PHOENIX—One by one, leaders from across Arizona delivered speeches extolling the importance of water conservation at Phoenix City Hall, as they celebrated the announcement of voluntary agreements to maintain the decline of the Colorado River in November.
When Tao Etpison took the mic, his speech echoed those who went before him. Water is the lifeblood of existence, and users of the Colorado River Basin were one step closer to preserving the system that has helped life in the Southwest flourish. Then he brought up the elephant in the room: Arizona’s groundwater protection was lacking, and mining companies were looking to take advantage.
“The two largest foreign-based multinational mining companies in the world intend to construct the massive Resolution Copper Mine near Superior,” said Etpison, the vice chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. “This mine will use, at a minimum, 775,000 acre feet of groundwater, and once the groundwater is gone, it’s gone. How can this be in the best interests of Arizona?”
This is a question the state and the Southwest will have to answer. Mining claims for elements critical to the blank force transition are mounting from Arizona to Nevada and Utah. Lithium is needed for batteries to store the power of the wind and sun and for electric vehicles. Copper supplies the wiring necessary to carry electrical power to where it will be needed to meet growing demand. But water is a state in the transition path, and drought plays a role in nearly every renewable energy progression project, from solar to hydropower, as the Southwest struggles to decide what to do. with each and every drop left as the region suffers aridification due to climate change and overconsumption for decades.
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Opponents of mining argue that the proposals may have an effect on endangered species, tribal rights, air quality and, of course, water, either in terms of quantity or quality. Across the Southwest, the 2023 story shows how water users, from farmers from the Colorado River basin to fast-growing cities in the Phoenix metro area, have had to use less water, forcing adjustments to residential progress and farming practices. But according to environmentalists and herbal resource experts, the water used in mining operations and the amount in this conversation don’t address the issues that could be fed through new mines.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe has been fighting for years to prevent the proposed mine by Resolution. It would be built on Oak Flat, a sacred place for Apaches and other indigenous communities, and a habitat for 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 is now in the hands of the U. S. District Court for the District of Arizona, after local organization Apache Stronghold filed a lawsuit to block it, arguing that its advance would violate the devout rights of indigenous peoples.
But for communities located near the mine and across the Phoenix metropolitan area, the water it would consume is just as big of an issue.
Over the life of the mine, Resolution estimates it would use 775,000 acres of water, enough to forge at least 1. 5 million homes in Arizona over about 40 years. And experts say the mine wants much more.
“By pumping billions of gallons of groundwater from the East Salt River Valley, this project would make Arizona’s goal for stewardship of its scarce groundwater resources unreachable,” one report commissioned by the San Carlos Apache Tribe reads. In one hydrologist’s testimony to Congress, water consumption was estimated to be 50,000 acre feet a year—about 35,000 more than the company has proposed drawing from the aquifer.
The Resolution copper mine is not the only proposed water-intensive mining operation. Much of what the industry describes as “critical minerals,” such as lithium and copper, is discovered in the Southwest, prompting a wave of mining claims in the region. public lands controlled by the federal government.
“Water is going to be more scarce in the Southwest, but the mining industry is immune to all those problems,” said Roger Flynn, director and general representative of the Western Mining Action Project, which has represented tribes and environmental groups on mining-related issues. lawsuits, adding the Oak Flat case.
To understand mining in the U.S., you have to start with the Mining Law of 1872.
President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill as a way to continue the country’s westward development by allowing mining on federal lands for free. To do this, simply place 4 stakes in the ground where minerals are suspected and record a claim. Unlike other industries that use public lands – such as the oil and fuel industries – no royalties are paid on minerals extracted from land owned by U. S. taxpayers.
Flynn called mining the last of “yesterday’s lords” – a term coined by Charles Wilkinson, a longtime environmental law professor at the University of Colorado who died earlier this year – referring to industries such as oil drilling and fuel, ranching and logging that The federal government gave them carte blanche to expand the West after the Civil War and expel the indigenous people from their lands. All industry regulations have changed, Flynn said, with the exception of the mining sector.
This has led regulators to consider mining as the number one use of public lands, giving it more weight than conservation or recreational activities, he said.
