Lithium is essential for the green economy, a key ingredient in the batteries that store solar energy and power electric vehicles. But the United States produces only a fraction of the global lithium supply from a single mine in Nevada.
There are big plans for more. The mining company Ioneer is on track to start construction on the Rhyolite Ridge lithium and boron mine on the Western edge of the state later this year, said the company’s managing director Bernard Rowe.
“This deposit is extremely large,” Rowe said. “Even as it stands today, we have 77 years of mine life. So this deposit will be in production for many, many generations.”
The Biden Administration approved the $2-billion project.
Another large project called Thacker Pass in Northern Nevada is already under construction and set to open next year.
“Do yourself a favor: Survey it, get to know about it, appreciate what we’re achieving here,” said Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo in a social media post documenting a tour of the site.
With the demand for battery storage on the rise, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has identified 66 lithium projects in some stage of development across the country.
Many of them are in the remote desert of Nevada.
Indigenous and environmental groups have said new lithium mines will cut off access to sacred land, damage habitat, cause pollution and dry up the water supply. But Gov. Lombardo calls lithium a “salvation” for Nevada’s economy, and the state is eager to take advantage of the buzz.
“The need for lithium and the interest in lithium is incredibly high,” said Jennifer Ott, deputy director of the Nevada Tech Hub, a new organization at the University of Nevada, Reno, supported by the federal government.
The Nevada Tech Hub is trying to build a clean-energy economy that includes mineral extraction, battery innovation and recycling. That means training engineers — and even truck drivers — to build a “lithium loop.”
It’s “not just a mining of materials, but a full ecosystem economy in the United States,” Ott said.
This won’t be easy. Lithium prices have swung wildly in recent years, plunging from record highs in 2022. President Trump’s climate policies have thrown cold water on the electric vehicle industry in the U.S., and some battery companies are scaling back, according to the Dallas Fed.
“We’ll always need a certain amount of lithium, but whether some of the really sky-high predictions for lithium come true or not, we don’t know,” said Nevada state geologist Simon Jowitt. “There are a lot of uncertainties here.”
For one, Jowitt says the battery industry is evolving fast.
“We don’t know what technologies are going to be rolled out in the next 10 or 20 years that will need minerals and metals. Is the future lithium-ion batteries, or is it sodium batteries or solid-state batteries?,” Jowitt said. “And all of those different technologies have different requirements.”
Ioneer’s Bernard Rowe said the Rhyolite Ridge mine has a built-in advantage to weather some of these uncertainties. It will produce boron alongside lithium — creating a buffer if lithium prices take another dive.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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