Reporters from The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism

SILVER PEAK, N.V. – Nyle Pennington, a veteran water scientist who tracks groundwater for local governments, stopped at a monitoring station just one mile from America’s only active commercial lithium mine. For years this well in Central Nevada typically held enough fresh water to reach the height of a three-story building, or about 30 feet. Pennington said it supplied much-needed nourishment for local cattle grazing under the Nevada sun.

On this crisp fall day in October, Pennington dropped a small rock down the well. Pings and clangs rang out as the rock hit bottom. A soft thud echoed back. “Bone dry,” he said. “If that would have had water in it, you would have heard a pronounced, loud splash.”

Pennington, hired by the Central Nevada Regional Water Authority to monitor groundwater levels, has documented a disturbing pattern: underground water sources are dwindling and even disappearing altogether near the Silver Peak lithium mine, which records show has pumped nearly four billion gallons of water from underground every year since 2020. The Silver Peak mine denied it is impacting freshwater aquifers, but Pennington said the evidence he recorded shows otherwise.

Silver Peak, which began mining lithium in the 1960s, won’t remain the only U.S. lithium mine for long. The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University has documented a surge of proposals to open new lithium mines that will, like Silver Peak, need billions of gallons of water to operate at a time when much of America’s West is still emerging from a recent megadrought.

As part of a Biden administration push to “build America’s electric future,” U.S. officials are encouraging the domestic expansion of lithium mines by dangling federal incentives. The effort would decrease U.S. reliance on China, which controls most of the U.S. supply chain for the lithium, a crucial mineral needed to power computers and military night-vision goggles.

The Howard Center launched a comprehensive, national investigation of the impact the proposed new lithium mines may have on U.S. water supplies. Reporters reviewed tens of thousands of pages of state and federal environmental impact statements and mining operation reports filed by companies involved in every proposed lithium project in the U.S. that sought permits or reached the physical exploration phase by the end of December 2023.

Among the investigation’s key findings:

• There are no federal rules governing how much water any type of mine can consume.
• America’s only operating commercial lithium mine is responsible for drying up nearby monitoring wells, according to reports from Nevada’s largest water authority.
• The vast majority of proposed lithium projects responding to calls for increased supplies of domestic lithium are, in fact, owned by foreign companies or their subsidiaries.
• The majority of proposed lithium projects in the U.S. intend to take water from already stressed sources like the Colorado River or strained groundwater systems.
• Federal authority to stop mines from extracting minerals, even from public land, is weak. The Department of the Interior, in more than 20 years, has not rejected a mining permit due to the harm a mine could cause.
• The federal government approved plans for a future lithium mine, even after its operators disclosed it would create 272 million metric tons of ‘tailings’ containing toxic waste.

Source: https://ictnews.org/news/lithium-minings-untold-threat-to-water