(Bloomberg) — 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 8 million gallons of water per day. In a rare public update on the $1 billion project, Tesla Inc. 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 Chief Executive Officer 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 8 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’.
