In Chile, the landscape is marred by mountains of discarded salt and canals filled with contaminated water with an unnatural blue hue. In Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto, residents believe that lithium operations contaminated streams used by humans and livestock and for crop irrigation. Lithium extraction harms the soil and causes air contamination.
In Nevada, researchers found impacts on fish as far as 150 miles downstream from a lithium processing operation. In Australia and North America, lithium is mined from rock using chemicals to extract it into a useful form. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, mining activities consumed 65 percent of the region’s water, which is having a large impact on local farmers to the point that some communities have to get water elsewhere.Īs in Tibet, there is the potential for toxic chemicals to leak from the evaporation pools into the water supply including hydrochloric acid, which is used in the processing of lithium, and waste products that are filtered out of the brine. But it is also one of the driest places on earth. South America’s Lithium Triangle, which covers parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, holds more than half the world’s supply of the metal beneath its salt flats.
After between 12 and 18 months of this process, the mixture is filtered sufficiently that lithium carbonate can be extracted. After several months the water evaporates, leaving a mixture of manganese, potassium, borax and lithium salts which is then filtered and placed into another evaporation pool. To extract lithium, miners drill a hole in salt flats and pump salty, mineral-rich brine to the surface. The lithium extraction process uses a lot of water-approximately 500,000 gallons per metric ton of lithium.
The battery of a Tesla Model S, for example, has about 12 kilograms of lithium in it grid storage needed to help balance renewable energy would need a lot more lithium given the size of the battery required. Part of that phenomenal demand increase dates back to 2015 when the Chinese government announced a huge push towards electric vehicles in its 13th Five Year Plan. The lithium ion battery industry is expected to grow from 100 gigawatt hours of annual production in 2017 to almost 800 gigawatt hours in 2027. Lithium prices doubled between 20 due to exponentially increasing demand.
After the second incident in 2013, officials closed the mine, but fish started dying again when it reopened in April 2016. It was the third incident in seven years due to a sharp increase in mining activity, including operations run by China’s BYD, one of the world’ biggest supplier of lithium-ion batteries. Cow and yak carcasses were also found floating downstream, dead from drinking contaminated water. In May 2016, dead fish were found in the waters of the Liqi River, where a toxic chemical leaked from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine. Mining and processing of lithium, however, turns out to be far more environmentally harmful than what turned out to be the unfounded issues with fracking. Now Biden is planning to transition the transportation sector to electric vehicles that are powered by lithium batteries and require other critical metals where China dominates the market. During the Obama-Biden administration, hydraulic fracturing was accused of causing a number of environmental problems-faucets on fire, contamination of drinking water, etc.-but the administration’s own Environmental Protection Agency could not validate those accusations.
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