Edvard Pettersson

(CN) — The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Thursday gave final approval to the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mining project in Nevada as the Biden administration seeks to strengthen domestic supplies of critical minerals needed for the country's transition to clean energy.

“We have moved quickly to build a robust and sustainable clean energy economy that will create jobs to support families, boost local economies, and help address environmental injustice, said Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department. "The Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine project is essential to advancing the clean energy transition and powering the economy of the future.”

Demand for critical minerals such as lithium, which is used in electric vehicle and grid-storage batteries, is expected to grow exponentially as the U.S. and many other countries around the globe transition away from fossil fuels, developing power grids and setting transportation targets that will require massive amounts of battery capacity.

The project in southern Nevada's Silver Peak Range, close to its border with California, will be able to supply enough lithium to power about 370,000 electric vehicles annually, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

Yet the announcement wasn't welcomed by environmental advocates who argue that the project poses severe threats to the region's biodiversity, cultural landscapes and water.

The Rhyolite Ridge mine, the Center for Biological Diversity said, would drive the rare wildflower Tiehm’s buckwheat to extinction because the plant’s entire global population is within the footprint of the mine.

It would also severely damage water sources and sacred sites in the Silver Peak Range, according to the organization, harming the cultural heritage of the Western Shoshone people.

“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, Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We need lithium for the energy transition, but it can’t come with a price tag of extinction.”

Tiehm’s buckwheat is a rare Nevada wildflower with delicate cream-colored blossoms that grows on just 10 acres of the boron- and lithium-rich soils of the Silver Peak Range in Esmeralda County, the center said. The buckwheat was protected under the Endangered Species Act in 2022 and 910 acres surrounding the wildflowers were designated as critical habitat.

The Bureau of Land Management said in its announcement, however, that the final environmental impact statement for the mine assessed and identified significant protections for the endangered Tiehm’s buckwheat.

These protections, the bureau said, include redesigning and relocating project features, funding Tiehm’s buckwheat propagation work, and developing a formal Tiehm’s buckwheat protection plan. The project proponent, Ioneer, modified its project proposal to limit impacts on the plant and its critical habitat, according to the bureau.

“Rhyolite Ridge is the most important lithium project in Nevada,” James Calaway, the CEO of Ioneer, said in 2022. “It’s not just for the state, the project is necessary for America’s supply chain and its effort to electrify its transportation system.”

Ioneer’s project on Rhyolite Ridge is one of more than 40 major lithium mining projects in the approval pipeline in Nevada alone, with more than 15,000 outstanding lithium placer claims filed with the Nevada Division of Minerals.

Lithium, the third element on the periodic table, has an assortment of industrial uses, ranging from pharmaceuticals to glass to use in aluminum alloys. But demand has exploded due to its use in lithium-ion batteries, commonly used for grid storage, smartphones and, most importantly, electric vehicles.

The success of Tesla and the transition to electric vehicles underway in nearly every major automobile producer has spiked the demand for lithium in the United States and throughout the globe. This increase in demand has captured the attention of the mining industry in the United States, which has been weakened by its poor record of ecological destruction.

But new generation miners say they are after minerals important to reducing fossil fuel reliance in the United States. They further contend that the coronavirus and other geopolitical concerns mean it is incumbent upon the U.S. to discover and extract rare earth materials.

"The U.S. electric vehicle industry currently imports all of its lithium," Ioneer said, and the company's Nevada-based Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project "will quadruple the U.S. lithium supply and strengthen the domestic EV battery supply chain."