The Lithium Rush

Nevada’s Next Great Boom and Bust

If the ghosts of Nevada’s silver miners were still rattling around the canyons, they’d be scratching their spectral heads, wondering what all the fuss is about a metal you can’t even use for a belt buckle. Yet here we are, in the throes of another grand mineral scramble, this time for lithium, the lightest metal on Earth, the very lifeblood of our electric future.

Nature, in her infinite wisdom, spent millions of years tucking away a fortune in lithium beneath Nevada’s arid basins, waiting for the day when the world would suddenly realize that what was once about as useful as a paper umbrella in a thunderstorm is now worth its weight in, well, lithium. When the electric carriage came into fashion and the lords of commerce demanded batteries by the ton, Nevada found itself richer than a cardsharp in a saloon full of greenhorns.

“Lithium got hot in the late teens, early 2020s, and people started looking for it more. When you look for something harder, you generally find more of it,” observed Sean McKenna, a man who has spent enough time studying hydrology to know what lurks beneath the desert floor.

And sure enough, with some scratching and digging, lithium deposits turned up in every dried-up lakebed and forgotten valley from Esmeralda County to the Oregon border.

In those fevered years, lithium’s price soared like a politician’s promises before an election. In 2023, it hit an all-time high of $80,000 per ton—a number so staggering it might have convinced an old prospector to trade in his mule for a geologist’s degree.

Electric vehicles were rolling off assembly lines, and the world’s thirst for battery storage seemed unquenchable. But if history has taught Nevada anything, the higher a boom goes, the more spectacular the bust.

By early 2024, the lithium market had plummeted faster than a one-legged gambler at a rigged poker table. Prices dropped 86 percent, forcing mine closures worldwide and leaving many an investor clutching his head in despair.

But like the grizzled old prospectors of yesteryear, the lithium barons of today remain undeterred. Albemarle keeps digging at Silver Peak, the nation’s only operational lithium mine, with plans to expand even if the market doesn’t.

Meanwhile, up at Thacker Pass—home to the largest known lithium deposit in the world—earthmovers are busy because when you sit on a mountain of wealth, you don’t get up just because the price tag wobbles.

And then there’s Rhyolite Ridge, where Australian company Ioneer has figured out a way to hedge its bets with boron, that other great unsung hero of the periodic table. When lithium prices tumble, they’ll peddle boron for glass, detergents, and whatever else the world suddenly remembers it needs.

It is, as always, a game of speculation, high hopes, and crushed dreams. The Trump administration wants to bolster domestic mineral production, which means Nevada’s lithium fortunes may come through policy rather than the whims of the market. The men and women chasing lithium today are no different than the ones who came before, pickaxe in hand, sure they were digging their way to paradise.

Time will tell whether Nevada’s lithium rush will prove a mother lode or another fool’s errand. But for now, the miners keep digging, the speculators keep betting, and the desert, indifferent as ever, watches and waits.