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The cobalt plant near Tacna has a new price tag, a new timeline and a new water number. Here's what's actually settled.

EVelution Energy pitched a $200 million plant in 2023. It's now $450 million, construction is still a year off, and the water figures don't line up from one document to the next.

Dan Bustard

Founder & Publisher

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Black-and-white photo of an irrigation canal running through desert toward a pumping plant, with the Gila Mountains in the background.
The Wellton-Mohawk Canal, with the Gila Mountains behind it, photographed in 2005. Water is the question residents keep asking about the proposed cobalt plant. Credit: Photo: David G. De Vries, Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress
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Out between Tacna and Dateland, on a patch of desert where somebody once planned an ethanol plant, EVelution Energy wants to build the first commercial-scale cobalt processing plant in the United States.

On Thursday night in Wellton, people who live near it got a chance to ask questions.

According to KYMA, Supervisor Darren Simmons invited the company to the town hall. EVelution's president and CEO, Navaid Alam, said afterward that residents "wanted more information on water use, water recycling, air quality, air emissions."

That's a pretty good list. And if you try to answer the first item on it from what's been published over the past three years, you'll find out why people are asking.

What the plant is supposed to do

Cobalt goes into rechargeable batteries, jet engines and radar systems. Most of it is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo and refined in China. EVelution's plan is to bring in cobalt hydroxide, process it near Tacna and sell the finished metal and cobalt sulfate in the U.S.

The company says the plant could eventually supply up to 40 percent of projected U.S. cobalt demand. Japan's Mitsui & Co. has signed an $850 million long-term agreement to buy a large share of the output, KYMA reported in May.

That's the pitch. Here's how it has changed.

The numbers, then and now

The price. In 2023, the company described a $200 million plant, according to AZ Inno. Its October 2026 financing announcement puts the total at about $450 million.

The timeline. In 2023, the plan was to start construction in 2024 and be running by 2026. In April 2025, the company told Arizona's Family it expected to break ground at the end of that year. Now the company says construction on the processing plant will start in 2027, after a feasibility study, a final investment decision and financing are in place. Commercial operation is targeted for 2029.

The jobs. The 2023 estimate was 60 permanent jobs. Arizona's Family in 2025 reported 1,200 construction jobs and up to 60 permanent positions, citing a local economic impact report. The company's October release talks about more than 6,200 "direct, indirect and induced" jobs over the life of the project. Those are different kinds of estimates, and the 60 permanent jobs figure hasn't been publicly replaced with a new one that I could find.

The plant itself. The 2023 plan called for about 33,000 metric tons of battery-grade cobalt sulfate a year. The current design, according to the company and the trade publication Engineering News, is up to about 20,000 tons of cobalt sulfate plus about 3,000 tons of cobalt metal.

None of that is unusual for a project that's still being designed and financed. Plans change, costs go up, and timelines slide. But it means that when somebody quotes you a number about this plant, it's worth asking which year that number came from.

About the water

This is the part people keep coming back to, and for good reason.

In 2023, a Yuma County staff report said the plant would use 74 million gallons of water a month, pumped from groundwater wells, according to the Arizona Republic. That works out to roughly 227 acre-feet a month, or something like 2,700 acre-feet a year.

In July 2026, EVelution announced that test drilling on the site had found enough groundwater to run the plant. That release put the plant's net freshwater consumption at about 34 acre-feet a month, or about 408 acre-feet a year. The company compares that to the water needed for about 70 acres of irrigated farmland in Yuma County.

Those two numbers are not measuring the same thing. The 2023 figure appears to describe the water the process would use. The 2026 figure is net freshwater, after the company's planned recycling of about 70 percent of its process water. The plant design has also changed since 2023. So you can't simply say the water use dropped by 85 percent. You also can't say anybody got it wrong.

What you can say is that there isn't one public document that lines up the old number, the new number and the recycling math, so that a farmer in Wellton could check it.

At the Board of Supervisors meeting on June 1, farmer Velma Limmeroth raised exactly that, Arizona Luminaria reported. She pointed out that reporting had cited both 74 million gallons a month and 100 acre-feet a year. She also said the local irrigation district had put roughly $95,000 toward drilling to test the water supply.

A website run by unnamed county residents, which the Greater Yuma Economic Development Corp. itself mentions in its project update, has posted a list of the questions it wants answered: how much the wells will actually pump, what the peak pumping rate will be, and whether the 408 acre-feet covers only the first phase of production.

One more piece of context matters here. EVelution says the site sits outside any of Arizona's Active Management Areas, the regions where the state limits groundwater pumping. So there's no state cap on how much the wells can pump, though they still have to be registered and their use reported. The company also says the groundwater it found is salty enough that it would need treatment before farmers could use it, and that its plant is designed to treat it.

What's settled, and what isn't

Settled:

  • The Yuma County Board of Supervisors approved a special use permit for the processing plant in March 2023, on 137.98 net acres near Old Highway 80 and Avenue 47½ E. The county's meeting record identifies the parcel and permitted use.
  • Supervisors approved a second special use permit in early 2024 for the plant's solar farm, about 28 megawatts.
  • The company says construction on the solar farm began this summer.
  • U.S. immigration officials approved the company's EB-5 offering on Sept. 30. Under that program, foreign investors put money into U.S. projects in exchange for a path to a green card. EVelution is trying to raise up to about $64.8 million that way.

Not settled:

  • The Export-Import Bank of the United States has given the company a non-binding letter of interest for up to $275 million. That's an expression of interest, subject to the bank's own review. It isn't a loan. Finland's export credit agency has issued a non-binding letter too.
  • The feasibility study, the final decision to build and the construction financing are all still ahead, by the company's own account.
  • The company's October release lists getting government approvals among the project's risks. It doesn't say which permits it still needs, and neither does the economic development corporation's September update.

Where this leaves things

Alam told KYMA the company wants to keep the community safe, and the town hall drew a positive reaction from residents, KYMA reported. Construction on the plant itself is expected to start sometime next year.

The water question isn't going away, and it doesn't need to be a fight. Most of what people are asking for is just arithmetic: how much the wells will pump, in gallons or acre-feet, on an average day and a busy one, written down in one place. That's an answer the company is in the best position to give.

If EVelution or the county publishes those figures, I'll update this story.

Photo: David G. De Vries, Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress

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