Novandino Litio: Resource Efficiency, Governance and the Future of Sustainable Brine Lithium

Following the creation of Novandino Litio in 2025 as a result of the partnership between Codelco and SQM, what have been the main challenges and lessons from the integration process? Based on your experience, what lessons can this new stage offer for the development of future lithium projects in Latin America and the Caribbean?

Novandino Litio was created through the strategic partnership between SQM and Codelco to ensure continuity for one of the world’s most important lithium operations in the Salar de Atacama, with an operating horizon through 2060.

The challenge has not only been to integrate a new ownership structure, but to do so without losing operational continuity, commercial reliability or the technical knowledge accumulated over three decades of production.

In this sense, Novandino represents a form of public-private partnership that seeks to preserve the industrial and commercial experience developed by SQM while incorporating stronger state participation through Codelco.

The most important lesson is that a competitive lithium project today cannot be based solely on resource quality. It needs clear rules, robust governance, industrial capacity, long-term investment, territorial acceptance and a transparent narrative about how it is produced.

Our ambition is clear: produce more lithium, produce better lithium and produce lithium that is increasingly sustainable for the global energy transition.

For future lithium projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, experience points to three critical conditions:
1. Ensure continuity and stability to attract long-term investment;
2. Integrate environmental, social and transparency criteria from the outset;
3. Build trust-based relationships with communities, authorities, customers and investors.

In an industry marked by price volatility and demanding traceability requirements, credibility becomes as important as production capacity.

The lithium industry is undergoing rapid technological transformation. Based on Novandino Litio’s experience, which innovations do you believe will have the greatest impact on productivity, energy efficiency and the sustainability of operations in the coming years?

Lithium demand will continue to grow, but the central question today is not only how much lithium the industry can produce, but how it produces it. At Novandino, we operate one of the world’s most important lithium resources in the Salar de Atacama, with brine-based production that uses natural solar evaporation to concentrate lithium-rich brine before refining it in Antofagasta, at the world’s largest lithium refinery, where we transform it into battery-grade lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide.

We are part of a value chain that will be fundamental to the global energy transition. With that role comes a clear responsibility: to provide volume and quality for the energy transition while reducing pressure on natural resources.

Continuous innovation has been fundamental to the way we operate and supports our long-term leadership strategy, focused on our main objective: producing more with less. In practical terms, this means:
1. Increasing production;
2. Reducing the intensity of natural-resource use; and
3. Strengthening our environmental performance while maintaining long-term competitiveness.

This ambition gave rise to our Salar Futuro project, which represents a holistic approach to integrating new technologies such as membrane nanofiltration, mechanical evaporation and direct lithium extraction, enabling water reuse and controlled brine reinjection.

These are not merely experimental technologies: several of those underpinning Salar Futuro are already part of operations at our lithium refinery in Antofagasta, where they were integrated into proprietary processes to increase efficiency and the quality demanded by global markets.

In July of this year, Salar Futuro was submitted to the Environmental Impact Assessment System and is currently under evaluation. We expect to obtain the environmental approval around 2029, paving the way for progressive implementation of the project starting in 2031.

Finally, at Novandino, innovation must go hand in hand with operational flexibility: combining and adapting different production modules according to market requirements and the unique conditions of the Salar de Atacama. Each salar has different geological, chemical and hydrological characteristics, and that ability to adapt is itself a competitive advantage.

Lithium production faces the challenge of reducing water consumption while also responding to growing demand for critical minerals. Based on your experience, how can these two objectives be reconciled, and which technological advances do you consider most promising?

Our experience in the Salar de Atacama shows that it is possible to decouple production growth from the use of natural resources, particularly brine and water. Between 2016 and 2025, we reduced water intensity per tonne of LCE by more than 80%. At the same time, production increased significantly.

This result comes from a combination of improvements in recovery, process control, comprehensive use of brine, new production routes and greater system efficiency. In fact, more than one-third of what we produce today comes from these new processes.

