Lithium: the New Environmental Crisis

The BBC (of all outlets) has an extended piece on how green tech is feeding another environmental crisis. It seems that while the better off indulge their desire to feel good by running EVs, and can now look forward to a taxpayer-funded £3,750 grant towards the cost, they’re actually helping to wreck the planet in a whole new way.

Back in the Bad Old Days when the wealthy started to enjoy the fruits and freedoms of the Industrial Revolution with steam trains and coal-fired ocean-going liners, the damage to Britain was all too apparent in the coal mines, open-cast mines, the filthy air and disgusting rivers. 

Today the solution is simply to relocate the devastation somewhere else. The Chelsea Tractor EV comes with its own consequences. The problem is lithium for batteries and the skyrocketing demand for it, which requires the use of vast evaporation pools in Chile, the world’s second-largest source after Australia:

Raquel Celina Rodriguez watches her step as she walks across the Vega de Tilopozo in Chile’s Atacama salt flats.

It’s a wetland, known for its groundwater springs, but the plain is now dry and cracked with holes she explains were once pools.

“Before, the Vega was all green,” she says. “You couldn’t see the animals through the grass. Now everything is dry.” She gestures to some grazing llamas.

For generations, her family raised sheep here. As the climate changed, and rain stopped falling, less grass made that much harder.

But it worsened when “they” started taking the water, she explains.

“They” are lithium companies. Beneath the salt flats of the Atacama Desert lie the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a soft, silvery-white metal that is an essential component of the batteries that power electric cars, laptops and solar energy storage.

As the world transitions to more renewable energy sources, the demand for it has soared.

In 2021, about 95,000 tonnes of lithium was consumed globally – by 2024 it had more than doubled to 205,000 tonnes, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

By 2040 it’s predicted to rise to more than 900,000 tonnes.

Most of the increase will be driven by demand for electric car batteries, the IEA says.

Chile’s government has been encouraging the industry, but it comes at a price:

Mining companies predominantly extract lithium by pumping brine from beneath Chile’s salt flats to evaporation pools on the surface.

The process extracts vast amounts of water in this already drought-prone region.

There has already been a visible impact on the fauna and flora, because the underground water is a finite resource and does not natural replace itself at the same rate the miners are removing it:

Faviola Gonzalez is a biologist from the local indigenous community working in the Los Flamencos National Reserve, in the middle of the Atacama Desert, home to vast salt flats, marshes and lagoons and some 185 species of birds. She has monitored how the local environment is changing.

“The lagoons here are smaller now,” she says. “We’ve seen a decrease in the reproduction of flamingos.”

She said lithium mining impacts microorganisms that birds feed on in these waters, so the whole food chain is affected.

She points to a spot where, for the first time in 14 years, flamingo chicks hatched this year. She attributes the “small reproductive success” to a slight reduction in water extraction in 2021, but says, “It’s small.”

Naturally, the mining companies are allegedly listening, and planning to extract lithium directly from brine:

At one of their plants in Antofagasta, Valentín Barrera, Deputy Manager of Sustainability at SQM Lithium, says the firm is working closely with communities to “understand their concerns” and carrying out environmental impact assessments.

He feels strongly that in Chile and globally “we need more lithium for the energy transition.”

The locals are, understandably, less than convinced:

Sara becomes tearful when she speaks about the future.

“The salt flats produce lithium, but one day it will end. Mining will end. And what are the people here going to do? Without water, without agriculture. What are they going to live on?”

“Maybe I won’t see it because of my age, but our children, our grandchildren will.”

She believes mining companies have extracted too much water from an ecosystem already struggling from climate change.

Conversely:

There is a common argument from people who support lithium mining: that even if it damages the environment, it brings huge benefits via jobs and cash.

Daniel Jimenez, from lithium consultancy iLiMarkets, in Santiago, takes this argument a step further.

He claims that environmental damage has been exaggerated by communities who want a pay-out.

As ever, whether it’s ‘green tech’ or any other development in history, whichever you spin it, if you want to understand it, just follow the money. Next time you get lectured by a smug ‘I’m doing the right thing’ EV owner, just point them to this article. Perhaps one day they’ll be vilified by the eco-righteous of the hair-shirted future just as those who own diesel and petrol cars are now. It’s certainly looking that way.

Worth reading in full.