An exploratory plan to hunt for lithium — just a few miles from Canyonlands National Park — has sparked concerns it could ruin pristine scenery in an area that attracts roughly one million visitors a year.
A1 Lithium wants to drill into two abandoned oil wells on Bureau of Land Management land in southeast Utah. It’s a test to see if there’s enough lithium to make a mining operation profitable.
Dave Pals, the Bureau of Land Management field manager in Moab, said he’s aware of how important the natural landscape is to residents and visitors alike.
“This area, in particular, is one of specific concern because it's kind of the gateway to the Island in the Sky region of Canyonlands National Park,” Pals said.
The well sites in question sit along the road that travelers take into Canyonlands and neighboring Dead Horse Point State Park, which is the second most-visited state park in Utah.
Pals said allowing some mining is a central part of the BLM’s mission of managing public land for a variety of uses, and he welcomes suggestions about how to best do that.
“We're inviting the public to have input and be part of this process,” Pals said. “More eyes on the project make it a better final document.”
People can submit their comments about this project to the BLM online through Aug. 26, 2023.
The plan includes measures aimed at reducing the project’s impact, Pals said, including painting tanks so they blend in better with the natural surroundings and restricting work to times of the year when there are fewer tourists or animals around.
But environmental groups, such as the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, want the BLM to do more.
Alliance attorney Landon Newell said the new exploratory drills threaten to spoil the region’s quiet, wild beauty.
“People don't come from around the world to see pumpjacks and drill rigs,” Newell said. “They're coming from around the world to see the remarkable landscape.”
The section of BLM land surrounding the well sites is home to biking trails, scenic overlooks and nearly 100 developed campsites, including the Horsethief Campground, which could be potentially impacted by the sights and sounds of a mining operation.
Unlike the open pit lithium mining project that’s drawn pushback from environmental groups and tribal communities at Thacker Pass in Nevada, this plan is looking to extract lithium from the brine fluid left behind in oil and gas wells.
While wastewater from oil drilling contains some lithium elements, Newell said, historically there hasn't been enough lithium in that brine for mining companies to bother with it. The method is now getting more attention as the U.S. looks to find additional domestic sources of the mineral to make electric vehicle batteries.
It highlights a central conundrum of the transition away from fossil fuels — balancing the desire for electric vehicles with the concerns about ramping up the extraction of the minerals needed to put more of them on the road.
Newell’s group supports efforts to make cleaner energy a reality, especially in light of the urgent need to curb climate change, but not at the expense of the natural landscape.
“The transition is going to take renewable energy and that takes renewable minerals,” Newell said. “[But] that does not mean that there's a free pass to go out on public lands exploring and poking around trying to find these minerals.”
Newell is glad the BLM’s newly revised plan does a better job of laying out how much water the project would use — roughly 25,000 gallons from local municipal water supplies.
But he’s frustrated the revision doesn’t include more alternatives for how large the project can be. Specifically, he said, the proposal only includes two options — either allowing the exploration of two wells or none. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance wanted an in-between option that would allow for work at just one well.
While the immediate concern is about the impact of these initial tests, he said, there’s also a broader long-term concern: What happens if the lithium exploration is successful?
In order to develop an actual mining operation after the exploration phase, the company would be required to submit a new proposal and go through another round of public comments before it gets approved.
But if the money is there, Newell fears many more mining operations will follow and spread out away from the road into natural areas that are even less developed.
“If that development continues to expand, it's going to expand into these sensitive wilderness-caliber landscapes,” Newell said.
