This latest edition of the Lithium 360° Forum, held in the main auditorium of Universidad del Desarrollo and organized by the Center for Research in Technologies for Society (C+) of the UDD Faculty of Engineering and SMI-ICE-Chile, brought together experts from industry, the public sector, and academia, before more than 250 attendees, to analyze the main production, regulatory, commercial, environmental, and social challenges facing the lithium industry in the context of the global energy transition.
The forum was opened by the Vice-Rector of UDD, Ernesto Silva Méndez; the Executive Director of SMI-ICE-Chile, Doug Aitken; the Minister-Counselor of the European Union Delegation to Chile, Andrea Nicolaj; and the Vice-Ambassador of Australia to Chile, Chung Ling Chau.
The Vice-Rector of UDD emphasized the importance of universities engaging with industry to understand its real needs, aiming to make a significant contribution to Chile’s development.
For his part, Doug Aitken, CEO of SMI-ICE-Chile, emphasized the role of collaboration between organizations and countries in addressing the enormous challenges facing Chilean mining in light of the significant growth in demand for critical minerals resulting from the global energy transition. «When we observe the difficulty we have in producing current volumes of copper and lithium,» he said, «it becomes clear that we cannot continue doing things as we have been, that we must rethink how we produce minerals, how we interact with ecosystems and communities, how we manage and reuse waste, and how we build resilience to the impacts of climate change.»
Following this, prominent representatives and experts from industry, public agencies, and academia addressed the most crucial aspects currently driving discussions within this industry: lithium projects and the national strategy, regulatory and commercial challenges, community relations, and new extraction and production technologies.
Participants included Daniel Jiménez, partner and manager of Ilimarkets; Ignacio Mehech, CEO of CleanTeach Lithium; Corrado Tore, Hydrogeology Manager at SQM; Jean Baptiste Hogard, Senior VP Lithium at Eramet Group; Sebastián Herrera León, from the Institute of Engineering Sciences at the University of O’Higgins; Humberto Estay, director of AMTC at the University of Chile; and Julieta Zamora, from the C+ Engineering program at UDD and director of the Lithium 360 Forum.
Francisca Rivero, general manager of SMI-ICE-Chile, moderated the discussion on community relations, which included Martin Cox, Community Relations Director at Wealth Minerals Lithium; David Ávila, president of the Quillagua Community Rural Potable Water Committee (APR); and Víctor Palape, coordinator of the same community.
With them, Francisca Rivero fostered a valuable conversation about the positive experience of this community with the lithium project that Llamara Group is developing in Quillagua. The participants shared details about the early engagement process in which this community has actively participated, elaborating on their concerns about water use in this project and on how the company has supported them in community social investment projects. For his part, Martin Cox described Wealth Minerals’ experience with the Ollagüe community, with whom they institutionalized the company Kuska Minerals, granting them a 5% shareholding and the power to appoint a director—a pioneering experience as a model of indigenous governance in a lithium project in Chile.
