Environmentalists, ranchers and others have fought for years against lithium mining ventures in Nevada. Yet opposition to mining one particular desert tract for the silvery white metal used in electric car batteries is coming from unusual quarters: space.
An ancient Nevada lakebed beckons as a vast source of the coveted metal needed to produce cleaner electric energy and fight global warming. But NASA says the same site — flat as a tabletop and undisturbed like none other in the Western Hemisphere — is indispensable for calibrating the razor-sharp measurements of hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead.
At the space agency’s request, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has agreed to withdraw 36 square miles of the eastern Nevada terrain from its inventory of federal lands open to potential mineral exploration and mining.
NASA says the long, flat piece of land above the untapped lithium deposit in Nevada’s Railroad Valley has been used for nearly three decades to get measurements just right to keep satellites and their applications functioning properly.
In December, the bureau initiated a review of plans for another lithium mine conservationists oppose near the California line where an endangered desert wildflower grows, about 230 miles southeast of Reno.
In Railroad Valley, satellite calculations are critical to gathering information beamed from space with widespread applications from weather forecasting to national security, agricultural outlooks and natural disasters, according to NASA, which said the satellites “provide vital and often time-critical information touching every aspect of life on Earth.”
That increasingly includes certifying measurements related to climate change.
“It is supposedly a goal of the Biden Administration to boost the development of renewable energy technology and reduce carbon in our atmosphere,” Amodei said. “Yet they support blocking a project to develop the lithium necessary for their clean energy objectives.”
The Carson City, Nevada, company holding most of the mining claims, 3 Proton Lithium Inc., had not submitted any formal project plans in 2021 when NASA requested the land withdrawal. But the firm claimed to have done extensive research in anticipation of future plans to extract the brine-based lithium resource it said is one of the 10 largest deposits in the world.
Chairman Kevin Moore said the tract’s withdrawal likely will prevent his energy company from pumping the “super brine” from about one-third of its claims there, including the deepest, richest deposits holding about 60% of the site’s value. He joined Amodei in testifying last week before the House Resources Subcommittee on Mining and Mineral Resources.
“Essentially, your actions are boiling down to, ‘There’s a problem that we want to keep worrying about but NOT allow to be solved,’ ” he said. “It’s self-contradictory.”
3 Proton Lithium insists its brine pumping operations would cause little if any disturbance to the land’s surface. But NASA doesn’t believe the risk is worthwhile.
The area’s unchanged nature has allowed NASA to establish a long record of images of the undisturbed topography to assist precise measurement of distances using the travel time of radio signals and assure “absolute radiometric calibration” of sensors on board satellites.