Hyundai’s water use: What does it take to build an EV in Coastal Georgia?

“Thomas & Hutton is simply not in possession of the breakdown of needs for Hyundai’s various uses including fire protection, EV production, bathrooms, cafeteria, battery assembly, and landscaping,” Vice President Trent Thompson wrote in an email to The Current. 

HMGMA officials, meanwhile, told The Current that its water use data was both “proprietary” and impossible to calculate.

“The information you requested is proprietary and more complicated than dividing our water usage by the number of vehicles we produce,” Joe LaMuraglia, the head of communications for the metaplant wrote in an email. 

“It isn’t possible to know exactly how much of the daily water usage is directly correlated to vehicle production.”

The lack of details adds fuel to the campaign for a breakdown of water usage by residents in Bryan and next door neighbor Bulloch County, where the Hyundai wells are currently planned to be located. A growing number of residents have been mobilizing to oppose the water permits, fearing that the industrial needs of Georgia’s largest economic development project will adversely affect their farm wells, and, amidst the backlash, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has announced it is reevaluating the impact.

“I’d like to know what they’re going to be using the water for,” said retired metallurgical engineer Ken Copi, who lives near the Hyundai site in Bryan County. “We’ve all heard how many gallons they’ll be using, but is it cooling water, process water, or 1,000 drinking wells? Whatever the use, there should be ways to mitigate it, ways to reduce it.”

Copi, wearing a baseball cap and a polo shirt, spoke out at an informational meeting held by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division at Southeastern Bulloch High last month. The audience, many of them local farmers and private residential well owners who worry the Hyundai wells will impact their ability to draw water, applauded his remarks. 

4 million gallons a day

Since construction began in January 2023, Hyundai has raced to build seven affiliate manufacturing plants from almost 3,000 acres of clear-cut land just south of I-16. Hyundai officials say their goal is to bring their first electric vehicle off the assembly line by the end of the year — in time to make those cars eligible for buyer incentives in the Biden Administration’s 2024 Inflation Reduction Act.

Water is key to those plans. In August 2023, Hyundai’s request for 4 million gallons a day for the Ellabell site colloquially known as the Hyundai Metaplant, first surfaced in public documents submitted to EPD. 

But officials at the Georgia Department of Economic Development and the Savannah Harbor Interstate 16 Corridor Joint Development Authority, who brokered the overall deal, knew of this request before the agreement was finalized in July 2022. They didn’t push back on the water request. 

“They give us their volumes, what they need, and then we were the middleman, if you will, between Bryan County as the operator and EPD trying to facilitate how all that works together,” said Trip Tollison, president and CEO of the Savannah Economic Development Authority and secretary/treasurer of the JDA.

In June, the consultants at Thomas & Hutton revised the justification of need required to secure water usage saying that the way water will be used by the car manufacturers are “industry trade secrets.”

“They don’t share that info,” said Thompson, who helped prepare Bryan County’s water withdrawal permit application. 

As well, the needs document, submitted to the Georgia Environmental Protection Division as part of the permit application process, fails to connect the dots between the requested water volume and Hyundai’s manufacturing processes or plans at the Ellabell site. 

Instead, it makes generalized supportive statements.

“Without the use of these wells there would not be enough water to supply the Mega-Site and associated industrial, commercial, and residential growth in surrounding areas. Bryan County would not meet its commitments to the State, JDA, and Project EA to provide water capacity for the upcoming manufacturing facilities. Other economic development regions will also stall and growth within Bryan County will dramatically slow,” Thomas & Hutton wrote in the document.

Bryan and Bulloch counties need the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to approve the two wells requested by each county. All four wells will be drilled in Bulloch, just over the county line from Bryan County. Bulloch was chosen in part because it’s the only one of the four counties whose development authorities make up the Savannah Harbor Interstate 16 Corridor Joint Development Authority that’s not under water withdrawal restrictions imposed by state regulators. The restrictions are in place to protect the aquifer from from overuse and to protect Georgia from a lawsuit with South Carolina, where Georgia’s use of the aquifer in the last century led to an intrusion of salt water in Hilton Head wells. 

Elusive data

Through the spring, the development authority took the lead on solving the bureaucratic hurdles associated with Georgia’s biggest economic development project and explained the water permit solutions as a matter of cost and time efficiencies.  

Needs, those officials explained, were for the manufacturing plant itself, as well as a mix of anticipated industrial, commercial and residential projects that would rise near the site. 

Water sources other than well permits in Bulloch County were rejected because they were not cost effective. Those rejected plans included sucking surface water from the Savannah River or drilling wells in Effingham County. 

The justification of need document describes why other water sources were rejected.

Tollison told The Current in a July interview that the surface water alternative would have cost $362 million more than Bulloch well water, and would have taken 10 years longer to implement. 

In August, the consultant Thompson told the JDA that the cost to local counties for a surface water option would be “upwards of $1 billion.” 

Tollison expressed confidence that Bulloch water wells would not cause suffering to area residents or farmers, as he similarly expressed frustration that slowing the water permit process would negatively affect the state’s corporate partner, Hyundai. 

