I Infiltrated the Most Valuable Plot of Land in America* | Sidebean

0:00This place where I'm standing, the driest place on Earth, is the actual, most valuable plot of land in America. That side behind me made $9 billion of revenue in 2022, and there could be trillions more buried under this salt. Because more than 50% of all the lithium in planet Earth is within a few miles of where I'm standing right now. And lithium is not just key to a bigger battery on your iPhone or your EV, it's for stores solar power when the sun is not here. It's used in medicine and glass and lubricants. This carbon neutral world that we're trying to build depends on our ability to dig all this lithium out. But as we flew and drove hundreds of miles to get here, we discovered the other side of this story, a story that's hidden in the desert salt. The metal that can transform our world for the better is also destroying their world. Okay, so maybe you guys have seen this video by Morningbrook. This area in the middle of nowhere is

1:07worth over a trillion dollars. And it might just be the most important plot of land in America right now. I really like Morningbrook. I love Morningbrook. But this video has two facts wrong. First, I know that you guys Americans, people who live in the US are officially called Americans, but also the entire continent is called America. And then this video talks about the McDormick Hill there. That's a 40 million ton reserve of lithium. But where we're headed, there are 57 million tons of lithium up for grabs. All right, guys. Welcome to the Atacama Desert. Atacama is truly the driest and oldest desert on earth. It gets under one millimeter of rainfall per year. By the way, nobody warned me about the insanely cold breeze that you get out here in Antifagasta from the ocean, but that's actually part of the reason why the desert even exists.

2:08I didn't think you could see it so clearly. There are actual clouds here that kind of look like rain clouds. And then they're coming from the ocean, but they all get stopped by this barrier of mountains. That's the Chilean coastal range. And that's the east barrier of the desert. That's the reason why none of these clouds can get there and why it's never rains on the other side. That's man, man. It's it's so and it's cold too. Even during the day, like it was it was not as hot as I would have expected. And so red like the coldest sand is red. Amazing. Every so often in El Nino years, like every five or seven years, it rains. And when it does, this incredible thing happens. It's called the desert in bloom. But beyond those days, all you really get is sand. When we driving south of here, there's nothing like no single plants, nothing for miles and miles. Yeah, they got plants here in this area, which I guess is nice. Not green, not pure green, but life at least. Now the other fact that Morningbrook

3:16got wrong is that they talk about this potential mind, the potential value of this part of land. But this place is real. It's operating. It makes up like 4% of Chile's GDP. And that's what we're trying to find. You know, after driving through the desert for like two, three days straight, they've seen some green and water. It's not something that you think you would miss what you do. So that town that we just passed is called Calama. In the local language, it means town in the middle of the water. There's this river that comes down from the Andes and forms this bit of an oasis in the middle of the desert. And now we're headed south now to San Pedro de Calama, which is, I think, the closest town that we could find to the Lithuanians. Well, it's not just about getting in the way of the desert, but it's a good thing. It's not

4:16to be able to go to the salt. It can be called Singia. I don't know what the agency is, it's so authorized, it has to be everywhere. Sure, sure. What we want to see is the Lithuanian people who are like the peasants. I don't know. I can't hear anyone. From what I can see in maps, there's like a 20 mile, maybe 30 kilometer drive like into the salt flats. And there's this server's road that I could see. So yeah, I think that tomorrow, we just have to give it a shot. I mean, we didn't have any planned line. Like, there's no script for our time in Calama. This is just a place where we're going to crash, but we've been eating car food for a whole this trip, like sandwiches and like snack and so on. Trying to find, we're trying to find a good meal. Actually, I hate like food review YouTube channels, because I can't have the food. Like I can't just watch people eat and not want to eat the thing.

5:17So no, you're not getting a you're not getting a food review for me. So I did some digging around Lithium last night and I have some some stuff. We're standing in this Lithium triangle, which extends from Chile up to Bolivia and then to Argentina. So the story here is that we're in this high plateau that has these bowls where water kind of accumulated and flow out to the ocean. What happened was that these volcanoes would erupt and they would put all these metals into the water through millions of years. As the desert became a desert, water started to evaporate. All these metals were left at the bottom and that's what eventually became the salt flats. Now Chile has just moved a lot quicker extracting this stuff. As we were driving around, you could see all these huge mining operations. Honestly, I had never seen so much mining in my life. Honestly, for example, I was in Bolivia a couple years ago with the family on the Wunis salt flats and you could see that they don't have any operation, nothing compared to what you see here. It's all very artisanal and like salt extracting stuff like that.

