo Paz is also the son of Jaime Paz Zamora, president when the Lithco contract was signed out on the salt in 1992 and cancelled a year later after Congress altered its terms. The same question, on the same salt flat, is now open again under his son.

What to watch

What happens next is a legislative and legal question more than a technical one. Whether the Paz government produces the legislation and the certified reserve figure that investors have said they need before committing capital. Whether the two signed contracts are renegotiated, ratified or dropped, and on what terms. The consultation cases brought by Nor Lípez communities may shape that second answer more than anything settled in La Paz.

The single most informative number would be a published recovery rate and cost figure from a direct extraction pilot that has run through a full wet season on brine from Uyuni. Nothing in the public record supplies one.