Max Wilbert, a 36-year-old environmental activist, says he cannot set foot anywhere near Thacker Pass, the site of one of the world’s largest lithium mines being developed in the northern part of the US state of Nevada.

The company developing an open-pit mine, a sulfuric acid plant, and a lithium processing facility on the piece of parched land measuring nearly 18,000 acres – larger than the size of Manhattan – took Wilbert and other activists to court in 2023 for their attempts to block the construction of the water-intensive mine in the driest part of the US.

“If we even go… within 200 metres of their site, we could get charged with a felony crime for violating court orders,” Wilbert tells TRT World.

Wilbert is facing a civil case, which means losing it may require him to personally pay the company, Lithium Nevada Corporation, fines to the tune of “at least $300,000, possibly quite a bit more”.

Lithium, described as the white gold of clean energy transition, is critical for renewable energy storage, particularly for electric vehicles (EVs). At present, the US imports seven of every 10 lithium batteries from China, which dominates the global EV battery manufacturing.

And this is where the Nevada mine gets so important for the US – in the context of President Donald Trump’s all-out trade war against China. Trump has slapped up to 245 percent tariff on China – a levy that makes EVs in the US a whole lot more expensive.

Initiated during the first term of President Trump and supported by the subsequent Biden administration, the lithium plant is seen as the answer to the US’s needs for critical minerals. People calling for ramping up the domestic production of lithium say it will reduce the US's reliance on foreign supply chains vulnerable to geopolitical tensions. 

The plant also aligns with Trump’s broader ambitions of creating manufacturing jobs. The three-year construction phase alone is expected to create nearly 2,000 direct jobs.

Slated to open later this decade, Thacker Pass is expected to produce 40,000 tonnes of battery-quality lithium carbonate a year in its first phase – enough to power up to 800,000 electric cars.

The parent company of Lithium Nevada Corporation is Lithium Nevada Ventures, which is jointly owned by automaker General Motors (38 percent) and a Canada-based firm Lithium Americas (62 percent).

Under an offtake agreement, GM will purchase 100 percent of the lithium output from the first phase of the Thacker Pass mine for 20 years. The company held the largest US market share among automakers at approximately 16.8 percent last year. 

The third-largest EV seller in the US in 2023, GM is planning to make all of its light-duty vehicles fully electric by 2035.

Activists like Wilbert are, however, not impressed.

“Lithium mining for EVs isn’t green, it’s greenwashing. It’s not green, it’s greed,” says Wilbert.

A spokesperson for Lithium Americas said the company will not comment for a story that “regurgitates issues” that the US courts have already resolved.

Supporters of the mining project say it will bring lost jobs back to the US and ensure access to natural resources necessary for a 21st-century economy. 

“I’d say that access to critical minerals and metals is (like) oil in today’s global economy,” Andrew Woods, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER) at the University of Nevada, tells TRT World.

Developing mines of these critical minerals will give “more leverage” to President Trump in his ongoing trade negotiations with foreign countries, he says.

“The mining industry in the US is not your grandfather’s mining with a pickaxe and shovel. It’s very complex, sophisticated, well-paid, and greener compared to (mining in) other parts of the world. Its importance is only going to grow.”.

Economy-versus-environment tradeoff 

Scaling up lithium extraction is considered essential to slashing carbon emissions. Yet the localised ecological and social costs of lithium mining continue to undermine sustainability, environmental activists claim.

Rural US communities like the one around Thacker Pass are left wrestling with the trade-offs. 

Some welcome mining firms for generating jobs in a state that had the highest unemployment rate in the country in February 2025.

Others fear environmental devastation. Nevada’s water tables — already stressed by drought — could be further strained by the massive water use in mining. An analysis of groundwater data from a Nevada well showed a drop in the water table of nearly five feet since 2018.

Wilbert says mining at Thacker Pass will extract more than 5,000 acre-feet of water annually from an aquifer in the Quinn River Valley, which is already under stress. 

For context, the same quantity of water can meet the needs of up to 15,000 US households for a whole year.

