Lithium, a critical mineral for a clean energy future, is about to boom as demand for it spikes.
Lithium is a key metal for electric vehicle batteries and there is a global push to find new sources of it. There is currently only one lithium mine in operation in the United States, but that is about to change — and drastically.
Companies have already staked claims to more than 100 new lithium mine projects. By 2030, at least six new mining projects are projected to be operating on American soil. And they’re mostly located in the arid Southwest.
Wyatt Myskow is a Phoenix-based reporter for Inside Climate News. He and his colleagues at Columbia Journalism Investigations are out with a story digging into the future of lithium mining — and who it will impact most by it.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Wyatt. Thanks for coming in.
WYATT MYSKOW: Thanks for having me.
LAUREN GILGER: All right, so you compiled this kind of first-of-its-kind database that shows there are 100 lithium mining projects on the horizon in the country. That’s a lot. Just begin for us with a little bit about how big the demand for lithium is right now, where it’s coming from.
WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, well, as you said in the intro, right, lithium is expected to demand in — production in the next decade or so, and demand for it is going to double as well. And so there’s this huge push to get more of it.
In the U.S. there’s three or kind of three regions of the world that produce a lot of it: China, Australia, and then what we call the Lithium Triangle down in South America. And the U.S. produces very little of its own lithium right now. And there’s been a big push both under the Trump administration and the Biden administration to source more of our own domestic lithium, to have more of our own supply chain so we don’t have to rely on these other countries that we’d rather not do, I guess in these cases.
And so there’s a been a big push at the federal level to incentivize companies to mine here in the U.S.. Now this is a long process; those 100 projects in the U.S., many of them are nowhere near mining. Only a handful are going to start digging maybe in the next couple years. Most of them are what we call exploration, where they’re drilling into the earth, taking samples, seeing if it’s financially viable to mine this lithium, and if the lithium’s good enough quality to do it.
But this lithium powers, you know, electric vehicles, but it’s also used to store energy for, you know, ... solar power and wind power. And so there’s quite a few uses for it and a big demand for it.
LAUREN GILGER: Right, so that, I mean, that’s a good thing in some ways, right? Like you’re looking at a clean energy future and what will power it, it’s, this mineral is going to be necessary for that, but that of course involves mining the mineral from the Earth.
You talked about the Trump administration, the Biden administration sort of touting our energy independence in lithium, trying to jumpstart this industry. I mean, Trump is famous for, you know, "Drill, baby, drill." What’s this look like under his administration?
WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, well, it’s "Drill, baby, drill," but also "Dig, baby, dig" is what he has said and what his administration has said on the mining aspect. And in the Trump administration — you know, again, this has been a bipartisan issue mining for the past decade, but it’s really ramped up over the last year under the second Trump term.
One of the first things the Trump administration did was put out an executive order saying that on the nation’s federal public lands, the No. 1 use of that land is mineral extraction, mining for critical minerals like lithium, and there’s scores of others. And so what the Trump administration’s done is, one, incentivize that, you know, push it forward.
Another key thing, you know, the Biden administration was putting out loans, they were doing some fast-tracking of projects. The Trump administration has really ramped that up. They’ve rolled back regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act that regulates any federal project that needs federal approval, any like any mine that might be on federal land. And that means there’s been less public comment for a lot of these projects that are coming through now, whereas before there was more public comment, both under the first Trump administration and obviously the Biden administration. That’s been rolled back.
You know, one of the projects we looked at in this series — typically when you have a public comment period for a project, we’re talking about at least a month to for community members and stakeholders to give their public comment on their thoughts on a project. One of them got rolled back to just five days. And public feedback prompted them to change that, but that project’s now being sued, and partially because of these rollbacks.
LAUREN GILGER: Interesting. I want to talk before we run out of time here, Wyatt, about about who’s impacted, right? Because you mapped that basically. And you were able to prove that socially, economically vulnerable communities are are going to bear the brunt of this boom, and that often intersects with tribal lands.
WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, no, exactly. So we mapped, using S&P Global data, where these projects are and then we overlaid that with data of tribal reservations and then also the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which measures counties that are socially vulnerable, as the name suggests, to climate and public health risks.
So 70% of the projects we mapped in the U.S. are within 35 miles of a reservation, and two-thirds of these projects are in highly vulnerable communities to climate and and public health risks. And so what that means is that these projects are going into communities that are already facing kind of the brunt of impacts from, you know, wildfires, drought, public health risks in general from, you know, whatever it might be. And a lot of these communities have already faced this before. A lot of these communities already have poor drinking water quality.
And so what we really wanted to do with this project was show, OK, one, who’s behind these projects, but second, what are the impacts looking like? And it’s very clear, even in these early stages, that communities are being impacted. You know, where mines use a lot of water, they pose public health risks, and those impacts are already being seen on the ground.
LAUREN GILGER: Tell us about one situation here in Arizona where there was a kind of a legal battle between a lithium mining project and the Hualapai Tribe, right? This is kind of up near Wikieup. They were successful in that legal challenge, it sounds like the tribe was.
WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, they were, and it’s one of the very rare cases where a tribe has, you know, so far won in their legal challenge against a mine. But, you know, this project was Arizona Lithium’s — at the time, Arizona Lithium’s Big Sandy project, and it was near a sacred spring to the tribe, near Wikieup.
And for years during the permitting, the tribe had warned the Bureau of Land Management that this site was, one, designated as a cultural property under the National Register of Historic Places, and they had concerns that this spring would be affected by the drilling that would happen, right? When these companies drill into the earth, it can puncture aquifers, it can change water flow, and there were concerns that this spring would be affected.
The BLM ignored that even though other federal agencies during public comment had said, "Hey, you really need to evaluate this." That was ignored. They permitted the drilling, and when the company started drilling, the spring went dry. Fissures broke open in the Earth.
Other, you know, some of the Hualapai sources I had shared these photos and videos with me — it’s really quite striking. And so the Hualapai sued. And they said, "Hey, the Bureau of Land Management had a responsibility here to consult with the tribe and to protect this property that is protected." And they won that case.
It’s one of these very rare cases. I’ve been to a lot of court cases for mines; very rarely do — for situations like this — very rarely do the tribes win. They won here, though, because it was such a blatant example of how these projects can impact even when they’re early, right? This was not a mine that — this project was not going to be mined tomorrow. They weren’t even guaranteed that they would mine; they were just testing to see if this would work.
LAUREN GILGER: And the impacts were already there.
WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah.
LAUREN GILGER: Last 30 seconds for you, Wyatt. I mean ... what could this look like in Arizona? Do we know how many mining projects might end up on in our state?
WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, well, we mapped seven potential lithium projects in Arizona. Most of these are all — all of these are in the very early stages. It’s kind of hard to tell how many might end up becoming mines.
That Big Sandy project was the one that was kind of the most developed. That one’s now on pause; the company that was behind it sold it off. It’s now owned by the Navajo Energy Transitional Company. Will they move forward with that? It’s really hard to say. But for right now, the jury’s still out on Arizona.
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