BUSINESS Concern rising in rural Utah over lithium extraction plan
GREEN RIVER, Utah — A plan to extract lithium — the lustrous, white metal used in electric vehicle batteries — in southeast Utah is adding to an anxiety familiar in the arid American West: How the project could affect water from the Colorado River.
An Australian company and its U.S. subsidiaries are analyzing the saline waters in a geologic 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 drained.
The company has also acquired rights to freshwater from the Green River nearby, 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 powerhouse that 40 million people rely on.
“We need to have a renewable energy transition, but maybe we shouldn’t be looking for these kinds of quick-fix energy solutions on a drought-stricken river,” said Lauren Wood, a third-generation resident of Green River, Utah. The town of 900 sits near a site Anson Resources is considering.
Many minerals are mined in open pits. But here, lithium would be separated from saline water using chemicals, which could be faster and less disruptive than traditional drilling, blasting and excavating of mining.
The project is one small piece in a global ramp up of lithium production to make batteries for storing clean
Green River resident Gayna Salinas, whose family farms in the rural Utah community, looks out Jan. 25 over the river, a tributary of the Colorado River. wind and solar energy and powering EVs. Alternative batteries that don’t rely on lithium are being tested, but for now, lithium is still used in most electric vehicle and electrical grid batteries.
Anson says its extraction process would be lowcarbon and “environmentally responsible,” an assertion that has not mollified concern from some environmentalists and residents.
Anson has been using old oil wells to explore the amount of lithium in brine, a salty liquid, deep beneath the ground.
The company says there’s enough metal in the brine to initially produce 10,000 tons of lithium carbonate a year. That’s enough to supply about 200,000 average EV battery packs.
It says natural pressure will push the liquid up from more than a mile deep. An absorbent would then separate out the lithium before the lithium-free water would be pumped back underground. Fresh water from the Colorado River would be used to wash the mineral. Anson said almost all of this fresh water would be recycled and used again.
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 for much of a commercial track record to have been established,” he said.
It has been deployed in Argentina and in a handful of projects in Qinghai, China.
Anson has acquired rights for 2,500 acre-feet of water from the Green River. An acre-foot is enough water to serve two to three households for a year.
The company said brine and fresh water are not the same because brine isn’t drinkable or usable for any other purpose. It also said the brine it has identified in the Paradox Basin is separated from freshwater aquifers by more than a mile of “thick layers of impermeable salt layers and sandstone units.”
But last year, the Interior Department and the Bureau of Land Management raised concerns about Anson’s plans to pump 13,755 acrefeet a year of groundwater near the Green River. Department officials said the aquifer and the river were connected and Anson had not sufficiently explained how the groundwater withdrawals might affect the Green River.
Utah’s water rights division will make the final decision on the water permits, which could take months or even years.