Nevada lithium mine wins final approval despite potential harm to endangered wildflower

RENO, Nev. (AP) — For the first time under President Joe Biden, a federal permit for a new lithium mine has been approved for a Nevada project essential to his clean energy agenda, despite conservationists' vows to sue over the plan, which they say will drive an endangered wildflower to extinction.

Ioneer Ltd.'s mine will help expedite production of a key mineral in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles at the center of Biden's push to cut greenhouse gas emissions, administration officials said Thursday in Reno.

Acting Deputy Interior Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis said it's "essential to advancing the clean energy transition and powering the economy of the future.”

“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," she said.

In the works for six years, construction of the Rhyolite Ridge mine should start next year in the high desert halfway between Reno and Las Vegas, the Australia-based Ioneer said.

Production is scheduled to begin in 2028 at the mine, which should produce enough lithium for 370,000 vehicles annually for more than two decades, officials said. Worldwide demand for lithium is projected to have grown six times by 2030 compared to 2020.

“I can say with absolute confidence there are few deposits in the world as impactful as Rhyolite Ridge,” Ioneer Executive Chairman James Calaway said Thursday.

“Today’s approval of Ioneer’s federal permit is the culmination of countless hours of work and a testament to our remarkable team’s dedication to developing and building one of the most sustainable mining projects in the country,” he said

The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management issued the permit after the Fish and Wildlife Service concluded — in consultation with the bureau required under the Endangered Species Act — that the mine would not jeopardize the survival of Tiehm's buckwheat.

The service added the 6-inch-tall (15-centimeter-tall) wildflower with yellow and cream-colored blooms to the list of U.S. endangered species on Dec. 14, 2022, citing mining as the biggest threat to its survival.

The bureau initiated the mine's permitting process five days later. The agencies say Ioneer's subsequent changes to the mine's footprint alleviated concerns about potential harm to the flower.

Environmentalists said Thursday that the mine's final approval was a politically motivated violation of multiple U.S. laws. The Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement that “litigation is now the only way to stop the Rhyolite Ridge Mine.”

“We need lithium for the energy transition, but it can’t come with a price tag of extinction,” said Patrick Donnelly, the center's Great Basin director. He said Biden's administration “ is abandoning its duty to protect endangered species like Tiehm’s buckwheat and it’s making a mockery of the Endangered Species Act."

Fewer than 30,000 of the plants remain in Nevada at the only place they're known to exist in the world across eight sub-populations that combined cover 10 acres (4 hectares) — an area equal to the size of about eight football fields.

USFWS said the project — including the infrastructure and waste rock dump — will come within 15 feet (5 meters) of the buckwheat and result in the loss of some of its designated critical habitat that is home to neighboring bees and other pollinators integral to its reproduction.

But the service said the operation will cause no direct disturbance to individual plants and that reclamation, mitigation and monitoring promised in the blueprint should provide necessary protections for it to coexist with the open pit mine deeper than the length of a football field.

Opponents of the project say it’s the latest example of Biden’s administration running roughshod over U.S. protections for native wildlife, rare species and sacred tribal lands in the name of slowing climate change by reducing reliance on fossil fuels and bolstering national security by easing reliance on foreign sources of critical minerals.

“We’ve been fighting to save Tiehm’s buckwheat for six years and we’re not giving up now," Donnelly said.

Nevada is home to the only existing lithium mine in the U.S. Another is currently under construction near the Oregon line 220 miles (354 kilometers) north of Reno. That Lithium Americas mine at Thacker Pass, which was approved in the final days of former President Donald Trump's administration, survived numerous legal challenges from environmentalists and Native American tribes who said it would destroy lands they considered sacred where their ancestors were massacred by U.S. troops in 1865.