In a press release published August 23, 2018, Chile’s General Directorate of Water (DGA) announced they will limit water use rights in the southern region of the Atacama desert because the current number of permits are above sustainable levels.
The DGA plans on creating a water reservoir for human consumption to ensure that water remains available in the Salar de Atacama where lithium giants, SQM and Albemarle operate.
“We are evaluating both in this case and in other cases where over-exploitation exists to first try to work with users to see if there is a voluntary agreement and, if not, to apply… reduction of extraction,” DGA Director Oscar Cristi told Reuters last week.
“We’re taking legal matters (limiting permits) and constructing the reservoir because it’s possible that these water sources won’t be available (in the future).” The area in question is the southernmost sector of the Salar’s watershed, known as C2, which is a key water supply for BHP’s Escondida copper mine, the world’s largest, and Antofagasta’s Zaldivar mine.
Cristi said the government had already granted BHP and Antofagasta permits to pump six times more water from an aquifer at the Atacama than it could sustain, and this was one reason for the ban. BHP proposed to regulators they would cut water extraction from wells in C2 by more than half, but regulators say this is not enough.
Looming water war in the region
In the past, the Chilean government granted hundreds of water rights permits with almost no consideration given to the cumulative effects as miners rushed to stake claims for the small pockets of water available in C2.
And make no mistake, the Salar de Atacama is economically vital to the country. The water trapped beneath the salt flats feeds the world’s largest copper mine and holds in suspension over 30 percent of the world’s reserves of lithium, used in electric car batteries, mobile phones, and laptops.
Moreover, the Chilean government doesn’t really know how much water is there. But Cristi is changing that. Cristi said Chilean development agency Corfo, which helps oversee lithium extraction in the Salar, hopes to provide a better picture in a study that’s due in December.
In May this year, the DGA released a study showing that Chile’s rivers, aquifers, glaciers, and lakes are shrinking at record rates and contributing to the country’s long-term drought. Carlos Estevez, then director of the DGA, said at the time: “The scarcity of the resource relates to climate change affecting a large area of the country… Access to water must be a human right.”
“The state has been very reluctant to draw up bans on water extraction,” said Cristi, who was only recently appointed head of the water authority. “We want to take a much more diligent approach in decreeing prohibited areas.”
So right now, local indigenous groups, SQM and Albemarle, regional copper miners and even newcomers to the region are all competing for the available water.
“What we have is a water war in the salt pan. There’s a huge crush on water and nowhere to get it from,” said Alonso Barros, an attorney with the Atacama Desert Foundation, an NGO that works with indigenous groups in the region.
Learning from past mistakes
Ingrid Garces, a professor who studies salt flats at Chile’s University of Antofagasta says one of the problems in the past was the government’s treating lithium mining as if it were “hard-rock” mining, and so the amount of water being used was never a consideration.
“We’re managing lithium as though it were a type of hard-rock mining,” said Garces. “But we’re mining water, not rock. This is a watershed. Even if you’re drawing from just one area, the whole is still reduced.”
The water crisis is also a jurisdictional issue in Chile. The brine from which miners extract lithium is water, but in Chile, it is considered a mineral like copper or iron and because of this designation, the brine is regulated as a mineral.
This means that environmental regulators handle permits for brine, while the water authority permits freshwater pumping. So a lack of communication between the two agencies has resulted in a great deal of misunderstanding about how freshwater and brine interact beneath the Salar says Cristi. “There may be an imbalance that we’re not accounting for,” he said.
