The Minister of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation, Aisén Etcheverry, is doing what women and men in science usually do, without being a scientist but a lawyer: looking with a sense of the future. Being the ministry that directs one of the institutional bodies that worked for a year in the Lithium and Salares Committee, to present at the beginning of this week concrete advances of the National Lithium Strategy, the contribution of this institution was concentrated in at least three pillars. From the review and systematization of a good part of the knowledge on the subject, the visualization of the importance of technology in the participation of private parties, to the production of knowledge to install, in the process, the foundations of future companies in the field of biotechnology, precisely in those salt flats that will be part of the 30% that will be protected.
-After a year of waiting, progress was made known in the National Lithium Strategy. How do you evaluate this period?
-More than a year of waiting, I would say it was a year of work. The truth is that, when the National Lithium Strategy was started, the President of the Republic presented us with very important challenges and with a quite innovative outlook regarding how we carry out productive development policies such as lithium, which is this idea of combine or find a fair balance between production and conservation. But also incorporate the science and technology component as a transversal axis that can accompany the success of this strategy.
-How were they installing that component, taking into account that a good part of the projects that have been promoted in the past have not considered the scientific factor to its fair extent?
-When we look at the installed capacities that the State has and the way in which we have done this throughout history, the truth is that it is quite new and, therefore, there was a lot to build. Once the strategy was launched, we focused on super serious and in-depth compilation work. Today we know very little about our salt flats. The salt flats are not measured, they have not really been studied, and therefore to understand what we were dealing with in terms of the amount of lithium, in terms of importance to biodiversity, in terms of other potentials that those salt flats may have, whether Minerals or non-minerals, we were pretty much in the dark. All the studies that were available were reviewed, based on information from the DGA, Conaf, information that the Ministry of the Environment itself had, Sernageomin, and so on.
-What is the role that the Ministry of Science is going to play in the future in the productive development and conservation of lithium?
-The ministry today has a role in the different stages of the strategy, different pillars. One has to do with what we can do in terms of making visible the importance of technology in the participation of private parties. We, from the ministry, regularly have conversations with SQM, with Codelco, with all the companies that are currently extracting or are in the process of starting extraction. Because part of what was proposed in the strategy is also to push for greater incorporation of technology by the private sector. And that, which was declared by the President when the strategy was announced, also has to translate into, first, understanding what technologies there are, and, second, seeing how we can help the private sector so that these technologies are deployed in the best possible way. . And that is an element that is present in the entire implementation of the strategy.
When Minister Aurora Williams talks about these RFIs, these calls for interest from the private sector, part of what is being asked in those calls for interest is also what technologies they have available. To ensure better production. Or what technologies they are studying or using to ensure that this production is more sustainable. That is an element perhaps a little more invisible, which was not in previous strategies, but which today becomes part of the heart of what we are doing with the National Lithium Strategy.
Conservation and biotechnological potential
-And what happens with conservation, are you going to use the protection status to carry out scientific research?
-On the conservation side, if one wanted to put two sides of a coin, something similar happens. Today, after verifying that we have so little information regarding the salt flats, this is beginning to translate into very concrete measures. The ministry is promoting the creation of a Technological Institute for Research in Lithium and Salt Flats that should correct that. In other words, the next time we face, perhaps not lithium, but boron or another chemical element, we are going to have an institutional framework that will not require 8 or 9 months of collecting information, but rather we will collect the information have because the studies have already been done. And that is another part that is done from Science. And there is a third element, which we also talk little about – it is difficult for us to talk about science and technology, we always stay in the part of large contracts –, but there is a third that has to do with the biotechnological potential that exists in the salt flats.
-For the pharmaceutical industry, for example?
-The salt flats have a very important richness in terms of biodiversity, but they also have what we call Extremophiles. They are very salty places that go through very extreme temperatures, and that means that there are microorganisms that live under conditions where it does not seem reasonable humanly for anything to live. And these microorganisms today are the basis of much research and we believe they have the potential to provide many solutions to other types of problems. It is not science fiction, that is how it has been throughout history. With the Minister of Health we recalled the case of rapamycin, which is this bacteria that was discovered as a result of some plants in Rapa Nui, and that today the main medicines that help transplanted organs are developed from these bacteria. do not reject those organs.
-Biological diversity as potential for development.
-Something similar has already happened in mining. Biotechnology mechanisms or developments have helped make mining more environmentally friendly in its process. So, we have this gigantic potential that is the biological diversity of the salt flats, which we are conserving, but with an active conservation logic. And that means that we care and protect, but that we also take advantage of the research capabilities that come from there and develop future industries. When we presented the Science Strategy we said “we as a Government, and this generation in general, had the opportunity and privilege of being able to develop a National Lithium Strategy.” With this 30% of conservation area we are allowing our children and their children to develop the national strategy of the Extremophiles, or Boron, or whatever comes, which today we still cannot imagine, but which is… and we are in process of discovery thanks to science.
-What is being done to ensure the transfer of knowledge between academia and the productive sector?
-From the Ministry of Science we strongly push the startups technologies, the startups scientific-technological based, which are basically ventures that are very intensive in knowledge and technology, which generally appear from universities, where there are many in biotechnology, and we support them in different ways. First with subsidies, it is a program that exists, they are subsidized, they are given resources to help them install it. But also now, and in fact we submitted a bill to Congress, where we are also releasing certain obstacles that today hinder the free flow between these startups scientific-technological base and universities. Today our legislation prevents professors who are researchers and who develop certain products from being able to later, and at the same time remain in academia, be part of the companies that are generated as a result of these discoveries.
So, if there is a professor, for example, at the University of Concepción, who has a very interesting development in biotechnology and wants to start a company based on that development, she has to choose whether to go to the company or stay at the university. That no longer happens in the developed world, and where what is encouraged is precisely that we can be on both sides: that knowledge transits in the easiest and most fluid way between the private sector and academia, these are things that we are going to start to correct with this project.
-What stage is the Lithium Technological Institute in?
-About the Technological Institute for Research in Lithium and Salares, which is part of the National Lithium Strategy, we will already be providing details during the next month, but it should start operating at the beginning of the second half of this year, which will make available what we call public goods.
-In that way?
-For example, today a biotechnology company that wants to participate in lithium or in the battery industry or in another, needs to be able to pilot, needs to be able to have access to lithium to test its things. These types of elements, which are public goods, are part of what the Lithium and Salares Technological Institute will also provide. And in this way what we are coordinating is an active private sector with incentives, an academy that can be linked quickly and easily with the private sector, and a State that provides those conditions that neither industry nor academia have,
which are these public goods that make it easier for all of this to work. So, all of these pieces are in place.
-Looking at it from within, how would you define the strategy in relation to the extraction process that has already begun?
-As a highly ambitious strategy that today, one year after its launch, 11 months now, is providing clear steps forward for things that are happening, without leaving aside the acceleration of lithium production, which was something that It was everyone’s concern, because lithium is generating many resources. And we are doing it from a vision of development where production converges with the conservation and care of the environment, in order to leave the pieces installed for future industries.