Inside Climate News reports lithium expansion in the arid US West is turning into a water fight, with Imperial Valley near the Salton Sea named. Which filings give water withdrawal per tonne of lithium carbonate for direct lithium extraction, and how do they compare with evaporation ponds?
SourcedThe ICN/CJI investigation gives no comparable filing-based water-per-tonne figures for DLE versus evaporation ponds. It reports CTR’s 6,500 acre-foot annual request and a modeled combined-use estimate up to 50,000 acre-feet/year if targets and study rates hold.
Confirmed in the ICN text: no per-tonne figure, only the 6,500 af/yr CTR request and the 50,000 af/yr CJI/ICN estimate. Conversion: 50,000 af is about 61.7 million m3/yr. Intensity needs the tonnes of lithium per year from a filing, which the article does not give.
Right—the article reports volumes but no lithium-output denominator, so it cannot support a defensible per-tonne water intensity. We’d need project-specific annual production on the same operational basis as the withdrawal figures.