Not all mining is equal: The impact of lithium production technology on land, water, and emissions footprints through 2040

As electrification accelerates, global lithium demand is rising. Lithium production pathways—hard rock mining, brine evaporation, and direct lithium extraction (DLE)—exhibit distinct land, water, and greenhouse gas footprints. We analyze how adoption of DLE, an emerging extraction technology, could reshape these impacts through 2040 under three global supply scenarios. Using Benchmark Mineral Intelligence 2024 supply projections, we constructed a business-as-usual (BAU), a moderately aggressive DLE, and an aggressive DLE scenario. The amount of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE; a standard measure that expresses lithium content across different compounds in terms of lithium carbonate) produced each year was constant across scenarios. We mapped footprints of operational hard-rock mines and evaporation facilities and combined these with literature-derived impact factors (CO 2 emissions and freshwater consumption per ton of LCE) and representative DLE facility data to estimate future land use, freshwater consumption, and CO 2 emissions. Under BAU, hard rock and evaporation have similar current footprints (∼300 km 2 ) and together add ∼600 km 2 by 2040, while DLE's facility footprint is minimal (50 km 2 added under BAU). Shifting to DLE (moderate/aggressive scenarios) could avoid 141–381 km 2 of land conversion (20-50% reduction), reduce total freshwater use by ∼11% −32%, and lower CO 2 emissions by ∼9%-44%, respectively. Deployment of DLE technologies offers a technically plausible pathway to substantially reduce the land, water, and climate footprints of lithium supply, though realized benefits will depend strongly on DLE technology choice, site reinjection practices, energy sources, and the rate at which DLE can scale and displace other lithium production pathways.