In record, back-to-back votes this week, Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies and then the Senate passed a government bill to reform the mining law to declare that lithium “is an asset of the nation, and its exploration, exploitation, extraction and use is reserved in favor of the people of Mexico.”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed it into law on Thursday. “Lithium remains in the hands of the nation,” López Obrador said; “lithium, which is coveted by multinationals and governments of foreign countries, they will not have it.”
The audacious move on the part of the government’s Morena party to push the reform bill through, reportedly caught the opposition by surprise—even though it was known that the government had the votes to pass it. It was approved by the Chamber of Deputies, with 298 votes out of a total of 500, and in the Senate, by 87 votes in favor, 20 against and 16 abstentions.
The reform was passed in the midst of a broader and weightier battle over overall control of the nation’s energy resources, including oil and electricity. Last Sunday (April 17), right before the lithium votes, the Chamber of Deputies voted down the government’s proposed constitutional reform to strengthen the state’s control over the electricity sector—a reform which Wall Street and the Biden administration (like the Trump administration before it) had deployed to heavily block. (This battle may not be over.)
Mexico is believed to have significant reserves of lithium, although largely found in clays, a harder material for mining this strategic metal now much in demand for electric batteries, especially for the “green"-favored electric automobiles. Previous Mexican governments had granted various concessions, still in the exploratory phase, to private companies, the leading project, in the state of Sonora, being owned by China’s Ganfeng Lithium. There are conflicting reports as to whether those projects are nationalized under the new law, or just new investments, but López Obrador said that the legality of the Ganfeng Lithium concession contracts will be reviewed.