Similarly, 11,300 gallons of diesel – the quantity the mining company would burn every day for onsite operations – is enough to fill the fuel tanks of about 100 long-haul trucks.

“We need to stop the burning of fossil fuels. But EVs are probably not the right path to do so,” he says, when asked about the presumed necessity of lithium in the much-hyped renewable energy revolution.

Extracting one tonne of lithium from Thacker Pass may require mining and processing up to 500 tonnes of earth. Doing so would mean generating 2.3 tonnes of carbon emissions for every single tonne of lithium produced, he says.

“We can't mine our way out of the climate crisis. We need to scale back our energy consumption, our materials consumption,” he says, adding that switching from gasoline cars to EVs is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Others disagree.

Glenn Miller, an emeritus professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Nevada, says the net environmental impact of the Thacker Pass mine will be “substantially less than effectively all gold mines of its size”.

A self-described critic of the mining industry for four decades, Miller says the mine is the “most benign” he has ever examined throughout his career.

Unlike gold mines, Thacker Pass will have no long-term contaminated drainage from heaps, no potential for acidic drainage, no pit lakes and will have a concurrent partial pit refill reclamation plan, he says.

“Regarding long-term environmental and indigenous issues, we should perhaps all be more concerned how lithium extraction is conducted in less well-regulated regions around the world.”

A biodiversity hotspot

Thacker Pass is far from the only site in Nevada with lithium deposits. There are about 82 proposed lithium projects across the state.

According to Chris Clarke, an environmental writer who reports on the mining industry in Nevada, most of the firms trying to find lithium in the state are small entities looking to flip any potential site to a larger company after getting the initial paperwork done.

Referring to mining plans by Canada-based Rover Critical Minerals in Amargosa Valley, a remote desert community located 145 kilometres northwest of Las Vegas, Clarke tells TRT World there is significant local opposition due to potential impacts on groundwater.

Lithium mining will have a ‘ruinous impact’ on the Amargosa River in particular, which is an intermittent stream that runs mostly underground through aquifers in the arid desert of southern Nevada and south-eastern California.

“It's a groundwater-dependent ecosystem… You have an intense concentration of endemic species, species that live nowhere else,” he says.

One species that will face extinction in the event of lithium mining in Amargosa Valley is the Devil’s Hole pupfish, a small fish with a maximum length of up to 1.2 inches considered a critically endangered vertebrate, or animal with a spinal column.

“It is absolutely dependent on groundwater. If groundwater gets depleted past the point where the shelf where the Devil’s Hole pupfish lays their eggs gets exposed to air, then that's it for the species,” Clarke says.

Faced with public pressure, the US Department of the Interior announced in January 2025 a two-year temporary withdrawal of public land measuring hundreds of thousands of acres in Amargosa Valley from new mining claims and mineral leasing, effective until January 15, 2027. 

Rover Critical Minerals did not respond to a request for comment.

Expedited licensing

It takes an average of nearly 29 years to build a new mine in the US, the second-longest in the world behind only Zambia. 

The long period generally allows experts and government bodies to conduct studies on the mining project’s impact on water quality, endangered species, and indigenous cultural sites.

The long period between the discovery and production also allows the local community to discuss the pros and cons of mining projects whose environmental impacts last for decades, if not centuries.

In the case of Thacker Pass, however, the licensing process took less than a year, Wilbert says. 

It began in January 2020 and ended in January 2021, he adds, noting that short-circuiting the years-long procedure meant the opportunities for the general public to assess and debate the issue were “very limited”.

Both the Republican and Democratic administrations have been in favour of the Thacker Pass mine. The first Trump administration (2017-21) put out an executive order directing federal agencies to accelerate permitting for projects on federal land.

The subsequent Biden administration (2021-2025) allowed federal permitting processes to be fast-tracked under the much-touted Inflation Reduction Act of August 2022. 

It offered tax credits, loans and other incentives to promote so-called green technologies like EV batteries, which consume three-quarters of annual lithium production worldwide.

“Unfortunately, destroying the planet is a firmly bipartisan project in the United States,” says Wilbert.