HUMBOLDT COUNTY — Ed Bartell looks out over his field of rye and toward a dip in the land between the Montana Mountains and the Double H mountains. The snow-covered Santa Rosa mountains stand behind him as a backdrop.
Wearing a cowboy hat, flannel shirt, blue jeans and boots, he points toward the dip in the land, where an untapped reserve of 3.1 million metric tons of lithium carbonate extract could change his life.
Bartell is in the middle of litigation with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over its approval of Nevada Lithium Corp.’s proposed lithium mine. The mine, if it is allowed to open, would become the country’s largest lithium mine, extracting 60,000 tons of lithium per year to make battery-grade lithium products for electric vehicles and appliances.
The open-pit mine would take over about nine square miles of land and have a lifespan of 46 years. Because the deposit is soft, minimal blasting and crushing is expected, according to the company.
The lithium ore would then be processed in a leaching circuit with sulfuric acid and then purified using crystallizers, according to the company’s website.
Lithium Nevada Corp., a subsidiary of Lithium Americas, said the project was designed to “avoid environmentally sensitive and rugged terrain”
and allowed for future potential expansions. The project will also require 2,600 acre-feet of water per year in its first phase, according to the company. Lithium Nevada proposed to have a zero-water discharge process in place, along with water recycling technologies to reduce water consumption.
“As the U.S. electric vehicle supply chain continues to grow, we remain committed to developing Thacker Pass with all of our stakeholders’ interests in mind,” Lithium Nevada Corp CEO Jonathan Evan said in a statement. “This includes ensuring we move the right project forward to align Thacker Pass with the growing needs of our potential customers and strategic partners.”
But Bartell, who since 2008 has owned about 1,000 acres of naturally occurring rye that is watered from the water table underneath, is worried that when the mine starts pumping water from the table, the water level will drop and he’ll lose his rye field — along with his cattle that graze it.
“(It’s) pretty devastating,” Bartell said.
Although the Bureau of Mining Regulation and Reclamation has written it was not concerned about leaching, Bartell is worried that the sulfuric acid, which will be placed in a waste dump site that will be lined with a heavy plastic liner, will seep out of the plastic and pollute the water.
Bartell and other groups against the project, such as Great Basin Research Watch, want the company to neutralize that leftover acid before putting it in the dump site.
Bartell is engaged in two lawsuits: one challenging the water rights transfers that gave the mining company the right to transfer water from underneath his rye fields to the mine, and the other challenging BLM’s permitting process. He expects decisions from those lawsuits in August or September.
Originally from Oregon, Bartell has called the area of Orovada — an unincorporated town of about 50 people — home. His wife is one of two teachers at the school of about 30 or 40 children, and in his free time he likes to take photographs of the nature around him.
“I love it out here,” he said. “If you like trees, it’s not very good. The mountains are gorgeous.”
He doesn’t know what he’ll do if the mine moves forward. If he were to sell the ranch, he’d have to disclose concerns about the mine and the water level, and the value would decrease.
Concentrations of arsenic and antimony, an element that can be toxic to humans, in the backfill pit are predicted to exceed drinking water standards over a 300-year period, according to the environmental impact statement, but the outflow of antimony concentrations is “not predicted to migrate west” outside of the mine’s boundary. Lithium Nevada Corp. proposed groundwater quality monitoring downgradient of the pit and will institute mitigation options if necessary, according to the environmental impact statement.
Bartell isn’t alone in his concerns.
Tribal concerns
The People of Red Mountain, a coalition of tribes in the area, have led the effort to thwart the mine.
Gary McKinney, a spokesperson for People of Red Mountain and a member of the Duck Valley Indian reservation, said they were descendants of a man named Oxfam who was the sole adult survivor of the Sept. 12, 1865, massacre between the U.S. Army and the Northern Paiutes that occurred on the mountain.
At least 31 Northern Paiute people were killed, and tribes refer to the mountain as “Peehee mu’huh,” which means “rotten moon,” in commemoration of the massacre.
The People of Red Mountain still have Paiute meetings and gather together, McKinney said. Many use traditional Paiute language, and they talk about what each root on the land means and what they’re used for.
“We still gather,” he said, “and (we’re) not wanting that culture to get further and further away from our reality.”
The company has advertised the mine as a good place for Native Americans to work at, McKinney said.
“There’s a lot of other options out there in the city,” he said, “but right here in a closed Indigenous community, it’d be hard because there’s nowhere to turn to except for a big mine like that.”
And pretty soon, he said, the tribes will watch the mine get rich, while the People of Red Mountain have no time for their culture and their family, and they will be stuck with problems once the mine runs empty.
“You can look back in China, look at their lithium deal and how their water got poisoned, and how their fish died,” McKinney said. “Then you can go look down in Chile, where their Indigenous community thought that they were having a good deal, but really they became slaves to that mine.”
They are also worried that if Thacker Pass goes through, more mines will follow and more land will be desecrated.
In the future, a series of mines could line the mountain range, creating an “enormous mining district,” said John Hadder, director of the Great Basin Resource Watch, which has also joined the fight against the mine.
