"Lithium Critical to the Energy Transition Is Coming at the Expense of Water", 18 July 2024

Lithium needed for batteries that power electric vehicles and store electricity from renewable energy projects is likely to deplete—and in some cases, contaminate—local water supplies, according to a new paper published this week. 

From mining the mineral to processing it for battery use, water is essential for producing the soft, silvery metal with superior ability to hold a charge...

The new paper, titled “Lithium and water: Hydrosocial impacts across the life cycle of energy storage,” is designed as a primer for community members, activists and other researchers about lithium’s impact on water supplies...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is worried about maladaptation—efforts to deal with global warming that have unintended, environmentally detrimental consequences...

By far, the biggest impact of renewable energy development on water will come from mining.

Hard rock mining, which provides 63 percent of the world’s lithium supply, requires huge amounts of water and intensive mitigation efforts to avoid contaminating local water supplies...

“Despite efforts to present lithium mining as a novel, climate-smart form of mining, at its most basic, open-pit lithium mining involves creating massive holes in the Earth that produce huge quantities of tailings and lasting impacts to waterscapes,” the researchers wrote. 

Other mining methods include lithium brine evaporation used in South America, where lithium-laced brine water located deep in the earth is pumped to the surface and allowed to evaporate and leave behind the mineral. That process can deplete those deep aquifers, which are often interconnected with other supplies of water that are safe for drinking and other consumptive uses.

There’s also direct lithium extraction (DLE), where lithium and other minerals are removed from brine water that is then sent back underground. Some companies have touted that emerging method as more sustainable and less water intensive, but it actually requires vast sums of freshwater

In Argentina, one of the few places where DLE has been used at a commercial scale, the process has led to the depletion of a local river, the paper found. And in Green River, Utah, locals and environmentalists have protested one of the DLE projects closest to operating in the U.S., over its potential impacts on their water supply. The project will pull water from the largest tributary of the already overdrafted Colorado River, and residents fear the toxic brine from underground could contaminate freshwater supplies...

[A]t the Salton Sea in California, often referred to as Lithium Valley due to its potential to provide enough of the mineral by itself to support the nation’s energy transition, local community groups and environmentalists have sued to try to stop a DLE site on the verge of beginning operation. They claim county officials conducted an inadequate study of the project’s impacts on the area’s freshwater supply. Much of what is needed for the project will come from the declining Colorado River...

There are also ways to minimize lithium mining’s impact, mostly by reducing the amount of the mineral needed by prioritizing public transportation and producing smaller EVs, research has found...