“I can tell you, from where we sit, we believe that there’s enough water for everybody – for this project, ag, residential wells, you name it,” Tollison told The Current. “Because it’s like I’ve said many times before: Never in a million years would we go after a project –  never in a million years would our governor allow us to go after a project –  where a lot of groundwater or drinking water would be sacrificed for others.”  

Yet nowhere in public documents submitted to regulators or the state has Hyundai had to explain why it wants or needs the right to use the equivalent of six Olympic swimming pools full of water a day. 

Instead, the nine-page justification document, originally submitted in August 2023 and revised in June 2024, provides few clues, giving water-use formulas for various other nearby developments, but not for the plant. 

For example, warehouses listed in the document are allotted 3 gallons of water for every 1,000 square feet. Offices get 200 gallons per day for every 1,000 square feet. But the so-called “unit loadings” for the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America/Battery JV are listed as “N/A” for “not available.”

Estimating the known uses

Hyundai’s LaMuraglia listed a variety of uses for the water, but didn’t link those uses to volumes.

“The water that HMGMA and our on-site affiliates require to operate is used for the concrete during the plant’s construction, office domestic water, cafeteria operations, utility systems, boilers, chillers, HVAC systems, car body leak testing, coolant, paint shop equipment, fire suppression, plant cleaning and general manufacturing operational use,” he wrote in an email to The Current. 
Hyundai Motor Company, the third-largest automobile manufacturer in the world, describes itself as committed to sustainable industrial processes. 

In its 2023 sustainability report, the company provides some clues to the average water use needed to build its cars across its global manufacturing facilities, not including the metaplant.

There, the company disclosed that it used an average of 714 gallons per vehicle across all of the company’s manufacturing lines. It is unclear which of the company’s multiple car lines might use more or less than that average amount.

The world’s largest EV manufacturer, Tesla, says that it uses 655 gallons per vehicle. 

Electric vehicle assembly generally uses less water than gas-powered cars, according to Bert Bras, the Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems at Georgia Tech.

“An electric vehicle tends to use a bit less water in assembly than an internal combustion engine assembly in part because there is a lot of part cleaning going on in internal combustion engine assembly to make sure no sharp metal pieces end up in engines and (automatic) gearboxes,” he told The Current. 

At the Ellabell site, Hyundai plans to produce 300,000 vehicles a year. According to the company’s generalized average water use, that number of cars would equate to approximately 0.587 million gallons per day. 

Meanwhile, the federal agency that regulates clean air and water has its own data about water needs on industrial and manufacturing plants.

The EPA’s “Lean Water Toolkit” estimates that on average each worker in an industrial setting would use 10–25 gallons of water per shift. The higher estimate would be needed when “there are toilets, showers, and full kitchen services (that is, food preparation and dish washing).” 

The Hyundai site in Bryan County is projected to hire 8,500 workers. With the EPA metric, a higher-end estimate of water use simply for the workforce would be an additional 0.213 million gallons a day. 

The site’s battery manufacturer is likely to be another large water user. 

However, South Korea’s LG, which will be making batteries for the Hyundai cars assembled in Ellabell, has not disclosed its water needs, despite multiple requests from The Current.

“Apologize for not being much of a help here,” the LG Energy Solution Global Communications Team said in a statement. “Unfortunately, at the moment, there’s nothing else we could provide you with, aside from the fact that we’re cooperating with the county regarding the water usage at our joint venture with Hyundai Motor Group.”

LG’s 2023 sustainability report says the company evaluates water risks before establishing any facility, and that it avoids using groundwater. It doesn’t provide a metric for water use per EV battery produced.

All LG battery factories, it says, “obtain processed water (industrial and tap water) from approved suppliers, avoiding the use of groundwater.” 

All water expected to be piped to the Ellabell plant, however, is groundwater from the Floridan aquifer. 

Mining for the materials used in EV batteries is a notoriously water-intense process. Researchers estimate it takes 500,000 to 2 million gallons of water to extract a ton of lithium. But what’s important locally for the Ellabell plant is the water required for battery assembly. 

The LG battery plant is projected to have an annual production capacity of 30 gigawatt hours. That’s equal to about 450,000 vehicle batteries.

Water use at other standalone EV battery plants around the country varies greatly.

For example, an SK Innovation battery site being built in Stanton, Tenn., is predicted to require 1.2 million gallons of water per day for an annual production capacity of 45 GWh, according to a 2023 environmental assessment of the project produced by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

Scaled for LG’s production would mean a 0.8 million gallon per day requirement at the Ellabell site. 

SK Battery America in Commerce requested 3.6 million gallons per day in its application for a Development of Regional Impact for its EV battery  factory with a 22 GWh production capacity, according to a press release from Gov. Brian Kemp’s office. Scaled to LG’s production in Ellabell, that rate of water usage equates to 4.9 million gallons a day, more than Hyundai has requested for the whole site. 

Irrigation at the megasite will require a portion of that 4 million gallons a day, at least until the wastewater treatment plant is up and running.

“When it’s operational, we’ll be able to send reclaimed water back to Hyundai for them to use, and we’re working right now actively with them, figuring out ways to use that to the fullest,” Thompson told the JDA board in August.

This story was provided by WABE content partner The Current.