Water Risk in Mining: Stress Districts, Dewatering Technology, and Permitting Exposure

Water scarcity has become a direct constraint on mine permitting and expansion across the Atacama, the Pilbara, and the copper and lithium districts of Southern Africa, where extraction limits and community opposition have stalled or reshaped projects. This report sets out the capital cost of seawater desalination and long-distance pipelines, benchmarks recycling rates against disclosed corporate targets, and evaluates paste thickening and filtered dry-stack tailings on a cost-per-tonne basis. It assesses water-rights regimes in Chile, Western Australia, Ontario, and South Africa for their practical effect on access timelines and permitting risk, and closes with a district-level scorecard ranking water risk by probability and cost impact.