The Daily Beast reports:

Elon Musk‘s future prosperity is inextricably linked to lithium, the vital mineral required for many of his businesses, from Tesla to X to SpaceX.

Tech may be marching into the future. But it is still battery-powered.

Dubbed ‘white gold’, lithium is notoriously difficult to mine in the United States. A $1 billion lithium refinery that Musk is building in Corpus Christi, Texas could use as many as eight million gallons of water a day in a region prone to drought.

With growing demand from Tesla and other electric vehicle manufacturers, the need for large-scale lithium mining worldwide has also soared.

And Ukraine, with an estimated 500,000 metric tons of lithium reserves, holds Europe’s biggest deposits.

So, it may not be surprising that Donald Trump’s demand for a $500 billion payback from Ukraine as part of his plan for a path to peace with Russia includes American control of half of the embattled country’s critical minerals.

As reported by The Telegraph newspaper, the terms of the contract amount to a “U.S. economic colonization” of Ukraine. In the proposed plan, under New York law, the U.S. would take 50% of recurring revenues received by Ukraine for the extraction of lithium and other resources.

“For all future licenses, the U.S. will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the contract adds. [Continue reading…]

Bloomberg reports:

Twenty miles outside Corpus Christi, Texas — an area so dry the local water company distributes shower timers at high school football games — the world’s richest man is nearly done building a lithium refinery that could require as much as eight-million gallons of water per day.

In a rare public update on the $1-billion project, Tesla in December said it was starting to test the ability to process lithium through the new factory. But the carmaker still doesn’t have a contract for the water needed to operate the facility, presenting a hurdle for CEO Elon Musk’s goal of turning lithium into chemical products used to make electric vehicle batteries.

The factory, where Tesla aspires to start production this year, is part of a broader effort by Musk to ease bottlenecks and build a more robust domestic supply chain of the critical raw material. It has also set off alarm bells among some in the small Texas town who are worried about having enough water to live on, let alone help supply a big factory.

In 2022, Tesla estimated it would need 400,000 gallons per day to run the lithium plant, rising to 800 000 gallons per day at peak usage. Two years later, a Tesla employee told a consulting firm, Raftelis, that the forecast has spiked to as high as eight-million gallons per day, according to South Texas Water Authority records obtained by Bloomberg News through a public records request.

South Texas Water Authority controls the water but doesn’t sell it directly to Tesla, which is negotiating a water contract with Nueces Water Supply, a water utility company. Nueces Water Supply didn’t respond to requests for comment. South Texas Water Authority didn’t provide a comment for this story.

It’s difficult to determine what kind of drain Tesla’s factory would have on the area’s water supply. But the average American family uses about 300 gallons of water per day or 109 500 gallons per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

For Robstown, which had 3 804 households as of 2023, that would equate to about 1.1-million gallons a day. At the high-end estimate of 8 million gallons per day, Tesla would be using eight times Robstown’s average residential water use. [Continue reading…]