WA’s need for EVs comes at a cost for mining towns

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THACKER PASS, Nev. — Cody Davis is part of a global energy transition.

He mined coal in North Dakota before taking a job at what’s slated to be one of the most productive lithium mines in the world.

Davis says miners can help the world dig up resources it needs to expand energy production, including for renewables.

“Mining is what we do,” said Davis, the mine’s operations and safety manager. “Just take that skill set and it’s just a different mineral.”

American coal mines are shutting down as coal-fired power plants are yanked offline, making way for cleaner sources of power. Washington state’s last remaining coal power plant in Centralia is set to shutter this year.

In northwest Nevada, the lithium mine here owned by Lithium Americas is just the beginning for this ancient, extinct volcano. More mining projects are on the table.

“I’m glad to see it’s happening domestically,” Davis said of the rush for lithium. “It’s an element that we need, and to pretend that if we don’t do it here that it’s not going on anywhere, it would be silly.”

President Donald Trump has upped the pressure, even threatening to use military force to take Greenland, a country with highly sought after minerals, and annex Canada, a major exporter of natural resources to the U.S.

The Thacker Pass mine was permitted under Trump’s first term, and was awarded a $2.26 billion loan as part of the Biden administration’s clean energy agenda.

The mine is expected to be up and running by late 2027 and supply enough lithium for an estimated 800,000 electric vehicles each year. A generic 40 kilowatt-hour electric vehicle battery (about the size in a Nissan Leaf) needs more than 8 pounds of the element, according to Shabbir Ahmed, a senior chemist at the Argonne National Laboratory.

Lithium plays an important role in Washington, where transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. State law mandates that all new passenger vehicles sold by 2035 have to be plug-in hybrid or fully electric, and Washington drivers have been fast adopting these vehicles.

But these consumer and policy choices have massive implications for communities on the front lines of the West’s new mining boom.

Here, near the Oregon border, pronghorn and sage hens roam the sagebrush-dappled caldera. Chokecherries and wild onions flourish where golden eagles soar above. The first peoples of this place were forcibly removed to reservations, but they continue to harvest first foods and share in ceremonies on the land.

These rolling hills and rimrock are punctuated by a quilt of farm and ranch land.

A ranching family was the first to sue the federal government to halt the existing plan for the Thacker Pass mine, concerned its proposed annual consumption of nearly 1 billion gallons of water would strain a delicate balance of ecosystems and agriculture.

Environmental organizations and Native nations, who received no meaningful consultation prior to federal approval of the mine on sensitive cultural sites, joined the opposition.

Two abandoned mercury mines loom large for nearby residents. Others are fighting to protect the remaining wild places where resource extraction gnaws at the edges.

“It was gold, silver, that really pushed us to be where we are today: 100 miles from everywhere,” said Gary McKinney, a member of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of Duck Valley, referencing the forced relocation of his people the first time the miners came some 150 years ago. “It’s not over yet.”

A delicate balance

About 25 miles from Thacker Pass, third-generation ranchers grow a sea of green alfalfa for dairies in California and Idaho, and produce enough feed to raise about 500 cows of their own. The operation, in a desert landscape, requires ample underground water.

“We’re pretty self-sufficient here,” Susan Frey said of her family farm in Orovada. There are maybe 300 people in the valley and many of them work on farms and ranches, she said.

By the time she and her neighbors heard of the proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass, near the height of the pandemic, it was too late for the community to weigh in, Frey said.

The federal Bureau of Land Management permitted the mine in less than a year.

Frey’s neighbor, Edward Bartell sued, arguing the federal government’s environmental review failed to evaluate the mine’s impacts on groundwater-dependent businesses and ecosystems, including harm to imperiled greater sage grouse and federally protected Lahontan cutthroat trout.

The area is in drought more often than not, Frey said, and sees the underground water levels drop. One good winter might restore a few dozen feet, but managing the resource is a delicate balance that locals worry may not withstand the continuous withdrawal of water needed to extract lithium here, said Frey, part of the Thacker Pass Working Group, a community coalition.

