This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate desk cooperation.
One by one, leaders from across Arizona gave speeches emphasizing the importance of water conservation at Phoenix City Hall as they celebrated the announcement of voluntary agreements to conserve the declining Colorado River in November.
When Tao Etpison took the microphone, his speech echoed those who had gone before him. Water is the lifeblood of existence, and users of the Colorado River Basin were one step closer to preserving the system that helped life in the Southwest thrive. Then he brought up the elephant in the room: Arizona’s groundwater protections were lacking, and mining companies wanted to take advantage.
“The two largest foreign-based multinational mining companies in the world are planning to build the massive Resolution Copper Mine near Superior,” said Etpison, the vice chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. “This mine will use at least 775,000 acre feet of groundwater, and once the groundwater is gone, it’s gone. How can that be in the best interest of Arizona?”
The question is one that the state and the South West must answer. My claims for the elements critical to the clean energy transition pile up from Arizona to Nevada to Utah. Lithium is needed for the batteries to store wind and solar energy and power electric vehicles. Copper provides the wiring to send electricity where it will be needed to satisfy the exploding demand. But water stands in the way of the transition, with drought playing into nearly every proposed renewable energy development, from solar to hydropower, as the Southwest debates what to do with every drop it has left as the region undergoing desiccation due to climate change and decades of overconsumption.
Mining opponents argue the proposals could affect endangered species, tribal rights, air quality and, of course, water — both its quantity and quality. Across the South West, the story of 2023 was how water users, of farmers in the Colorado River Basin on fast growing cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area, which is needed to use less water, forcing changes to residential development and agricultural practices. But left out of that conversation, natural resource experts and environmentalists say, is the water used by mining operations and the amount that will be consumed by new mines.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe did fighting for years to stop Resolution’s proposed mine. It would be built on top of Oak Flat, a sacred site for the Apache and other indigenous communities, and a habitat of rare species such as the endangered Arizona hedgehog cactus, which lives only in the Tonto National Forest near the city of Superior. The fate of the mine now rests in US District Court in Arizona after the grassroots group Apache Stronghold filed a lawsuit to stop it, arguing that its development would violate the indigenous people’s religious rights.
But for communities located near the mine and across the Phoenix metropolitan area, the water it would consume is just as big a problem.
Throughout the mine’s lifetime, Resolution estimates it will use 775,000 acre-feet of water — enough for at least 1.5 million Arizona households over about 40 years. And experts say the mine will likely need much more.
“By pumping billions of gallons of groundwater from the East Salt River Valley, this project will make Arizona’s goal of stewardship of its scarce groundwater resources unattainable,” reads one report commissioned by the San Carlos Apache Tribe. In one hydrologist’s testimony to Congresswater use was estimated at 50,000 acre-feet per year — about 35,000 more than the company proposed to draw from the aquifer.
The Resolution copper mine is not the only water-intensive mining operation being proposed. Many of what the industry describes as “critical minerals,” such as lithium and copper, are found throughout the Southwest, leading to a flurry of mining claims on the region’s federally managed public lands.
“Water is going to be scarcer in the Southwest, but the mining industry is basically immune to all of these issues,” said Roger Flynn, director and managing attorney at the Western Mining Action Project, which has represented tribes and environmental groups in mining-related lawsuits. , including the case about Oak Flat.
‘The Lord of Yesterday’
To understand mining in the US, you need to start with the Mining Act of 1872.
President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill as a way to continue the nation’s westward development, allowing anyone to mine on federal lands for free. To do this, one only needs to plant four stakes in the ground where they think there are minerals and submit a claim. Unlike other industries that use public land—such as the oil and gas industry—no royalties are paid for the minerals extracted from land owned by American taxpayers.
Flynn referred to mining as the last of the “Lords of Yesterday” — a term coined by Charles Wilkinson, a longtime professor of environmental law at the University of Colorado who died earlier this year– referring to the industries such as oil and gas drilling, farming and logging that were given carte blanche by the federal government to develop the West after the Civil War and push indigenous populations off the land. All of those industry regulations have changed, Flynn said, except mining.
