GREEN RIVER, Utah — A plan to mine lithium — the shiny, white metal used in electric vehicle batteries — in southeastern Utah is adding to fears familiar in the arid American West: how the project will drain water from the Colorado River could affect.
An Australian company and its U.S. subsidiaries are analyzing the salty water in a geological formation shared by Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, an area called the Paradox Basin. The area’s groundwater is rich in lithium salts and other minerals from when it was a marine basin millions of years ago that repeatedly flooded and dried up.
The company has also acquired rights to freshwater from the nearby Green River, leading to questions about how groundwater and river water are connected, and how its plans to produce lithium could affect the environment. The Green River is a tributary of the Colorado River, the overfished powerhouse of the West on which 40 million people depend.
“We need a transition to renewable energy, but maybe we shouldn’t be looking for these kinds of quick energy solutions on a drought-stricken river,” said Lauren Wood, a third-generation resident of Green River, Utah, a town of 900 people , near a site Anson Resources is considering.
Many minerals are extracted in open mines. But here, lithium would be separated from the salt water using chemicals, which could be faster and less damaging to the environment than traditional drilling, blasting and excavating mining.
The project is a small part of a global ramp-up of lithium production to make batteries to store clean wind and solar energy and to power electric cars. Alternative batteries that do not rely on lithium are being tested, but for now lithium is still used in most electric vehicle batteries and electricity grids.
Anson says the extraction process — which has no large-scale example in the U.S. — would be low-carbon and “environmentally responsible,” a claim that has failed to allay concerns from some environmentalists and residents.
Anson has used old oil wells to investigate the amount of lithium in brine, a salty liquid deep underground.
The company says there is enough metal in the brine to initially produce 10,000 tons (about 9,072 tons) of lithium carbonate per year. That’s enough to power about 200,000 average electric vehicle battery packs in the US.
It is said that natural pressure will push the fluid up from more than a mile deep. An absorbent would then separate out the lithium before pumping the lithium-free water back underground. Freshwater from the Colorado River would be used to wash the mineral. Anson said almost all of this fresh water would be recycled and reused.
“We realize how precious water is in our arid environment,” Anson CEO Bruce Richardson said in a statement. “The lithium we extract will go into electric vehicles, and the whole point of it is to have a lower impact on the environment.”
But geologists and earth scientists, including Michael McKibben, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, said it’s unclear how water-intensive direct lithium extraction really is.
“The technology is too new to establish much of a commercial track record,” he said.
It has been deployed in Argentina and in a handful of projects in Qinghai, China.
To date, Anson has acquired rights to 2,500 acres of Green River water. One acre is enough water to supply two to three American households for a year. The company said it won’t actually use that much, but provided no further explanation.
In a statement, the company said brine and fresh water are not the same because brine is not drinkable or usable for any other purpose. It also said the brines it identified in the Paradox Basin are separated from freshwater aquifers by more than a mile of “thick layers of impermeable salt layers and sandstone units.”
But last year, the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management raised concerns about Anson’s plans to pump 13,755 acre-feet of groundwater annually near the Green River. Department officials said the aquifer and the river were connected and that Anson and its U.S. subsidiaries had not adequately explained how groundwater withdrawals could affect the Green River.
Utah’s water rights department will make the final decision on water permits, which could take months or even years.
Several other companies are exploring direct lithium mining projects in the US. Last year, ExxonMobil acquired rights to the Smackover formation in southern Arkansas, considered one of the most promising lithium resources in North America. In Nevada, Century Lithium is conducting a pilot project in the Amargosa Valley, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Despite increasing government and industry interest in obtaining more lithium in the U.S., Nevada currently has the nation’s only lithium mine. Australia, Chile, China and Argentina produce almost everything.
Green River Mayor Ren Hatt said the city’s limited economic base is creating pressure to accept Anson’s project, even though some residents, like Gayna Salinas, are skeptical and concerned about its proximity to the city.
“It’s hard to turn something down in a community like Green River,” he said.
Salinas, whose family farms in the rural community, said she was skeptical about the economic benefits of a project like Anson’s. She was referring to the uranium mines and oil and gas drilling in the area in recent decades, which are no longer functioning.
“It seems like everyone wants to use rural America as a dumping ground and rural America doesn’t care because it needs the money or the jobs.”
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