- The increasing demand for lithium to support electric vehicle production is placing a significant strain on global freshwater resources, especially in already arid regions like the Lithium Triangle.
- A recent study indicates that freshwater availability for lithium mining has been substantially overestimated, leading to concerns about the sustainability of current extraction practices.
- Beyond water consumption, lithium extraction processes risk contaminating local water supplies with toxic chemicals, posing additional environmental and public health threats.
- While lithium has a starring role in the global clean energy transition thanks to its fundamental importance in batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage, the “white gold” may be as much of an environmental threat as it is a savior. Extraction processes for the metal are associated with significant negative environmental externalities and public health risks, and now scientists are questioning whether the world can spare the vast amount of fresh water lithium production consumes.Lithium production is booming around the globe as demand projections continue to rise and prices recover after a period of decline due to overproduction. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has said that that lithium demand for battery-making alone will likely increase by a factor of ten in the decade between 2020 and 2030, and a 2023 report from Popular Mechanics calculated that “an electrified economy in 2030 will likely need anywhere from 250,000 to 450,000 tonnes of lithium.” This represents a massive boom in production and refining capacities worldwide. For reference, “In 2021, the world produced only 105—not 105,000—tonnes.”
As lithium production ramps up, the trade-offs associated with production are becoming harder to ignore. Lithium is generally produced by pumping salty brine out of the earth in places where lithium is naturally occurring, and allowing it to dry out in evaporation pools, leaving the lithium readily available to harvest. The whole process is effective and has relatively low overhead, but it requires a staggering amount of water – around 500,000 gallons per tonne of lithium. And, in a cruel twist of irony, often takes place in some of the driest places on earth. The so-called “Lithium Triangle” of South America lies in the Atacama Desert – the world’s highest and driest. In the Chilean portion of the Atacama, a staggering 65% of the region’s water is consumed by lithium mining activities.
Making matters worse, a new study from scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) shows that the Lithium Triangle has far less freshwater available for lithium mining than previously thought – about ten times less. And these results suggest that the same miscalculation has been made in global lithium extraction operations. “Our results reveal that commonly used global hydrologic models overestimate streamflow and freshwater availability substantially, leading to inaccurate water scarcity classifications,” states the paper, published last month in the scientific journal Communications Earth & Environment.
It’s not all bad news – the paper also points out that there is potential for the lithium industry to significantly reduce its water footprint. “Water is the most important resource in these systems, and it’s the part of the system that is most sensitive to change,” says David Boutt, one of the paper authors and a professor of geosciences at the UMass. “I’m optimistic that, through research and development, companies can be more water efficient, especially when driven by the market.”
However, lithium extraction doesn’t only threaten to suck freshwater reserves dry, it also risks contaminating the local water resources it doesn’t consume. Lithium is not the only element left behind when the brine pools evaporate. Other toxic chemicals – such as hydrochloric acid – also abound in these briny pools thanks to the lithium refining process, and have been known to leak into local water supplies. “The release of such chemicals through leeching [sic], spills or air emissions can harm communities, ecosystems and food production,” read a 2024 report from international environment activism group Friends of the Earth. “Moreover, lithium extraction inevitably harms the soil and also causes air contamination.” Already, there have been prominent cases of environmental and public health emergencies of this nature, such as the poisoning of the Liqi River in Tibet in 2016.
“Like any mining process, it is invasive, it scars the landscape, it destroys the water table and it pollutes the earth and the local wells,” said Guillermo Gonzalez, a lithium battery expert from the University of Chile, in a 2009 interview. “This isn’t a green solution – it’s not a solution at all.”
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
Demand for Lithium Strains Water Resources