The lawsuit was then joined by Nevada-based conservation groups, who argued the federal government “swept under the rug the mines’ serious environmental impact” — including groundwater pollution and harm to protected birds, wildlife and plants — in the rush to approve the project.

Next, Native nations — including the Burns Paiute and Reno-Sparks Indian Colony — and People of Red Mountain, an association of Indigenous people, joined the litigation. They highlighted how tribal governments weren’t consulted in good faith.

“Many tribal offices … were closed for much of 2020,” the complaint said, as Native Americans were among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic among demographic groups.

In court filings, the tribes suggested the government should have consulted with at least nine additional tribes in Nevada, California and Oregon with ancestral and cultural ties to Thacker Pass.

The Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Tribe wrote a letter to the United Nations, seeking the investigation of “ongoing indigenous rights violations arising due to land management by the BLM and lithium extraction.”

This land here holds one piece of a chapter of the U.S.’ genocidal history.

Between 1864 and 1868, there were an estimated 100 massacres of Indigenous peoples, who occupied the Great Basin region, said Michon Eben, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony’s tribal historic preservation officer.

This includes a massacre at Thacker Pass.

Paiute tribal elder Inelda Sam grew up fishing for trout in Thacker Pond, hunting deer and groundhogs in the hills. Gallon Ziplocs packed with ruby red chokecherries fill her freezer.

Peehee Mu’huh, also known as Thacker Pass, is a sacred place. “That is where a lot of our people were massacred,” she said, referencing an 1865 killing of more than 30 Northern Paiute people by the 1st Nevada Cavalry.

Sam is a descendant of Ox Sam, one of the few survivors of the massacre. She and other Northern Paiute people return to this place to pray for their relatives.

“We don’t want that (place) to be destroyed — our plants and our food there,” said Sam, a member of People of Red Mountain, or Atsa Koodakuh wyh Nuwu. Along with ceremonial items, “We have our groundhogs up there, we’ve got our deer and we’ve got sage hens, rabbit and we’ve got fish out there.”

“That is what we’re trying to fight for,” she said.

Power of clay

When Lithium Americas finishes building its processing facilities at Thacker Pass, it will likely be the biggest development in Humboldt County. Even bigger than the Walmart, joked Tim Crowley, the Canadian mining company’s vice president of government and external affairs.

Crowley was giving a tour of the company’s pilot plant in Reno last year. Lithium Americas runs samples of ore through this web of pipes and vats of chemicals to refine its process.

Crowley picked up a piece ofclayore and snapped it in his hand. As he stirred it in a vial of water, the heavier sediments settled to the bottom.

What doesn’t break down in the water is the ash from a volcanic eruption more than 16 million years ago.

The company is interested in what’s suspended in the water, the lithium.

This will be replicated on a larger scale, before the cloudy liquid is combined with sulfuric acid to separate the clay, lithium and other minerals. The minerals then will be crystallized, and lithium carbonate will be shipped off to General Motors to be made into batteries to power an electric vehicle on a street near you.

This process for extracting lithium hasn’t been done anywhere before. Lithium Americas says this type of mining is cleaner than mining of the past.

There will be no tailings ponds with dams at risk of failure, Crowley said.

But the mine won’t be without tailings or other waste. Testing has shown the mining has the potential to expose concentrations of arsenic, antimony, fluoride, iron, magnesium, sulfate and uranium in excess of state standards. The company is required to prevent the release of these heavy metals.

When local residents think of mining, he knows they envision the nearby abandoned mercury mines, Crowley said, but they may not have an understanding of what modern mining looks like.

He dismissed any existing fears over the mine and promised to “show this community and the rest of the state that it’s really well done.”

He argues the company has gone above and beyond what’s required — offering to provide benefits to locals through jobs, training, building a community center and a school. The mine’s total investment package totals about $25 million.

“We can’t make everybody on the planet happy,” he said. “We just have to keep our eye on the ball of doing right by the planet, doing right by the state, and at least being respectful in the sense of listening, and say, ‘Well, what is it that you want?’ “

A U.S. District Court in Reno and a panel of three circuit court judges in Pasadena, Calif., ruled against those who challenged the project, finding that BLM complied with the relevant laws when approving Thacker Pass.

