South American Mines Pump Seawater As Rivers Dry Up
by Eliza Barclay, Washington, D.C. 
on 02.25.08
A Planet Ark/Reuters correspondent has a story out of Cerro Lindo, Peru about how the town's spanking new mine and another mine in Chile are now pumping seawater high up into the Andes because of a shortage of locally available water. The Cerro Lindo mine and the Esperanza gold and copper mine in Chile's Atacama Desert have traditionally relied on rivers fed by glaciers, which are rapidly melting with climate change.
The average mine requires millions of gallons of water during its 40 years of operation, which means access is an increasingly worrisome issue for mine owners as global warming looms and cities that share water resources with the mines grow.
And the South American miners aren't the only ones willing to haul their water from far, far away when local resources begin to fade. In other parts of Latin America like Mexico City, water is pumped up and over mountains to serve sprawling urban populations. This energy-intensive and expensive process is a prime example of the extreme engineering efforts we are likely to see down the road as our water resources diminish.
In the case of the mines, the shared reliance on rivers between farmers, miners and urban dwellers has begun to create tension and strain in relations.
"Water always generates conflicts between mines and farmers, so this is a good alternative because the source is limitless," German Arce, who runs the Cerro Lindo mine, told Planet Ark. The ocean water will be free, except for transportation and treatment. We'd like to see the mines talk more about water conservation, but that doesn't seem to be a central part of the dialog just yet.:: Via Planet Ark
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Are we going to run out of oil or water first. Be careful were you move.
Maybe these companies should have stopped destroying the glaciers by building mines before they had to resort to this drastic measure. What’s the environmental damage of saltwater runoff in the Andes? Will this contaminate water supplies throughout the region?
"Water always generates conflicts between mines and farmers, so this is a good alternative because the source is limitless,"
haha.. remember water world? I wonder what'd be like if the opposite happened
so what happens to all the salt in the water? There is going to be some changes to soils composition. Depending on how much water ( which appears to be huge amount) this could have even more negative affects on the region in addition to the standard mining operations.
Would like to hear more about the effects of salt water on inland mining operations...
And when the mine owners have finished creating a desert of the land there they'll move on and do the same again somewhere else.
Terrible, tragic, short sighted greed.
Agreed. The salt water will likely be quite damaging to the local eco system if it's just dumped. The mine tailings themselves even with fresh water are likely to be quite damaging too, though. Saving the fresh water for human/plant/animal consumption though to me seems to be a positive step.
As an alternative, there's several companies out there creating systems to harness energy from waves. This one
http://www.ceto.com.au/home.php
has a system that pumps water to shore, desalinates, and creates energy. From a distance this seems like a pretty obvious solution to several of the issues this article brings up.
This is the first good argument I've seen to place urban centres and mines near each other!
Now we need some focus on progress in de-salination technologies.