By Dave Sherwood
By Dave Sherwood
SANTIAGO, Feb 10 (Reuters) – With residents and courts ringing the alarm about depleted water provides in Chile’s Atacama salt flat, the world’s prime lithium miner Albemarle ALB.N quietly filed a proposal in December for a community to watch flows beneath the parched desert ground.
The beforehand unreported transfer is a sign of how essential it has grow to be for miners to show their provides of the so-called “white gold” battery metallic are sustainable as they court docket automakers getting ready for the approaching electrical automobile revolution.
Automobile firms have ratcheted up scrutiny within the Atacama, by far the largest supply of provide in South America’s so-called “lithium triangle,” the place one lithium producer is locked in a court docket battle over pumping of brine and a copper miner has opted for dear desalination over drawing water from native aquifers.
“What we’re seeing is a scrutiny of how lithium is being produced, and significantly, within the Salar de Atacama,” Ellen Lenny-Pessagno, Albemarle’s Chile supervisor, instructed Reuters in an interview in capital…