6:19I read that they're starting to develop that there and then Argentina as well, but yeah, like these chillions are kicking everybody's ass at it. So let's see if we can find those salt flats then. I'm a nerd for these types of stories of like super materials are like hidden industries in the middle of nowhere and I get my daily dose of that stuff from the hustle, daily newsletter. We'll also pitch them to the production of today's video. So the hustle newsletter is not about breaking news. It's not about the latest update. It's not about politics. It's about deep dives and case studies on stuff that entrepreneurs really care about. It's about what founders and hustlers need to grow their own businesses. So driving is completely free. You can find a link here with this QR code. I'm just gonna drop it in the description too and well thanks to the hustle for partially funding this video. Theqo now. Theqo now. I think we're on the side of the salt flats and I didn't

7:21expect to see like towns here. I don't think they're even on the map man. I didn't see them. Oh, it is a river. Yeah. Oh nice. Nice. Too hot. That road there supposedly leads into the salt flats. It's like a like a 20 mile 30 kilometer drive into the flats that maybe gets us to the mines but I don't know man. Haven't seen a single car drive out of there. White things against the dark background and some black things against the clear background. What are those things? I'm trying to find a vantage point so we can see like we can see the pools. But they're like these red patrol cars that already pulled us over at once. They don't

8:26they don't want us to be here. So we made it. We've made it to like the mining area. Okay. Got it. Got it. Pools are here. I'm gonna I'll explain in a sec but I think at least we've got a chance to see them. There's too much wind. I can't. I'm throwing struggling to get back. I'm shaking a little bit. Like I was trying to fly back but like it was stuck in the same place because the wind was all strong but we have the footage. Like the wind here is great. Oh, I got it. I think we got it. We have the footage. Let's get out of here. What these guys are trying to do is they're trying to evaporate brine. They're basically pumping this water from underground. They're pouring it over all these pools and they're waiting for the

9:27water to evaporate which can take up to two years and you can kind of see it in the color of the pools. The more yellow the pool becomes. That means that more water has evaporated and therefore lithium is more concentrated. And then apparently it's it's so much lithium you can make mountains of it. Oh guys it's it's so much water in the pools. If this is the driest place on earth like where does that water come from? And is it like running out? They're so crazy. They're like this super sharp spiky. The lady at the restaurant told us that this is an edible like the salt in the if salt thoughts is an edible. Now I get why it's getting late. Wish you'd go. And the mobs can't go to the pool. She called the she called the guy so maybe we got lucky. So the little town is called

10:30Paine. We found out it's just on the side of the salt flats. It feels a little bit like walking into the lions den because every car here is like this red truck that was chasing us earlier when we find a place to stay like we had to ask around a little bit. It's better than nothing or than driving back for another two hours so I'll take it. It's like an open house where they're kind of negotiating reparation and compensation of the salt flat region. In Paine we met with Joudith Kruse, a local tour guide who's agreed to walk us to Paine's biggest treasure. A set of cave paintings that's estimated to be close to 3,000 years old. As we arrive Joudith set some coca leaves in the rocks next to the cave.

11:44The most someting to the process of destruction. From what we could see, Paine's small economy is strictly tied to the mines, even people from Bolivia travel for work. But Paine's relationship with the mines is complex. In the salt of Paine, it's a huge salt and it's very ancient that they were expensive.

12:49And it's a matter of the process of destruction of the people. There's also a demand in this one. I talked to my grandmother and she said why they left the land? She said that because the passage was not there. And before that, she left her house and she was going to see it. I couldn't believe it. Their fight is not to block mining altogether. It's to create a balance that allows desert communities like Paine to live where they've existed for thousands of years. And here in the desert, the cycle of water going from the Andes to the rivers to the underground deposits

13:49is everything. The desert can't keep up with the speed at which water is being extracted for lithium mining. The government is not far from the state. It's like the first wave that's being made. It's also a very strong load for this community. It should live in that process of who asks, who knows, who knows.

14:53Lithium extraction at the Atacama Salt Flats is a license to a US company and to a Chilean company that's actually partly owned by a Chinese conglomerate. Representing actual billions of dollars, 4% of the country's GDP, it's no surprise that this relationship is one-sided. And it's been crazy to see this contrast of a complete drought of seeing how water is this precious resource to these communities, a resource that they have rituals around. Well, at the same time, you have these giant pools of water just evaporating into the air in the middle of the salt flats. But on the other hand, lithium is key to renewable energies because we need to store that energy somewhere. It's key to this better world that we're trying to build with slowing down a climate change. Venus hopes are now set on new technologies and the mines adopting them. A 2024 paper, for example, proposed a method that uses an electric filter that extracts lithium out of the water without having to evaporate it.

15:55It's called RCE or Redux couple Electrolysis if you want to look it up. Saving our world should not come at the cost of destroying their world. And there are ways to do it. This story very much reminded me of Nosada in Costa Rica. This small town that was kind of invaded by gentrification. Well, at the same time, a local community organized itself to preserve what the town was originally attracted for. We did that video a couple years ago and it's one of my favorite videos in our channel, also from our home country. So we should check it out. Thanks a lot for watching.