A concrete example is the production of lithium sulfate from brines with a higher sulfate content, using a proprietary and patented process developed in and for the Salar de Atacama, with capacity of 50,000 tonnes in 2025. This allows us to create value from salt stockpiles and flows that until a few years ago were not utilized, transforming them into a strategic input for producing battery-grade lithium carbonate and hydroxide.

These advances go hand in hand with a commitment to transparency: Novandino makes environmental and operational information available through a public monitoring system that allows users to view the evolution of key indicators, including brine extraction and water-use data.

Looking ahead, the most promising technologies for us are those that complement the advantages of the current natural-evaporation process, allowing greater control, recovery and system efficiency.

The guiding principle is to produce more lithium with less continental water, lower brine intensity and a smaller carbon footprint.

Our targets are to reduce brine extraction by 50% by 2028 (822 l/s) and move toward the complete elimination of continental-water use by the mid-2030s.

This approach is not only technical but also territorial: listening and responding to the concerns of local communities in the Salar de Atacama is an essential part of our sustainability strategy. Ongoing, horizontal dialogue with communities, respect for their worldview and joint work to create local value have been decisive in the development of innovation projects such as Salar Futuro.

The expansion of lithium production also entails greater electricity demand. Based on Novandino Litio’s experience, what are the main challenges for energy planning, power infrastructure and the development of new mining projects to advance in a coordinated manner in Latin America and the Caribbean?

Energy is one of the determining factors in the competitiveness and sustainability of the lithium industry. The Salar de Atacama offers us an exceptional advantage: the world’s highest lithium concentrations and a natural evaporation process that uses solar energy to produce lithium with one of the industry’s lowest carbon footprints.

That same advantage, however, creates a challenge: the technologies that allow us to use less water and recover more lithium require more electricity, so their environmental benefit depends directly on having clean, reliable and competitive energy. That is why Salar Futuro foresees preferential use of renewable energy and the development of new transmission lines.

In Chile, the growth of renewable energy has created favorable conditions for deploying new technologies and reducing the carbon intensity of operations. The challenge ahead is to ensure that energy infrastructure evolves at the same pace as technological innovation and new production capacity.

The regional challenge is not only to generate more renewable energy. It is to deliver it to operations and integrate it into complex territories where communities, ecosystems and multiple uses coexist. This requires early planning, participation, regulatory clarity and public-private coordination.

We have seen this firsthand with our fleet of high-tonnage electric trucks, which transport brine between the Salar de Atacama and the refinery—nearly 500 kilometers round trip—making us the company with the longest electric freight route in Chile. Because the route is geographically and logistically challenging, it required field testing and custom charging stations. It demonstrates that energy planning only works when it is connected to the operational reality of mining.

Latin America and the Caribbean holds some of the world’s leading lithium resources. Based on Novandino Litio’s experience, what conditions are necessary for the region to consolidate its leadership in this market and strengthen its contribution to the global energy transition?

Latin America holds more than 50% of the world’s lithium resources and close to 40% of reserves. This provides a unique advantage. But geological availability alone does not guarantee leadership. What will matter is the capacity to transform those resources into operating, financeable, environmentally rigorous and socially sustainable projects.

At Novandino, we want to contribute to this agenda through the experience built over more than thirty years of operations, working under the highest national and international standards.

Our operation in the Salar de Atacama is audited under IRMA, the industry’s most rigorous standard for responsible mining. To date, the Salar de Atacama remains the only lithium operation in the world to achieve an IRMA 75 rating. In 2026, we began a new re-audit process, reaffirming our commitment to continuous improvement.

We know that stakeholder expectations are increasingly high, and it is precisely those expectations, together with our own ambition, that drive us to question, innovate and continuously improve the way we operate.

As a region, the opportunity is to become a global benchmark not only because of the availability of critical minerals, but because of the capacity to develop mining and energy solutions that accelerate decarbonization and demonstrate leadership in how minerals are produced.