Tesla’s Lithium Refinery and the Chromium Misdirection
It was a Saturday and I was sitting there eating my bacon pancakes when I came across an Electrek article about Tesla that reminded me of the quote from the Swiss physician Paracelsus: Sola dosis facit venenum, or in English, the dose makes the poison.
Tesla’s lithium refinery in Robstown, Texas has been accused of discharging industrial wastewater into a drainage ditch. That kind of discharge is not unusual in itself. Facilities do it all the time once the water has been tested and shown to meet permit limits, and Tesla does hold a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) permit that allows controlled discharge under those conditions.
The accusation is not that they are unlawfully discharging waste, something the state knew about but apparently did not inform the district authority that manages the ditch, but that what is being dumped into the drainage ditch is being labeled as violating those limits.
Electrek basically decided without exploring the actual report or permit, to grab two of the most well-known elements and by using conjecture build a narrative that Tesla is 100% guilty. They leaned hard on imagery like invoking Erin Brockovich and the claim that Tesla misled people by saying they are using a cleaner way to produce lithium. A process Electrek does not go into detail on, and based on the elements they picked, clearly does not understand. Inside Climate News, one of the sites that originally released the news at least kept things more grounded, even if they too are guilty of pushing narrative over context.
This leads us to one of the reasons why a quote from a few hundred years ago popped into my head: Arsenic. When it comes to mining and refining, arsenic is the first thing opponents reach for, and it has been used as a proverbial canary in the coal mine for lithium projects for years.