In abstract
Social and environmental teams sued final yr saying the $1.8 billion Hell’s Kitchen challenge may trigger water and air issues not disclosed in its environmental affect report. A decide disagreed.
An Imperial County decide cleared the way in which for the Hell’s Kitchen challenge, one of many world’s largest lithium mines, when he just lately dismissed a lawsuit filed by civic and environmental teams.
Hell’s Kitchen, within the Salton Sea, guarantees to unearth a motherlode of lithium, a mineral important to electrical automobile batteries, cellphones and different electronics. Whereas the courtroom determination is predicted to open a floodgate for U.S. lithium manufacturing, it has disillusioned neighborhood organizers who fear the mine will endanger close by residents.
The nonprofits Comite Civico del Valle and Earthworks argued of their lawsuit that the environmental overview for Hell’s Kitchen didn’t absolutely tackle the challenge’s results on water provide and air high quality, and that the corporate growing it, Managed Thermal Assets, didn’t seek the advice of with native Native American tribes as required by legislation. On Jan. 9 Superior Courtroom Choose Jeffrey Jones dominated that Managed Thermal Assets had met these necessities, releasing it to renew development.
Opponents mentioned that call greenlights the challenge with out ample environmental safety and neighborhood enter.
“A simply transition to renewable vitality requires that we don’t create new sacrifice zones for
lithium mining,” Jared Naimark, California mining organizer with Earthworks, mentioned in a press release.
Rodney Colwell, CEO of Managed Thermal Assets, mentioned he’s happy with the choice and expects to start out development in 5 to 6 months. Nonetheless, the lawsuit set the challenge again a yr or extra.
“We’re happy to get past it, but it has cost us a lot of time and it has put the project at risk,” he mentioned. “We haven’t been able to raise capital. We haven’t been able to move forward with development at all.”
Now that it’s again on observe, Colwell mentioned the corporate expects to start out producing geothermal vitality by the top of 2026 and mining lithium after that.
California leaders are decided to transition the general public to electrical automobiles over the following decade as a part of the state’s battle towards local weather change. To do this, they’ll want plenty of lithium.
That’s the place the Salton Sea and Hell’s Kitchen are available. Power firms are already producing geothermal vitality on the website, extracting sizzling, high-pressure brine to generate electrical energy. The brine is wealthy with mineralstogether with greater than 3,400 kilotons of lithium: sufficient to make over 375 million electrical automobile batteries, in accordance with the Division of Power. Hell’s Kitchen will take away minerals from the brine after which reinject it into aquifers across the Salton Sea.
State and federal officers gushed in regards to the prospect of that a lot home lithium, predicting that the realm they name “Lithium Valley” may develop into one of many world’s greatest sources of the “white gold,” releasing the U.S. from relying on different nations for the vital mineral.
“The development in Imperial Valley is a gamechanger for not just Southern California but the entire nation in shifting lithium dependence on foreign countries to a domestic supply,” Managed Thermal Assets acknowledged in a press launch.
However native organizers and lecturers raised a crimson flag, pointing to uncertainty in regards to the extraction course of and doable air pollution.
“The direct lithium extraction technology that the Hell’s Kitchen Lithium Project plans to deploy has only been tested at a demonstration level, and their Imperial County project would be one of the first commercial plants of this scale in the United States,” mentioned Luis Olmedo, Govt Director for Comite Civico del Valle, in a press release.
“It’s got a lot of unknowns in terms of air quality,” added James Blair, a geography professor at Cal Poly Pomona who printed analysis on the challenge. “This is already a degraded region, not only from the impacts of agriculture, but also the receding Salton Sea itself.”
Blair advised CalMatters the environmental overview is fuzzy about how a lot poisonous mud the mine would produce, how a lot water is required to dilute the brine and whether or not the mining course of would launch dangerous substances equivalent to hydrogen sulfide or radon.
“The Hell’s Kitchen project can do much more to mitigate environmental impacts,” significantly on water shortages and drought, he mentioned.
Colwell mentioned these considerations are unfounded and described the lithium extraction course of as a “closed-loop system” that received’t generate landfill waste or air air pollution.
“It is the cleanest lithium technology on the planet,” he mentioned.
Jones dominated that the corporate has adequately addressed the challenge’s results on water provide and couldn’t analyze potential future air high quality affect.
Olmedo mentioned the courtroom ruling doesn’t fulfill the nonprofits’ considerations. They need stronger water conservation measures, higher protections for tribal sources and extra particulars about waste technology and water recycling. They’re searching for a authorized settlement between the corporate and Imperial Valley residents to make sure these calls for are happy.
Olmedo mentioned his group “will exhaust all available legal and public policy channels, including consideration of appealing the trial decision, to ensure that the residents and environment of the Imperial Valley receive the highest threshold of protection.”