Some leaders from the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe were supportive of the mine’s approval.

But for some, Thacker Pass serves as an example of where federal laws fall short.

A recent report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union found an 1872 mining law that set the Thacker Pass project into motion codifies the colonial extraction practices of the 1800s.

Government agencies could be more proactive in mapping out mineral-rich areas for mining exploration with less overlap with endangered species, sacred places and communities, experts say.

“If we know ways to reduce conflict, why would we not reduce conflict?” said Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, a group that provides third-party assessments of proposed mine sites.

Boulanger argues following regulations and thoughtfully considering environmental impacts and Indigenous rights will speed up the energy transition by avoiding costly litigation and human conflict.

Legacies

The mining of the past is a stark reminder of what can go wrong.

On a summer day last year, a great horned owl swooped through the retired mercury pit.

Generations of families mined mercury at two mines about 10 miles away from the Fort McDermitt Reservation.

Mercury mining ended in the late 1980s. But the McDermitt Combined School’s football field and parking area, areas surrounding the playground and 56 residential properties in the town of McDermitt and on the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Reservation, needed to be cleaned of toxic waste from the mining decades later.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency performed a cleanup of these areas in 2013.

“When I was in grade school it was all over the playground,” Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone tribal member Myron Smart said of the dangerous waste. “We had some good football games out there in the gravel. And I’d go home with holes in my pants and my knees would be all bloody, or my elbows, not knowing what it was, what it really was.”

Smart’s father was diagnosed with mercury poisoning after years of working in the mine. A 1987 review by the EPA had indicated “hazardous waste problems” associated with the containment of disposed tailings and “excessive blood mercury levels” in some employees that worked with mine materials.

The history books have omitted the chapters that shaped life today, Smart said.

His grandmother was 12 years old when the U.S. Cavalry attacked her camp at Thacker Pass, in the 1865 massacre. Some of his relatives were gathered and taken to Fort Simcoe near White Swan, Yakima County, as prisoners of war. Native children were taken from their families, shipped off to boarding schools where their hair was cut and they were whipped for speaking their language or praying.

“Any history book you open up, it’s always, ‘We were heathens,’ ‘They were savages,’ ” Smart said. “And then to this day, it’s all the same, nothing ever changed. All of these promises, all these treaties that they made, they don’t mean anything to them.”

Epilogue

Efforts to protect the Owyhee Canyonlands, a vast expanse of wildlands north and northeast of Thacker Pass largely in Oregon, have been underway for more than a decade. It has been referred to as some of the last and largest intact wild landscapes in the West. Meanwhile, President Trump has suggested he may shrink or eliminate existing protections for federal lands.

For the residents and future leaders of this place, the Northern Paiute’s ancient language of Wayaduaga Apegan, the ‘language of the Rye-Grass Valley,’ holds lessons of the past and guides for the steps ahead.

Jeralyn Brown and five other elders teach young students each week at the McDermitt library, and a nonprofit overseen by Brown takes students to pick and roast pine nuts, and hunt rabbits, groundhogs and other game across the traditional territories from Disaster Peak to Battle Mountain and beyond.

“With this language class, not only are we teaching our kids to preserve the language,” Brown said, “… this is also the time where we keep our children busy in order to preserve the way the lifestyle used to be with our ancestors.”

McKinney, a member of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of Duck Valley, envisions a future where generations of families with ancestral ties to this land continue to bring the culture back and enjoy restorative camping trips here.

“Let’s talk about the dreams instead of the nightmares,” he said. “What about the smiles and the laughter and the music, togetherness and the celebration of gatherings. We’re here to help our people, help our families break that cycle of oppression.”

Geological history spanning millions of years is carved into this landscape. In the decades to come, the future of this place will be written in the earth.

Reporting for this project was supported in part by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists and EcoFlight, a nonprofit using small aircraft to provide an aerial perspective with a mission to educate and advocate for wild lands, watersheds and culturally important landscapes