In rural Utah, concern over efforts to use Colorado River water to extract lithium

A plan to extract lithium — the lustrous, white metal used in electric vehicle batteries — in southeast Utah is adding to an anxiety familiar in the arid American West: how the project could affect water from the Colorado River. An Australian company and its U.S. subsidiaries are analyzing the saline waters in a geologic formation shared by Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, an area called the Paradox Basin. The area's groundwater is rich in lithium salts and other minerals from when it was a marine basin millions of years ago that repeatedly flooded and drained.

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