There's also a big lithium deposit in Nevada, and preparations for mining are underway there.[1] General Motors put in $650 million for guaranteed access to the output of this Thacker Mine.
It's in a caldera in a mountain that I-80 bypassed to go through Winnemuca, Nevada. Nearest town is Mill City, NV, which is listed as a ghost town, despite being next to I-80 and a main line railroad track.
The mine site is about 12km from Mill City on a dirt road not tracked by Google Street View.
Google Earth shows signs of development near Mill City. Looks like a trailer park and a truck stop. The road to the mine looks freshly graded. Nothing at the mine site yet.
It's a good place for a mine. There are no neighbors for at least 10km, but within 15km, there's good road and rail access.
"to shut down the tar sands, we actually have to shut down the tar sands, not just blow up other mountains elsewhere and hope that leads to the end of the tar sands."
You'll never obtain universal agreement for a mine, because there will always be a contingent for whom the correct number of mines is zero. They'll never put it that way, of course. But the decision process they exhibit is "new mine? no", and the consequence of realizing those preferences would be zero new mines.
Fortunately, checking to make sure the entire Internet does not have a website disagreeing with the decision to start a mine, is not part of the process by which mining is started.
On the topic of interpolation, I wonder if other areas along the trail of the Yellowstone hotspot might be easier/better sources of lithium. I suspect Nevada makes access easier than areas in the Snake river plain. But some of those areas might be more amenable to Lithium mining with less of an impact.
I specifically went out of my way on a trip a couple years ago to check out Thacker Pass to see where this planned Lithium mine was going. Unfortunately there was thick smoke followed a significant thunderstorm as a front came through and I didn't get to explore much.
We are in a crisis of climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss. Thacker Pass is critical wildlife habitat for threatened, endangered, and endemic species including the greater sage-grouse, pronghorn, Lahontan cutthroat trout, and golden eagles. Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh in Paiute, is sacred to regional Native American tribes.
It’s too late to prevent Phase 1 of the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, but there are opportunities to help prevent Phase 2. More broadly, we hope to protect the rest of McDermitt Caldera from Southern Oregon down to Thacker Pass from catastrophic lithium mining.
But many analyses actually find that the emissions reductions from switching to electric vehicles are quite minor.
Paul Hawken, for example, doesn’t put electric cars in his top 10 climate solutions. In fact, it’s number 24 on his list, with almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases, and behind solutions like tropical rainforest restoration (about 5 times as effective at reducing emissions as is switching to EVs) and peatland protection (more than twice as effective).
Producing a single electric car releases a lot of greenhouse gas emissions—about 9 tons on average. This is rising, as the size of electric cars is going up substantially. That means that even if operating electric cars reduces emissions overall, it’s not going to reduce them much. One calculation estimates reductions of 6 percent in the United States. That’s not enough to make much of a dent in warming.
> almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants
I love this: it implies we should eliminate refrigerants and we should eliminate food waste...
Like a child wanting two incompatible things.
And I was answering "it looks like their arguments are presented entirely in terms of tradeoffs". Which to me contains the same locura - trying to face reality but failing to.
Plus the other reply which is black and white: "unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests"
And I've just noticed the original comment is flagged... Another form of denying and erasing the reality of others.
That list is only scale (e.g. 40 Gigatons saved by onshore wind or utility solar by 2050) and even on that measure EVs do pretty well at 10 Gigatons.
But they do even better if you consider cost since the TCO of many electric vehicle classes is lower than the alternative, so you save money and carbon.
These tradeoffs are displayed on a marginal abatement cost curve:
> Technologies: Many measures in the power and transportation sectors are cost-effective right now, including several electric vehicle classes, electric efficiency, high-quality solar PV and onshore wind resources, and nuclear relicensing. The use of heat pumps in buildings is also available.
> Emissions: Together, the measures in this range represent more than 1 gigaton of potential annual emission reductions by 2050 or 22% of way toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Frankly, these articles are obviously written from a very left-wing perspective with essentially no relevance on the American political stage.
None of the opinions stated in the protect* article are close to majority.
> > Benson’s argument is that “mining critical metals is a necessity for a greener future.” But I would ask—a necessity for whom? For example, do child slaves laboring in Congolese cobalt mines call this necessary? Cobalt is an essential ingredient in mobile phones and electric vehicle batteries, but those kids aren’t driving Tesla’s and listening to podcasts all day. They need liberation, not consumer toys.
