A federal judge on Monday ordered regulators to reexamine a state permit allowing Lithium Americas Corp.’s Thacker Pass mine to produce and store mining waste on more than a thousand acres of public land.
Chief Judge Miranda M. Du, however, rejected opponents’ claims that the project would cause “unnecessary and undue degradation” to the environment or wildlife, meaning construction of the mine can continue.
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Lithium Americas Corp. has landed a US$650-million financing with General Motors Co. that moves the Canadian lithium company closer to breaking ground on a massive lithium mine that should help alleviate a North American shortfall for the key battery metal.
Detroit-based GM is set to become the largest shareholder in Lithium Americas, with a stake of just under 10 per cent, and it will also be entitled to exclusive supplies of the lithium carbonate produced during the first 10 years of the mine’s operation.
Nevada and other states are poised to rake in huge benefits from a boom in lithium mining for batteries pushed by federal incentives as U.S. demand surges for electric vehicles (EVs).
Environmentalists, however, are warning amid investments from the Biden-backed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that a heavy-handed approach to lithium mining could bring many of the same problems associated with fossil fuel extraction.
(Reuters) – A U.S. judge said on Thursday she will rule “in the next couple of months” on whether former President Donald Trump erred in 2021 when he approved Lithium Americas Corp’s (LAC.TO) Thacker Pass lithium mining project in northern Nevada.
The timeline further delays the company’s plans to build North America’s largest lithium mine even as Washington pushes to boost domestic production of metals crucial to the green energy transition and wean the country off Chinese supplies.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/
The interpretation of a 150-year-old mining law could be a part of whether a U.S. District Court judge upholds the federal government’s approval of a massive lithium mine — a project that has faced challenges from a local rancher, environmental groups and Native American tribes.
In legal briefs over the past two years, the mine’s opponents have challenged federal permitting of the planned Thacker Pass mine north of Winnemucca. Federal land managers, they argued, fast-tracked the project and did not adequately consider a number of issues in its environmental review — the mine’s footprint on wildlife habitat, groundwater, air quality and Indigenous sites.
RENO, Nev. (AP) — A high-stakes, yearslong legal battle over a huge lithium mine planned in Nevada resumes Thursday with arguments from lawyers for the mining company, the U.S. agency that approved it and the rancher, tribes and conservationists fighting the project.
U.S. District Judge Miranda Du has refused twice over the past year to grant temporary injunctions sought by tribal leaders who say the mine site is on sacred land where their ancestors were massacred by the U.S. Cavalry in 1865.
The town of Tonopah, Nev., was born out of a silver rush. A frantic race to extract a natural resource created a town of more than 10,000 people — for a while. Today, Tonopah is home to a little over 2,000 people. But there’s a new mining boom in town.
You can see it when you check in at the old Mitzpah Hotel, all faded glory, ghost stories and tales about Wyatt Earp. Above the cash register, next to a chandelier, a screen advertises a lithium exploration company. And forty minutes outside of town, Silver Peak lithium mine is in the process of doubling production.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/
There is an otherworldly feel to the crystalline-blue evaporation ponds that sit in Clayton Valley, an arid area in Nevada’s least populated county, Esmeralda. From above, the ponds look like a grid of pooled water arranged in a gradient that moves from a deep-sea blue to a light-sky tone. The man-made desert pools contain what is naturally underneath the ground: water.
Pumps, drilled deep into the Earth, pull brine from an underground aquifer, and pipes move the salty water into the expansive holding ponds. This is not just any water. It is rich in lithium, a mineral needed for electric cars and large-scale storage batteries, technologies in high demand as countries and industries seek to decarbonize national economies and electric grids.
Three women trek into the barren Nevada desert, boots crunching down a wash until one of them stops at an overhang, pulls out a geology pick, and chips away a chunk of rock. Over the next few minutes, and during hours of interviews, they explain the relationship between this stone and the battery that powers your electric car.
They talk about prehistoric volcanoes, subterranean brine lakes, advanced technology and the mineral that is changing the future of our planet. Lithium. This curiosity of the periodic table is an element so sensitive it can’t be found alone in nature. The pure white metal, when exposed to air, promptly oxidizes and turns black.
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The University sold the majority of its stake in the Lithium Americas Corporation during the second quarter of 2022, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings released over the summer. As of last filing, the University’s holdings in the company are around $4.5 million, down from $92 million earlier this year.
Still, Protect Thacker Pass, a Nevada-based coalition of activists, has argued that the University’s holdings in the company remain unacceptable. Max Wilbert, the co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, said, “We need far deeper and more significant change, including an end to car manufacturing, to stop the [ecological] crisis we’re in.” According to the U.S. Department of Energy, lithium is used in most of today’s electric vehicles.
US-based Nevada Gold Mines (NGM) continues to demonstrate the impact of Barrick Gold’s strategy of combining the best assets with the best people as new projects and prospects secure its future as a high-quality, long-life operation for decades to come, says NGM chairperson Mark Bristow.
Speaking during a visit by a group of equity analysts and investors to the development of the Goldrush underground project, the openpit operations and processing facilities at Cortez, and the Third Shaft project and core shack at Turquoise Ridge, Bristow said NGM had unlocked significant synergies by consolidating mines, teams, processing facilities and landholdings.
(Bloomberg) — The high-desert mountain pass overlooking alfalfa fields and RV parks doesn’t look like a battleground that will shape the country’s clean energy future.
But when the rock samples here are pulverized, pulled apart and mixed with chemicals, they yield a metal increasingly seen as white gold: lithium, a critical ingredient for batteries used in electric vehicles, solar energy storage, and consumer electronics.
In 2019, Barrick Gold Corp and Newmont formed a mega-company that would be managed by Barrick’s executives. The new company, Nevada Gold Mines, now accounts for about 75% of the state’s gold production.
Earlier this year, High Country News and The Nevada Independent published an investigation into Nevada Gold Mines’ outsized influence in northeastern Nevada. With about 7,000 employees and 4,000 contractors, Nevada Gold Mines dominates the economy of that part of the state, operating with enormous influence and little competition.
The huge project on public land, approved by the Trump administration in its final days, has sparked an outcry and a lawsuit, but opposition among Native Americans is not unanimous.
Thacker Pass, a remote valley in the high desert of northern Nevada, will always be sacred for Gary McKinney of the Paiute-Shoshone Tribe. He often visits to honor ancestors said to be killed here by U.S. soldiers in 1865. “It’s been a gathering place for our people,” said McKinney, who lives on the Duck Valley Reservation, 100 miles to the east.
McKinney and others are now fighting a new battle over an open-pit mine planned for Thacker Pass, which sits atop a massive lode of lithium. Driven by soaring demand for lithium, which is vital to electric car batteries and renewable energy, a company called Lithium Americas hopes to break ground this year on the biggest lithium mine in the U.S.
(Bloomberg) — A lithium supplier for Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. expects to clear an environmental hurdle involving a rare flower next year, paving the way for deliveries to electric-vehicle makers ahead of looming shortages of the battery metal.
Ioneer Ltd. seeks to build its Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron project in Nevada, but the Australian company has been unable to get federal permits because public lands near the site are home to the endangered wildflower Tiehm’s buckwheat. The US Fish and Wildlife Service said in February it planned to designate about 910 acres near the project as a critical habitat for the pale yellow flower.
