As Ford Authority reported last month, the Biden Administration was seemingly on the verge of approving a what’s known as the Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project in Nevada, which is set to be spearheaded by a company called ioneer – which Ford signed a deal with back in July 2022 as it worked to secure enough raw materials to meet future EV demand. The project received a conditional commitment of up to $700 million from the Department of Energy for mining operations in Nevada in January 2023, and now, it has seemingly overcome the final set of barriers needed to gain federal approval.
As Ford Authority reported this past April, ioneer still had one major hurdle to overcome before it could begin mining in Nevada’s Silver Peak Range – the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) needed to sign off on the site’s environmental impact after they identified significant protections for the endangered Tiehm’s Buckwheat, a desert flower endemic to the area, which had already prompted ioneer to modify its mining proposal in an effort to minimize its impact on the local environment.
Now that this process is completed, BLM has announced that the Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron mining project has received official federal approval, paving the way for a massive breakthrough in America’s mission to create a robust domestic supply chain for raw materials used in the construction of EV batteries. The mine – which is located around 225 miles north of Las Vegas, is one of North America’s largest sources of lithium and could produce enough of that material to power roughly 370,000 all-electric vehicles annually when it’s completed.
“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. The Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine project is essential to advancing the clean energy transition and powering the economy of the future,” said Acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis. “This project and the process we have undertaken demonstrates that we can pursue responsible critical mineral development here in the United States, while protecting the health of our public lands and resources.”
Comment
So the natural environment gets destroyed by mining for lithium to produce batteries for electric cars which are supposed to protect the environment? The mine itself is an environmental disaster along with the EV cars and batteries which have to be built and later junked.