“Liberation” is not the solution to extreme poverty in the Congo/DRC. You either need to convince wealthier societies to do vast wealth transfers or find a way to bootstrap a stronger economy, which very well might involve lithium mining.
The leftism exemplified by this blog post resembles actual leftism. Unfortunately, it only really exists in the confinement zone of social media, and isn't allowed anywhere near the political stage.
What Americans consider "leftist" in their politics is just "socially progressive but center right." Hillary Clinton gets called a Communist, Barack Obama a Marxist. Americans wouldn't know an actual leftist if one threw a Molotov cocktail through their window.
Sure, the people winning elections aren't part of the capital-L Left but that doesn't mean the capital-L Left isn't an important political force even in America.
It's because there are people with unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests of corporations would be left.
Your description of the location of this mine doesn't match your Wikipedia link.
Searching in Google Maps, Thacker Mine comes up as 40.58448942010599, -117.8912129833345. As you say, that is near I-80 and Mill City, and there is nothing there.
But Wikipedia says it's at 41.70850912415866, -118.05475061324945 in the McDermitt Caldera, nowhere near Mill City or I-80.
I'm thinking probably don't trust Google on this one. :)
Right. The Nevada Appeal, which actually has people on the ground, has far more info.[1] North of Thacker Pass is the area to look. The mine is building their own rail yard west of Winnemuca. The mine will be an open-pit mine like a coal mine. Sawtooth Mining division of North American Coal will do the mining. Dig down 350 feet, take out clay with lithium, process, put back clay without lithium.
The processing plant will be at Thacker Pass. Big plant, maybe 1800 people.
Lithium in clay is a new thing - the usual input is brine. Also a sulfuric acid plant, a power plant, housing, etc. Project assumes a loan of US$2.3 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy.
"Lithium Americas will contract with a bus company to drive workers an hour to the site for 10-hour work shifts, he added. An additional two hours will be added for transportation time.
If you go to work on our project, you will have free room and board and free transportation to the site every day. You would get three free meals a day." If you're an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia, that might look good.
I don't trust latitudes and longitudes that are precise down to the nanometer. :)
4-5 digits should be enough for any use outside of surveying, that's a precision of 10 meters and 1 meter respectively.
Even Wikipedia is making me suspicious by using hundredths of arc seconds, despite linking the document that came from. How do you localize a mining site down to a single foot?
Right. If you look at the area in Google Earth, you can see lots of small dirt roads and little round areas which are probably test drilling sites, spread over tens of square kilometers. Like most open-pit mines, it will be big.
If you want exact coordinates, here's the future mine entrance in Google Earth.[1]
The county or state widened the road, put in a turn-off, added turning lanes, and posted a "Mine Entrance" road sign. The turn-off dead ends within ten meters at the property line, as of when the picture was taken.
The mine hasn't built their side yet.
I assume single foot would be what they consider to be the center of the mine? Though I don’t know how Wikipedia would have that information yet; maybe it’s the default output of their map selector or something. An actual survey of the mine would need to be done to know where its center is
Looks like Google got "Thacker Pass Lithium Mine" in the McDermitt Caldera confused with an old gold mine called "Thacker Placer Mine" that was southeast of Mill City: https://westernmininghistory.com/mine-detail/10042614/
Yeah I asked Google Gemini to make a map showing the three principle lithium developments of Nevada and it pinned the historical Thacker Mine, not the new Thacker Pass Mine.
Then I asked chatgpt and it refused to make a map but said that I should just look on the map for Thacker Pass, which is almost right but it also said I should look northeast of Winnemucca, which isn't correct. It's north and west.
It's in a caldera in a mountain that I-80 bypassed to go through Winnemuca, Nevada. Nearest town is Mill City, NV, which is listed as a ghost town, despite being next to I-80 and a main line railroad track. The mine site is about 12km from Mill City on a dirt road not tracked by Google Street View.
Google Earth shows signs of development near Mill City. Looks like a trailer park and a truck stop. The road to the mine looks freshly graded. Nothing at the mine site yet.
It's a good place for a mine. There are no neighbors for at least 10km, but within 15km, there's good road and rail access.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine