… Companies are racing to draw out lithium from brine bubbling below the Salton Sea. … A recent study concludes that most lithium mining areas won’t have enough water by mid-century to meet the industry’s demands. “Those regions are already water-stressed,” said co-author Jennifer Dunn, director of the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience at Northwestern University. Adding lithium mining onto them without reducing water consumption across the board will make it extremely challenging for those mines to operate in the near future, not to mention meeting everyone’s water needs. … As the warming planet shrinks freshwater resources, experts say, the clean-energy transition driving demand for lithium may ultimately be constrained by the water scarcity that decades of fossil fuel use have accelerated.