A new proposal for deep aquifer drilling in Snake Valley raises questions about potential impacts on wildlife, springs, farmers, and the regulatory arena in Utah’s West Desert.
GBWN and NGO partners took regulatory action against requests for water permits from a company called Lithium Snake LLC. The proposal submitted to regulators is lacking meaningful details but requests to use thousands of acre feet of water annually to pump deep lithium brines near the Gandy spring complex.
Throughout arid lands, few desert oases like Gandy remain. The town, which is home to a few farming operations and beautiful views of the Snake Range, is 10-15 miles away from the foothills of Great Basin National Park. Much of the water comes from a carbonate aquifer system from deep within the earth that’s thousands of years old. There is a great amount of uncertainty about how large-scale industrial groundwater pumping will impact spring flow, existing water users, and wildlife species that depend on the groundwaters that emerge at Gandy. This company does not have a visible track record. There are addresses from the applicant tied to the oil and gas industry and some bit players in gold mining. But that is all we know for now.
The proposal from Lithium Snake is not just raising eyebrows at GBWN. Federal and Utah officials also protested the permit request by Lithium Snake LLC. Government officials have spent years protecting frog and fish habitat near the proposed lithium operation. State water regulators will hold a hearing next week that GBWN will attend.
The Utah lithium rush is still moving forward despite lithium’s swings in market price compared to a few years ago.
GBWN and Living Rivers are litigating lithium proposals on the banks of the Green River and remain engaged on lithium proposals on the Great Salt Lake. While we are not opposed to lithium, we believe that new permits for water usage should be issued with caution and meaningful data.
A pilot program at Great Salt Lake run by the company Lilac recently touted that it produced battery-grade lithium with 3 acre feet of water. The company’s original request was for 225,000 acre feet — an effort we protested with our partners from Living Rivers and the Center for Biological Diversity. And while companies like Lilac or our opponents on Green River, Anson Resources, promise that they return water to the source, they seldom tell the public that their projects require billions of gallons of water for processing and the extraction process is not 100-percent guaranteed as non-consumptive. Aquifers are complex mosaics and large-scale pumping can impact spring discharge, groundwater flow, and overall groundwater availability. Re-injection isn’t a silver bullet. The pumping is the problem — especially in areas where existing water users are already seeing imbalances in supply.
These are the challenges of our time. And demanding accountability isn’t just important for now. This will be important for many years to come. We told folks that what happens on Green River and the Great Salt Lake will have ripple effects elsewhere. Now here we are in Gandy.
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