Allkem General Discussion, page-1644

There's a reason all these articles only ever talk about the Atacama in terms of lithium water usage, and it's because it is a very dry area currently experiencing even lower than usual rainfall, and there is a lot of agriculture in the area. They'd be having problems even if there was no lithium. Olaroz and SDV are different, they are in very remote regions with no agriculture nearby. The lithium operations in the Atacama are also significantly larger than what's going on in Argentina.

They talk about the enormous "usage" of water in lithium extraction and then talk about damage to the agricultural industry. Implying that "500,000 gallons of water per tonne of lithium" is somehow taken away from agriculture, but of course, this water is heavily salted, 10 times that of seawater, and is entirely useless for agriculture or any other purpose.

So what about process water? You can read about that for Olaroz in the sustainability report, page 37: https://hotcopper.com.au/threads/ann-2021-sustainability-report.6453707/ They use bore water and it's 49m3 (49,000 liters) per tonne of lithium, which is a lot less than the implication above. They're planning on reducing that to 30m3 by 2030. It's worth reading the full sustainability report, Orocobre has always worked harder to be on the right side of the ESG side of things compared to other companies.

Still sounds like a lot of water though, how does that compare to other metals? Well, we can find that out: https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/download?pid=csiro:EP137374&dsid=DS3 To summarise, about 70-90m3 per tonne for copper, about 70-300m3 per tonne for nickel, depending on the ore. That's a lot more than our lithium, and yet you don't see media articles targeting them for their water usage. Funny that.

I'm not saying mining doesn't have a big impact on the environment, it does. And I encourage any measures and regulations needed to keep things sustainable. But what I am saying is that there is a very misleading campaign out there to paint lithium as a uniquely harmful and environmentally unsustainable chemical, when the hard data shows that it really isn't that different from other metals in terms of its impact. We've been mining and managing the environmental impact of these other metals for hundreds of years, and we can do so for lithium too.