Bulk chemical reagents and inputs for lithium and hard rock, and their last mile to the puna (Salta)

Tonnes of lithium produced times reagent intensity times the price delivered to plant, with a cross-check by the physical route that shares with the main calculation the lithium tonnage both start from: it serves as order of magnitude, not as independent verification. One discipline orders the whole exercise: lithium capacities are not added together — carbonate, hydroxide and chloride are different products and they have to be converted before being summed.

A robustness check along three paths, and the honest result is that one confirms the direction but not the level, another bites and exposes an assumption inside the method itself, and the third does not discriminate and is declared as such. (a) The twin on the other side of the salt flat, normalized per tonne of lithium. Catamarca publishes the same business —lithium reagents delivered at plant gate— at USD 55-95 M/year, midpoint ~70, over 40 to 50 thousand tonnes of effective carbonate. Here the midpoint is the same figure, ~USD 70 M/year, over 42,215-53,544 t LCE-eq. Two provinces publishing 70 proves nothing on its own; what can be measured is the implied figure per tonne of lithium, and there they do separate: once the ~USD 6 M of stockpiling and last mile that this TAM contains and the other one counts separately are removed, Salta implies USD 1,337 per tonne LCE against USD 1,556 in Catamarca, that is 14% cheaper. That is exactly the direction the process route anticipates: Catamarca is carbonate by evaporation, where measured real soda ash consumption is 2.081 t/t; Salta is mostly direct extraction and hydroxide, where that consumption falls towards the theoretical 1.4. But it is not an independent verification and that has to be said: both calculations use the same price band —the USD 1,314/t floor from the Sal de Vida NI 43-101 and the official USD 1,918/t midpoint— and hang from the same primary source. What it does prove is that the two halves of the triangle rank the way the chemistry dictates; what it cannot prove is the level, because the level is the same input in both. (b) Top-down from foreign trade, which is the only OBSERVED value in the whole chain. Everything else on this page is capacity, ratio or reference price; imports are a series measured at customs. The official study publishes the three figures needed: lithium mining imported 67,580 t/year of sodium carbonate for USD 20,178,409 while the country produced 32,470 t LCE (2016-2020 average). That those three reproduce exactly that same ratio and the USD 298/t CIF stated in the same table is the proof they have been read correctly. Divided the only way that matters here: USD 621 of CIF soda ash per tonne LCE, or USD 1,021-1,240 delivered at plant using the same 1.6-2.0× CIF→plant step this calculation builds link by link. Both figures come from the same CIF vintage —the 2016-2020 one— and that is why they can be divided: it is the series this path measures at customs and the one anchoring Step 3. Against the official midpoint for total reagents —USD 1,918/t LCE, measured at those same evaporation plants—, soda ash accounts for 53-65% of reagent spend, not the 85-90% the physical cross-check assumes. The headline does not depend on that assumption —it is built as base × price— but the physical cross-check does: if soda ash accounts for two thirds of reagent spend rather than 85-90%, the same tonnage implies around 50% more —a factor of 1.5— the carbonate-route reagent that cross-check states, and pushes it above the band it publishes itself. This is deliberately left in percentage terms and not in dollars: the floor of that leg is one of the figures the TAM's own audit flagged for recalculation. The reading is that if the figure is off, it is off downwards. (c) Weight within the province: here it does not discriminate, and the reason is arithmetic. This is the path that worked for metrology. Added together, Salta's nine investor markets come to USD 229.3 M/year and this one weighs 30.5%; in Catamarca its twin weighs 41.7% of 167.9. The gap looks large and tells us nothing, because both numerators are the same figure: the eleven points of difference are entirely the Salta denominator, which is 37% larger. The control confirms the method does discriminate when numerators differ —the brine laboratory weighs 1.7% in both provinces and high-altitude health 2.5% against 3.5%— but here they do not differ, so it is declared and not used to move the figure. What still stands: the level rests on the method —physical base converted with an explicit factor, times a three-anchor price band— and not on these paths. Path (a) proves that Salta and Catamarca rank the way the chemistry dictates; path (b) is the only one that bites, and what it bites is not the headline but an assumption in the cross-check, in the direction that the published midpoint is conservative; path (c) does not apply. The gap remains the one the TAM itself declares: without a reagent consumption ratio for direct extraction, 100% of this market rests on a process-route assumption.

The number rests on a few variables. The formula shows how it moves when each one changes; and each variable carries its freshness seal — how often it is worth revisiting. estim