His company, with 30 employees, is one of two from the United States among the eight contenders to develop BoliviaвЂ™s lithium reserves. Egan and others are strivers looking for their first break in mineral-rich places like Bolivia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the South Pacific. Some are familiar names like Elon Musk at Tesla, while Mr. Just as wildcatters have long sought riches prospecting for oil, the clean energy revolution is spawning a wave of gritty entrepreneurs who hope to ride a new boom, vaulting themselves into the intersection of geopolitics and climate change. With a quarter of the worldвЂ™s known lithium, this nation of 12 million people potentially finds itself among the newly anointed winners in the global hunt for the raw materials needed to move the world away from oil, natural gas and coal in the fight against climate change.Д®ight foreign companies have been competing in recent months to establish pilot lithium projects here, including four from China and one from Russia, countries that have had friendlier relations with BoliviaвЂ™s government than the United States has. Egan, the site is вЂњpure white beauty as far as the eye can see.вЂќ The Indigenous Quechua people revere the Salar de Uyuni, 4,000 square miles of salt flats that their forebears believed were the mixture of a goddessвЂ™s breast milk and the salty tears of her baby. вЂњThis is the new Saudi Arabia,вЂќ he promised.

But to Teague Egan, EnergyXвЂ™s chief executive, it had nothing but promise. Surrounded by rusty equipment, empty production ponds and pumps uncoupled from pipes, it seemed a forlorn spot. Still, the real attraction was in plain sight: a giant chalky sea of brine high in the Andes called the Salar de Uyuni, which is rich in lithium, among several minerals with growing value worldwide because they are needed in batteries used in electric cars and on the power grid. On arriving, they found that the conference they had planned to attend was canceled and that security guards blocked the location.

SALAR DE UYUNI, Bolivia - The mission was quixotic for a small Texas energy start-up: Beat out Chinese and Russian industrial giants in unlocking mineral riches that could one day power tens of millions of electric vehicles.ДЄ team traveled from Austin to Bolivia in late August to meet with local and national leaders at a government lithium complex and convince them that the company, EnergyX, had a technology that would fulfill BoliviaвЂ™s potential to be a global green-energy power.

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