Huge US lithium mine gets govt approval
Operations at Rhyolite Ridge will produce enough lithium to supply the batteries for more than 370,000 electric vehicles every year, Australian operator Ioneer said.
The plant will create 500 construction jobs over the next few years and 350 jobs during its decades of extraction, the company said.
"There are few deposits in the world as impactful as Rhyolite Ridge," said Ioneer Executive Chairman James Calaway, heralding the permit issued Thursday by the Bureau of Land Management.
The company's managing director, Bernard Rowe, said construction would begin next year.
"This permit gives us a license to commence construction in 2025 and begin our work in creating hundreds of good-paying rural jobs, generating millions in tax revenue for Esmeralda County, and bolstering the domestic production of critical minerals," he said.
The news comes less than two weeks before Americans go to the polls to elect a new president, and will be welcomed in Nevada, where unemployment is well above the national average.
The administration of President Joe Biden has made the green transition a key plank of its economic policy, investing heavily in technologies aimed at slashing the pollution that is causing the climate to change.
Scientists say electric vehicles are a vital link in that chain, and their widespread adoption in the car-dependent US will be vital if the country is to meet its carbon reduction targets.
Biden has tried to nudge the US auto industry to re-tool and shift production away from gas-guzzlers and into electric cars, in a move he says will help create jobs at home.
Subsidies for consumers have rewarded automakers who produce EVs in the United States, even while they struggle to source lithium batteries -- a sector dominated by strategic rival China.
But the project at Rhyolite Ridge has highlighted the trade-off between the need to adapt energy sources and the desire to protect the planet's biodiversity.
Campaigners say the mine will threaten the unique habitat of the endangered Tiehm's Buckwheat -- a rare wildflower with delicate cream-colored blossoms that grows only in this corner of Nevada.
"By greenlighting this mine the Bureau of Land Management is abandoning its duty to protect endangered species like Tiehm's Buckwheat and it's making a mockery of the Endangered Species Act," said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation group.
"We need lithium for the energy transition, but it can't come with a price tag of extinction."
Ioneer admits that over the years the mine is in operation around a fifth of the flower's habitat will be directly affected.
But the company, which has spent $2.5 million researching the plant, says mining will not affect its survival, insisting their experiments show it is already growing well in greenhouses.