[Salta (Argentina) = E-Daily Reporter Park Min-woong ] Forty minutes after boarding a 16-seat light aircraft in the northwestern Argentine province of Salta, a vast brown wasteland stretching endlessly between the Andes Mountains at an elevation of 4,000 meters came into view. The clouds were close enough to touch, and the surrounding landscape felt as surreal as if we had landed on Mars.
“Hombre Muerto.” Meaning “Dead Man” in Spanish, this vast salt lake was as desolate as its name suggests. However, POSCO—which recognized the growth potential of lithium early on—gave it a name with the exact opposite meaning: “Sal de Oro,” meaning “Golden Salt.”
On the 19th (local time), the upstream processing site at POSCO Holdings’ Brine Lithium Plant No. 1 in Hombre Muerto was operating at virtually full capacity, bustling with activity despite the bitter cold. This plant, operating in the middle of a barren wasteland, is the culmination of POSCO’s 16-year effort to achieve self-reliance in the lithium supply chain.
The importance of lithium in the global industrial landscape is growing by the day. Not only is it a key raw material for electric vehicle batteries, but the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers has recently made the energy storage system (ESS) market a new source of demand. This is why securing a stable lithium supply chain directly translates into corporate competitiveness.
POSCO is focusing its efforts specifically on Argentina because of the competitive advantages of brine-derived lithium. Lithium is categorized into ore-derived and brine-derived types, with brine-derived lithium accounting for approximately 40% of global production. It offers higher cost competitiveness than ore-derived lithium, as it requires lower production costs since there is no need to mine and crush rock.
In particular, Ombre Muerto is located in the “Lithium Triangle,” which holds approximately 65% of the world’s lithium reserves, and features high-concentration brine containing an average of 921 mg of lithium per liter. It thus combines three key advantages: abundant resources, high quality, and cost competitiveness. POSCO has established itself as the only South Korean company to achieve self-sufficiency in the lithium supply chain—from raw materials to product manufacturing—at this site.
It all began in 2010. At that time, POSCO proactively embarked on developing core technologies for extracting lithium from brine. In 2018, after establishing a subsidiary in Argentina, the company acquired the mining rights to the Salar de Ombre Muerto and began securing resources directly. Following exploration, technical validation, and plant construction, the company has been commercially producing battery-grade lithium since last year. In the second quarter of this year, the company achieved its first quarterly profit from its Argentine brine-based lithium business. Sixteen years after entering the lithium business, the once-barren land has been transformed into POSCO’s “golden salt” production hub.
POSCO plans to develop the site into a lithium production base with an annual capacity of 100,000 metric tons (t) by 2033. Given that the current price of lithium hydroxide is around $18,000 per metric ton (approximately 25 million won), this translates to an annual revenue of about $1.8 billion (approximately 2.5 trillion won). Based on the surge in lithium prices seen at the end of 2022, this figure would approach 10 trillion won.
