Hexavalent chromium.

Arsenic.

Where? Tesla’s lithium refinery wastewater near Corpus Christi. In a ditch.

Both are IARC Group 1 carcinogens.

Both are absent from Tesla’s state wastewater permit. Why can Group 1 carcinogens be dumped by Tesla on Texas without a permit?

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) tested the discharge in February and certified compliance. They tested for dissolved solids, oil and grease, chlorides, sulfates, temperature, oxygen.

The regulator skipped heavy metals. The permit omits them. The permit also omits lithium, the substance the facility exists to produce.

Lithium.

Think about it.

Before issuance, TCEQ executive director Kelly Keel told the public the wastewater would be free of residual lithium, chemical runoff, or other harmful pollutants.

Well, guess what? Eurofins found all three.

Eurofins Environment Testing, an accredited lab with locations across the globe, reported traces of hexavalent chromium, a well-known carcinogen, and arsenic, an environmental poison. Nueces County Drainage District No. 2, which manages the ditch, commissioned the test.

Neither hexavalent chromium nor arsenic is included as an allowable discharge pollutant in Tesla’s wastewater permit.

Frank Lazarte, attorney for Nueces County Drainage District No. 2, identified lithium, strontium, and vanadium as a chemical signature pointing back to the battery processing facility. Volunteer engineer Aref Mazloum called the lithium trace a fingerprint at a crime scene.

The district sent Tesla a cease and desist last week.

Good luck with that. Might as well ask Tesla to have door handles to work in a crash so survivors aren’t burned to death.

Tesla discharges 231,000 gallons of refinery wastewater into the ditch every day. The water flows to Petronila Creek, then to Baffin Bay. People eat fish caught there. The sampled water measured ten to twenty times saltier than normal surface water. The ditch walls are losing their vegetation, which raises flood risk for the homes the drainage district exists to protect.

Robstown sits sixteen miles west of Corpus Christi, a city preparing to impose emergency water restrictions in September if the reservoirs keep dropping.

The refinery blew nearly a billion dollars to build. And then the drainage district learned after the fact that it was receiving the discharge when workers found an unfamiliar pipe stretched across the easement.

For some, I don’t know maybe corrupt reason, the TCEQ excludes local drainage districts from the permitting process that results in Group 1 carcinogens being poured out.

The big hat regulator says they perform accountability. We see no cattle, however, because the permit structurally prevents it.