Chile backs lithium, rare earth tech: design and recovery notes for mine engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
Chile’s state development agency Corfo has awarded up to $5.8 million under its R&D Challenges programme to two projects on direct lithium extraction (DLE) and rare earth recovery, co-financing up to 80% of costs from Salar de Atacama concession revenues. One project, funded with up to $1.9 million over two years, will design a DLE testing platform for Chilean brines, while a second, up to $3.9 million over three years, will trial leaching and bioleaching of rare earths from tailings, waste dumps and slags containing at least 46,000 tonnes of vanadium and 16,000 tonnes of cobalt. The move coincides with Codelco–SQM’s Nova Andino Litio JV to 2060 and Albemarle’s Chile DLE pilot reporting >94% lithium recovery and up to 85% water reuse after 3,000 operating hours.
Technical Brief
- Corfo’s R&D Challenges programme co-finances up to 80% of project costs from Salar de Atacama concession revenues.
- The DLE project will build a piloting/testing platform specifically for Chilean salt flat and saline lagoon brines.
- Early-stage work focuses on identifying and validating multiple DLE technologies under Chilean operating conditions, not single-vendor deployment.
- Rare earths project will trial both leaching and bioleaching flowsheets on tailings, waste dumps and slags.
- Mining liabilities targeted contain at least 46,000 t vanadium, 16,000 t cobalt and “hundreds of tonnes” of rare earths.
- Both projects are supervised by a central piloting centre, enabling controlled, comparable process performance data collection.
- Practical application is the potential conversion of existing tailings and slag storage into secondary feedstock operations under a circular-economy model.
- Scope is limited to piloting and technical evidence generation; commercial-scale DLE in Chile remains unproven according to industry experts.
Our Take
Nova Andino Litio’s concession running to 2060 at the Atacama Salt Flat effectively gives Codelco and SQM a multi-decade runway to absorb and scale any successful DLE or rare earth/vanadium/cobalt recovery technologies emerging from Corfo’s R&D Challenges programme.
Albemarle’s $30 million DLE pilot and $216 million salt recovery facility in the Atacama position it as a key industrial test bed; if its reported 94% lithium recovery and 85% water reuse rates prove robust at scale, they will set a high environmental-performance benchmark for other Chilean lithium operators in our database.
Within the 87 keyword-matched lithium and rare earth pieces in our coverage, Chile stands out as one of the few Latin American jurisdictions coupling state-backed R&D funding (via Corfo) with long-term JV structures, which is likely to tighten the technology and permitting bar for new entrants in northern Chile.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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