“You don’t need to prove that there are minerals in a mining claim, you don’t need to provide any evidence that there’s a mineral there,” said John Hadder, executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, a Nevada-based environmental organization that monitors mining claims. “You can just be suspicious, and there’s a lot of suspicion going around. “
Most of Nevada relies entirely on groundwater, an increasingly scarce resource. Without water, corporations looking for critical minerals can’t extract them, Hadder explained. As a result, they seek to obtain water rights from other users, regularly by purchasing farms and ranches, thereby transforming a community’s economy and demographics. When mines are developed, they can have an effect on local waterways, groundwater levels, and water quality as toxins seep into aquifers and surface reserves over the years. Now, as the transition to blank power gains momentum, there is a new mining boom, leading to developing concerns about the effect on local ecosystems. In Nevada alone, there are more than 20,000 lithium mining concessions, the largest of which, of course, are controversial.
In northern Nevada, corporations have proposed two large lithium mines, Thacker Pass and Rhyolite Ridge, in already overexploited underground basins. Both have come under scrutiny, the former because it was proposed on a site sacred to local indigenous tribes that is also home to local ranchers. and the endangered grouse, and the latter for threatening an endangered wildflower found nowhere else in the world.
Now, Canadian company Rover Metals will drill a lithium exploration task near the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a wetland habitat in Nevada near the California border that is home to a dozen threatened and endangered species and is one of the most biodiverse places. on the world’s planet, which environmentalists call “the Galapagos of the desert. “
“Nevadans almost more than any other state have had to wrestle with the availability or lack thereof of water for development for its entire history,” said Mason Voehl, the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, an environmental group that has helped lead the push to protect the refuge. “This is sort of compounding that already really complex challenge.”
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Opponents of the proposal effectively sued the Bureau of Land Management for its approval of the drilling site without consulting other agencies about the potential impact on the refuge’s critical groundwater supply. BLM rescinded its approval, but the company behind it is still seeking permits. “A massive victory in this world is necessarily a delay,” Voehl said.
In Utah, too, corporations are trying to tap into dwindling aqueous materials to extract lithium. Compass Minerals had planned to extract lithium from the Great Salt Lake, which has reached record levels in recent years, until backlash from regulators and environmentalists led the company to announce in November that it will postpone operations, at least for now. Along the Green River, the largest tributary of the Colorado River, Australian company Anson Resources is looking to extract lithium from brine buried deep underground. The 9,000-foot-deep wells and the use of Colorado River water to extract brine caught the attention of local environmentalists and the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the river’s management, who questioned the company’s claim that its procedure would not work. amount of water available for other uses.
“We see that [the company] has claimed that this water will not be consumable,” Tyson Roper, a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal firm that oversees hydropower and water in the West, said at a hearing on Anson’s water rights. . Array: “Any knowledge you have indicates that you will consume water. “
That could have big implications for other water users and systems in the region, he said, a fear that was also expressed in other federal and environmental agencies.
“This could have an effect on much larger operations and allocations established not only through the Green River Block Water Exchange, but also through the Colorado River Storage Project,” Roper said at the hearing. “The same allocation that supplies water to 40 million people, 5. 5 million acres of irrigation, 22 tribes, 4 recreation spaces, and 11 national parks. “
These and other proposed mines in the Southwest are critical parts of U. S. efforts to gather an internal source of critical minerals for the energy transition in white. But the mining projects also pose what many see not only as another serious load of dwindling water materials in the Southwest. Southwest, but also as one that doesn’t get the same scrutiny as other primary water users. For some, water for mines highlights a tension between the effects and responses of climate change, as farmers and peoples in the region are suggested to settle for drastic measures. They cut their water materials in a dry region, and blank energy developers try to exponentially increase the water needs of mines. They take advantage of the abundant solar and wind resources of the Southwest that they harvest.
Wyatt Myskow covers environmental news in the Western U.S. from Phoenix as the Roy W. Howard investigative fellow. Wyatt graduated from Arizona State University with his bachelor’s degree in journalism and has previously reported for The Arizona Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The State Press. He has covered local government, development news, education issues and the COVID-19 pandemic.
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