And, Hadder wondered, after a mine takes all the resources and exits the community, leaving behind the buildings the company built, what will happen to the area?
Wildlife considerations
Coupled with agricultural and cultural considerations lies another layer of concern: the effect the mine will have on wildlife.
The area is home to the sage grouse, which are grayish brown and have dark bellies with long, pointed tail feathers. Biologists are concerned the mine will further threaten the sage grouse, the population of which has been on decline in part due to a wildfire 10 years ago.
The male sage grouse find an area called a lek, where they display themselves for courtship and show off their chest feathers to females, said Katie Fite, a biologist and public lands director with WildLands Defense, one of the environmental plaintiffs suing the Bureau of Land Management over the mine. The sage grouse return to the same lek sites each year.
The sage grouse hens need the sagegrass for nesting, and they need the insects associated with wildflowers there to survive, Fite said.
“The kind of sagebrush habitat, this hard winter habitat, is really irreplaceable,” Fite said. “The area was long known as prime habitat in Nevada — the best of the best.”
The sage grouse is the “flagship of species of the sagegrass ecosystem,” Fite said, and if the sage grouse goes away, the entire ecosystem will soon follow, she said.
The environmental impact statement prepared by the BLM didn’t find there would be significant threats to the sage grouse, and Fite called the environmental impact statement “poorly done, saying there weren’t clear estimates on the number of sage grouse in the area.
“Noise levels during exploration are expected to be lower at this lek compared to ongoing mining operations, and are not expected to exceed thresholds associated with sage grouse breeding behavior,” the statement says.
BLM did write that the construction noise may affect sage grouse by disrupting behavior, causing physiological stress, especially during the breeding season between February and May. The noise might also increase predation of the sage grouse because the construction noise might mask the sounds of a predator approaching.
BLM wrote in the statement that a control plan for ravens — predators of the sage grouse — will be put in place so that the numbers of sage grouse do not decrease due to “conditions enabled by the construction and operation” of the mine. There will also be fencing around the facility to help prevent the sage grouse, which fly, from entering the project area.
“This lithium mining boom is just the antithesis of what needs to happen if sage grouse are going to be preserved,” Fite said.
What’s the cost?
The environmental groups against the project have stressed that they aren’t against mining as a whole — just against Thacker Pass specifically.
Hadder says the whole community should have to consent to a project and should be made fully aware of the consequences of the project and have the right to say no.
“ ‘The price is too high,’ is what a lot of people would say,” Hadder said. “I mean, mining is destructive, period. It does a lot of damage, so it has to be done carefully.”
Funding should be allocated for communities to access an independent assessment of a project, rather than the company paying a contractor to conduct the study, Hadder said. A model with the Environmental Protection Agency already exists with grants, but it should be expanded, Hadder said.
Hadder said he thought the project was moved along quickly and permitted in a sloppy fashion. His group has looked at technical reports that were developed, and he feels that there is a lack of attention to important details in the analysis.
“The community feels like they have no choice,” Hadder said. “So they’re just gonna have to do what they can do, talking to the company and so forth.”
The environmental impact statement was also conducted during COVID-19, Hadder said, and many people felt cut off from the public process.
There’s also different technology that opponents of the mine think could be better. Bartell said Tesla developed a new process to extract lithium out of clay deposits using table salt, which is less harmful.
McKinney said people were also working to reform the General Mining Law of 1872, which he thinks is outdated, based on when mining consisted of “donkeys, pickaxes and shovels.” The law allows corporations to prospect on public domain lands and stake claims on mineral discoveries they make. Companies can extract minerals without paying royalties to the U.S. government, unlike oil and gas companies that operate on federal territory.
“That law is being used to push this whole effort with lithium batteries and electric vehicles,” McKinney said.
In late April, Natural Resources Committee Chair Rep. Raúl Grijalva., D-Ariz., and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., introduced House and Senate legislation to modernize the mining law. The Clean Energy Minerals Reform Act requires hardrock mining operations to meet certain requirements and standards that are similar to what already apply to oil, gas and coal development on public lands, according to a statement from the Natural Resources Committee.
“This antiquated system has allowed mining companies to extract more than $300 billion worth of gold, silver, copper and other valuable minerals from U.S. public lands without paying a cent in federal royalties to the American people,” they wrote in a statement. “These same companies have left the public with billions of dollars in cleanup costs for abandoned hardrock mines, which have polluted 40% of the headwaters of western watersheds. Many Indigenous communities’ sacred sites and lands are continuously at-risk of being permanently destroyed by mining.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., with the help of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., broke with progressives in their party to help keep a similar provision out of the multitrillon-dollar infrastructure package that passed Congress in 2021.
“The legislation would have an unfair, outsized effect on the state of Nevada, where most of the land is owned by the federal government, and it imposes taxes on federal land,” Cortez Masto said at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which Manchin chairs. “But more importantly, moving this type of reform through a short-term budget process would create uncertainty for the industry.”
But groups like People of Red Mountain want to see a change to the old mining law and have mining companies pay more royalties.
“This isn’t green at all,” McKinney said. “This is destroying our part of the earth and taking the green from here and turning it into money.”