By Shivani Lakshman, World Resources Institute

 

LONDON, 25 August. - (ANA) - While critical minerals like lithium and cobalt are essential for renewable energy, extracting them can strain water supplies. Analysis shows at least 16% of the world's critical minerals mines, deposits and districts are located in areas facing high water stress.

 

Demand for critical minerals is booming. Global efforts to fight climate change are driving up the need for lithium, cobalt, graphite and other such minerals essential for building electric vehicles, solar panels and other clean technologies. This compounds existing demand from the tech sector, where critical minerals are used in smartphones, laptops and other consumer electronics.

 

There’s no question the world will have to mine more of these minerals, and quickly, as the clean energy transition ramps up. But doing so also comes with risks — including the potential to sap water supplies.

 

Using global data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and WRI’s Aqueduct tool, we found that at least 16% of the world’s land-based critical mineral mines, deposits and districts are located in areas already facing high or extremely high levels of water stress. These are areas where agriculture, industry and households regularly use up much or most of the available water supply. Without proper management, critical minerals mining can be extremely water intensive and polluting, further straining limited freshwater supplies.

 

Critical Minerals Mining Depletes and Contaminates Fresh Water

Most methods used to mine critical minerals today require significant amounts of water for separating minerals, cooling machinery and controlling dust. Waste from mining and processing, including residual minerals and chemicals, can also contaminate water in nearby communities.

 

Current processes for extracting lithium — a critical mineral used in both electric vehicle (EV) batteries and solar panels — are particularly water-intensive. Take the “lithium triangle” in South America. This area spanning parts of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia contains over half the global lithium supply, found in brine pools underneath the region’s vast salt flats. Miners pump this brine into large pools on the surface of the flats, where the water evaporates out and leaves behind lithium carbonate, used for producing clean energy technologies.

 

This evaporation method uses up to half a million gallons of brine water to extract one ton of lithium. While the brine water itself is unfit for drinking or agricultural use, some reports show that withdrawing such large quantities can cause fresh water to flow into brine aquifers and mix with salt water. This can result in salinization of fresh water and deplete nearby surface and groundwater supplies.

 

In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, one of the country’s key mining regions, lithium and copper extraction have reportedly consumed over 65% of the local water supply, depleting available water for Indigenous farming communities in an already water-scarce region. Indigenous communities in Chile and Argentina have also reported contamination of fresh water used for drinking, livestock and agriculture with toxic waste from lithium operations.

 

Impacts to fresh water are not unique to Chile nor to the lithium industry; they are occurring across global mining and processing locations for a variety of critical minerals. Similar concerns about water use and contamination have already been reported for cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and graphite in China, among others.

 

 

 

 

The USGS’s Global Distribution of Selected Mines, Deposits, And Districts Of Critical Minerals data set, last updated in 2017, spans 116 countries. An analysis of data from USGS and WRI’s Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas reveals that at least 16% of the global critical mineral mines, deposits and districts located on land are in areas facing high or extremely high baseline water stress. In these locations, at least 40% of the water supply is required each year to meet existing demand, meaning that there is high competition for water among agricultural, industrial and domestic users and sometimes not enough water left over to sustain important freshwater ecosystems.   - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/25 August 2026 - - -