Going in blind? Water and the rush for lithium
The politics are about water as much as anything else.
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-- Daniel
The Western U.S. is full of proposed lithium projects, but they are pushing up against something the region has very little of to spare: water. I’ve been reporting on this in Nevada for years now, with multiple companies looking to extract lithium here and thousands more claims. But it’s playing out in other places too. Look only to Utah.
Last week, the Salt Lake Tribune’s Leia Larsen reported on an interesting development in the statehouse. State leaders appear poised to crack down (or at least discuss doing so publicly) on mining companies who are drawing excessive amounts of water from the Great Salt Lake to extract lithium. One company in particular, Compass Minerals, has drawn scrutiny, but a new law, being discussed, would affect new players testing new technologies as well. Here’s a summary on what the proposed legislation does:
“The proposed legislation would task the state engineer with curbing extractors’ water consumption to help the lake recover… HB 453 also requires extractors to prevent wasting the lake’s minerals and natural resources. They must agree to preserve the lake’s ecology and healthy salinity levels. It also allows the state to acquire and remove solar evaporation ponds through eminent domain.”
When it comes to lithium and water, the politics are complex. The proposed law, HB 453, is lengthy, and I’m curious to see how it progresses through the Utah statehouse, where lawmakers seem to be taking seriously the need to put some order on the rush.
Not only is this a story about how to protect the lake’s ecosystem from extensive water consumption. For some, it appears to be as much about fairness under a legal system that gives priority to those who claimed water first. When there’s a shortage in most Western states, water is allocated first to those with the oldest “senior” rights.
As Larsen notes, Great Salt Lake miners tend to have the newest “junior” rights while upstream irrigators tend to have older “senior” rights. To benefit the Great Salt Lake’s elevation, some agricultural users have leased their water rights rather then use them.
Here’s an illuminating quote from the bill sponsor, Republican Rep. Casey Snider:
“We had a conversation with a mineral company that said, ‘What will we do now if we cannot extract water, even if it is there?’” Snider said. “And my response to them was, ‘Welcome to agriculture, you ought to join us in prayer that it rains.’”
The Great Salt Lake is not the only place where Utah policymakers and regulators are grappling with how to manage a rush for lithium. Near Green River, Utah to the east, a company is proposing to extract lithium from salty underground water, or “brine.”
But the proposal in the Paradox Basin has raised a number of concerns, as Suman Naishadham and Brittany Peterson from the Associated Press recently reported. For one, there’s the project’s proximity to the Green River, a tributary of the over-tapped Colorado River. Although the company would be mining groundwater, there are big questions about how the aquifer is connected with the river. How does drawing from one affect the other? And the company has water rights to draw from both sources.
While the company says it would recycle much of the water by using a less intensive technology — known was Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) — there are still questions about its footprint. DLE has a lot of promise to reduce water consumption, but it’s still “too new for much of a commercial track record,” as one geologist told the AP.
Separate from the Great Salt Lake, Utah is looking at ways to regulate brine mining and study how to move forward. A different piece of legislation, House Bill 433, would give regulators increased authority to oversee brine mining where there are multiple competing surface or subsurface operations that might conflict with each other.
Importantly, the legislation would require state officials to study brine mining and “evaluate current and potential regulation of brine mining operations.” Such a study would attempt to address what agencies have jurisdiction over brine mining, safety measures, the spacing of groundwater wells and areas with overlapping brine use.
In short, the Utah Legislature is looking at lithium and its impact on water. Will Nevada be next? The state is still grappling with how to handle overlapping water claims to mine lithium in Clayton Valley (see picture above/below). The valley is home to Silver Peak, the country’s only operating lithium mine. And it’s what the Utah bill might call a “multiple mineral development area.” There is fierce competition over water between Albemarle and SLB, which is looking to pilot a DLE technology (PBS Newshour recently did a good investigation into Clayton Valley that’s worth watching).
The question of who gets access to the underground brine — under Western water and mining law — is a major question, but it is in no way limited to Clayton Valley. In Railroad Valley and elsewhere in Nevada, companies are not only facing more scrutiny from environmentalists. They face competition from others in the lithium industry.
And exactly how many proposed projects are there in Nevada? An astonishing 83, with a roughly even split between projects looking at brine and hard-rock mining.
That’s according to Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin Director for the Center of Biological Diversity, who created one of the most thorough maps tracking lithium projects across the West. It’s a helpful exercise and one that offers an immediate sense of the scale. Even if only a fraction of projects come online, that’s a lot of new mining.
This all gets to a letter, which came through my inbox earlier this week. Donnelly, looking to Nevada’s legislative session next year, wrote to the Joint Interim Standing Committee on Natural Resources asking them to propose policies to do two things:
Fund a study “to evaluate lithium resources in the state and determine which can be extracted with the least impact on communities and the environment.”
Create rules to “prioritize permitting for mine proposals in areas of least conflict; while de-prioritizing permitting for mine proposals in areas of greatest conflict.”
In the letter, Donnelly notes that “the rollout of the lithium boom in Nevada thus far has been marred with conflict due to potential impacts to cultural landscapes or biodiversity, with numerous projects facing litigation and public outcry due to their being sited in areas of highest conflict with biological and cultural resources.”
Donnelly said landscape-level planning could help: “We need incentives for domestic lithium production in places and using techniques that avoid significant impacts to the environment and communities, and by extension avoid conflict and litigation.”
You can read the full letter here, and he wrote more about it in his Substack.
Not sure where the policy pitches will go at this point. Stay tuned.
But with proposals for projects in counties across the state, Nevada is at the epicenter of the lithium boom, or the “lithium loop” as the governor calls it. It’s also one of the driest state’s in the nation, and a new mining rush is placing pressure on communities in different ways. As with many water and natural resource issues, the politics don’t fit neatly into partisan politics. How the state responds to this rush — and the stress that it puts on water — should be a major question for lawmakers, if it’s not already.
Some other threads I’m watching:
From The Desert Sun’s Janet Wilson: “Will seven Western states be able to rapidly craft a voluntary plan to keep the Colorado River afloat for decades to come? It’s increasingly unclear, as negotiations have foundered between two sides…”
To be honest here: Any time I hear the term “water agent,” I can’t help think of The Water Knife. Utah has legislation appointing a “water agent” with a $1 million budget to look for an “out-of-state” supply. More from the Salt Lake Tribune’s Leia Larsen. Oh, and the bill creates a council of top water districts exempt from open meeting laws. 👀
This is a noteworthy item, via Politico: “FIXING A HOLE: Southern California has done a great job saving water — so good a job that it’s now facing a budget deficit.”
From the Nevada Current’s Jeniffer Solis on a dry start to the year and where things stand after the last storm: “A strong Pacific storm system brought flooding rains to California and heavy snow to the Sierra Nevada, but drought concerns continue for Nevada as persistent dry and warm temperatures cut into the state’s snowpack.”