Lithium 'White Gold Rush' in Nevada Could Desecrate Native Land

Over 17,000 claims have been made to mine lithium in Nevada, most of which is on Native American land.

This so-called "white gold rush," named for its similarity to the gold rush in California in the mid-1800s, comes in response to increasing worldwide demand for lithium for battery manufacture.

"Most Li (lithium) consumed in the U.S. is mined in Australia and South America, refined and processed into cathodes in Asia, and then shipped here and to Western Europe to assemble electric batteries for vehicles," Michael A. McKibben, a lithium research professor at the University of California, Riverside, told Newsweek.

"The mad global Li rush is supply and demand driven; demand for electric vehicle, smartphone and immobile electrical grid storage batteries has made Li consumption go way up and prices have increased nearly 500 percent in the last two years: now over $70,000 per metric ton (2,200 lbs) of lithium carbonate."

However, three-quarters of the planned mining sites are on Nevada tribal lands. There is concern that the destructive and polluting processes of lithium mining will decimate the local land and its sacred significance to the tribes.

Shelley Harjo, a Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone tribe member, said in a statement that the Thacker Pass mining site in northwest Nevada, which is expected to produce at least 80,000 tons of lithium each year, is also where dozens of Native Americans were killed in 1865. Harjo said that the Tahker Pass mining site "will be the biggest desecration and rape of a known Native American massacre site in our area."

"Current traditional mining of hard-rock granitic Li pegmatite deposits (mainly in Australia) and soft-rock salar (dry lake) bed brine deposits (mainly by evaporation in Chile and Argentina) are both quite damaging environmentally, in terms of disturbance of land surfaces, high water consumption, and having a very large footprint," McKibben said.

"Many of the potential Nevada deposits are in weathered volcanics and their derived sediments, so not quite as hard as granite, but also not as soft as salar brine deposits. So many of the Nevada deposits will still require open-pit operations, blasting, crushing, roasting and acid leaching like the ones in granites."

Mining has a wide range of adverse effects on the environment and local humans. Erosion and sinkholes can destroy habitats, loss of biodiversity can occur due to the contamination of soil, groundwater, and surface water by the chemicals emitted from mining processes, and people can be negatively affected by carbon emissions from the mines.

"Lithium is sourced in a number of ways, eg. hard rock mining [in Australia and Portugal] and underground reservoirs [in Argentina, Brazil and Chile], and Nevada in the U.S.," Mohan Yellishetty, a mining and environmental engineering associate professor at Monash University in Australia, told Newsweek.

"Like any mining, the Li extraction will have impacts. One has high CO2 emissions (the Spudumene route produces 3 times more CO2 than the brine route) and the other route (salar brines) has an enormous land and water footprint (approximately 3x water and 7x land requirement) per ton of lithium production," he said.

In the face of the changing climate and the public reaction to the destruction of land, the future of mining does involve the development of less damaging processes.

"New non-invasive recovery technologies called Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) involve adsorbing Li directly out of geologic brines using engineered Al, Ti or Mn (aluminum, titanium, manganese) nanoparticles. Basically an 'ionic sponge' process," McKibben said.

"These new techniques are being applied to geothermal brines and oil field brines. Salar producers are also starting to switch over to DLE instead of the more damaging traditional evaporative methods," he said. "If DLE works well and can scale up to commercial levels of production, then ultimately traditional hard-rock Li mining will be priced out of the market."