That has led to mining being viewed as the best use of public land by regulators who give it more weight than conservation or recreational activities, he said.
“You don’t have to actually prove that there are any minerals in a mining claim, you don’t have to provide any evidence that there’s a mineral there at all,” said John Hadder, the executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch , a Nevada environmental group that monitors mine claims. “You can only be suspicious – and there’s a lot of suspicion going on.”
Most of Nevada is completely dependent on groundwater, an increasingly scarce resource. Without water, companies hunting for critical minerals can’t mine, Hadder said, so they seek water rights from other users, typically by buying up farms and ranches, changing the economy and demographics of a community. When the mines are developed, they can affect local streams, groundwater levels and water quality as toxins seep into aquifers and surface supplies over the years. Now, with the clean energy transition underway, there is a new mining boom, raising concerns about how local ecosystems will be affected. In Nevada alone, there are more than 20,000 mine claims related to lithiumthe largest of which naturally attract controversy.
Water’s role in mine warfare
In northern Nevada, companies have proposed two massive lithium mines — Thacker Pass and Rhyolite Ridge — in groundwater basins that are already over-appropriated. Both attracted great attention, the former to be represented on a sacred site for local indigenous tribes also provided for area farmers and endangered sage grouseand the latter for an endangered wildflower found nowhere else in the world.
Now, Canada-based Rover Metals is seeking a lithium exploration project near the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a wetland habitat in Nevada near the California border that supports a dozen endangered and threatened species and is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, which environmentalists call “the Galapagos of the desert”.
“Nevadans have had to wrestle with the availability or lack of water for development almost more than any other state for its entire history,” said Mason Voehl, the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, an environmental group that has helped push to protect the refuge. “It’s kind of compounding that already very complex challenge.”
Opponents of the proposal successfully sued the Bureau of Land Management over its approval of the drill site without consulting other agencies about the potential impact on the groundwater supply critical to the refuge. The BLM withdrew its approval, but the company behind it is still pursuing a permit. “A big win in this world is basically a delay,” Voehl said.
Also in Utah, companies want to make use of dwindling water supplies to mine lithium. Compass minerals plans to take lithium out of the Great Salt Lake, which in recent years have reached record lowsuntil backlash from regulators and environmentalists caused the company announced in November that it was suspending operations, at least for now. Along the Green River, the largest tributary of the Colorado River, Australia-based Anson Resources wants to extract lithium from brine buried deep underground. The plan to drill wells 9,000 feet deep and use Colorado River water to mine the brine drew the attention of local environmentalists and the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the management of the river, both of which disputed the company’s claim that their process would not reduce the amount of water available for other uses.
“We see it [the company] claims this water is going to be non-consumptive,” Tyson Roper, a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees hydropower and water in the West, said at a hearing on Anson’s water rights. “All the data out there says water will be consumed.”
That could have major implications for other users and water programs in the region, he said, a concern other federal agencies and environmentalists have also raised.
“This has the potential to affect much larger operations and allocations established by not only the Green River Block Water Exchange, but also the Colorado River Storage project,” Roper said at the hearing. “The same project that supplies water to 40 million people, 5.5 million hectares of irrigation, 22 tribes, four recreation areas and 11 national parks.”
These and other proposed mines in the Southwest are critical pieces in U.S. efforts to build a domestic stockpile of critical minerals for the clean energy transition. But the mining projects also pose what many see as not only another serious burden on dwindling water supplies in the Southwest, but one that doesn’t face the same scrutiny that other major water users face. For some, the water for mines highlights a tension between the impacts and solutions of climate change, as farmers and cities across the region are asked to accept dramatic cuts to their water supplies in the rapidly drying region, and clean energy developers seek to amount to the Southwest’s abundant solar and wind resources that they harvest.
