Full Title: Lithium and Water: Hydrosocial Impacts Across the Lifecycle of Energy Storage
Author(s): James Blair, Noel Vineyard, Dustin Mulvaney, Alida Cantor, Ali Sharbat, Kate Berry, Elizabeth Bartholomew, and Ariana Firebaugh Ornelas
Publisher(s): Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water
Publication Date: July 14, 2024
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Description (excerpt):
As a key ingredient of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), lithium plays a significant role in climate change mitigation, but lithium has considerable impacts on water and society across its life cycle. Upstream extraction methods—including open-pit mining, brine evaporation, and novel direct lithium extraction (DLE)—and downstream processes present different impacts on both the quantity and quality of water resources, leading to water depletion and contamination. Regarding upstream extraction, it is critical for a comprehensive assessment of lithium’s life cycle to include cumulative impacts related not only to freshwater, but also mineralized or saline groundwater, also known as brine. Legal frameworks have obscured social and ecological impacts by treating brine as a mineral rather than water in regulation of lithium extraction through brine evaporation. Analysis of cumulative impacts across the life span of lithium reveals not only water impacts in conventional open-pit mining and brine evaporation, but also significant freshwater needs for DLE technologies, as well as burdens on fence line communities related to wastewater in processing, chemical contaminants in battery manufacturing, water use for cooling in energy storage, and water quality hazards in recycling. Water analysis in lithium life cycle assessments (LCAs) tends to exclude brine and lack hydrosocial context on the environmental justice implications of water use by life cycle stage. New research directions might benefit from taking a more community-engaged and cradle-to cradle approach to lithium LCAs, including regionalized impact analysis of freshwater use in DLE, as well as wastewater pollution, cooling water, and recycling hazards from downstream processes.