Not just Nevada — lithium is draining water across the world, study reveals

As Nevada gears up for the next few years of its lithium boom, a new study is calling attention to what’s most at stake — water.

Lithium, used in electric vehicle batteries, is considered a critical mineral for the transition away from fossil fuels to more green sources of energy. Only one lithium mine is fully operational in the country, in the Silver Peak mountain range of Nevada’s Esmeralda County.

But that could change fast, as dozens of lithium mines are proposed throughout the state and a few make their way through strict, decadelong federal permitting processes.

Published this month, the study’s authors put Nevada’s lithium conundrum into a broader, international context, offering a deeper look into water that’s been used up in other countries and what the U.S. could stand to lose.

Environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers have all asked the question for years: How can Nevada minimize harm to its most precious resource?

“Tremendous quantities of water — as I call it — are being pumped and dumped,” said Kate Berry, a University of Nevada, Reno geography professor who worked on the study. “Nevada is known by Nevadans as a mining state, but I’m not sure everybody knows what the implications are.”

Open-pit, brine evaporation or DLE?

There are three known ways to extract lithium from the ground: open-pit mining, lithium brine evaporation and direct lithium extraction, or DLE.

Open-pit mining, which involves drilling large holes and the production of waste, leads to the most environmental harm and conflicts that have led to the killings of activists around the world, the authors wrote.

Lithium brine evaporation is the method where salty liquid is pumped from the ground. There’s no clear scientific consensus about how this technique interacts with groundwater, but brine is not renewable and takes millions of years to form.

DLE takes away the need for evaporation ponds. It’s an umbrella term for a suite of approaches that’s only been used in Argentina so far and does still use freshwater, sometimes more than lithium brine evaporation.

While three of the authors interviewed don’t see any method emerge as the most sustainable in every context, Nevada lawmakers have floated DLE as a potential path forward to use the least amount of water. Holding the title of the driest state in the nation has prompted concern about intense groundwater depletion in some rural counties.

“What might be a sustainable use of water in one location would very much not be in another,” said UNR doctoral student and study co-author Noel Vineyard, adding that regions studied see impacts from numerous mines that extract different minerals. “Ignoring that is how we end up with over-appropriated groundwater basins in Nevada.”

One open-pit case study explored in the paper is the contentious Thacker Pass mine near the Nevada-Oregon border, highlighting its expected use of 1.6 billion gallons of groundwater ever year over the mine’s anticipated 41-year life.

Though it got a green light in the end and is being constructed, the mine became a tribal issue, proposed on the site of an 1865 massacre with many worried about groundwater contamination.

In the study, lithium production is shown as an issue of environmental justice, which focuses on how the environmental burden of mining is distributed unequally to underserved people.

David Kreamer, a UNLV hydrology professor who wasn’t involved in the study, said he sees lithium as a parallel to uranium mining, where extractive mining has clashed with cultural sites and environmental resources.

He agrees that lithium production is an emerging issue for so-called frontline and fenceline communities.

“The U.S. has a history of polluting the poor,” Kreamer said. “Environmental justice is a really important aspect of how we go forward as a nation.”

Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.