Why It's So Hard to Mine the World's Largest Lithium Deposit

A Pass, or Peehee Mu'huh to the local Paiute people has been mined since the 1970s, so the new analysis merely confirms what locals have long known about the area.

- Caroline Delbert

AN ANCIENT VOLCANO BENEATH NEVADA and Oregon could hold the largest deposit of lithium ever found, scientists revealed last summer in a peer-reviewed paper published in Science Advances.

This section of land-called Thacker Beginning to extract the lithium in earnest would change the landscape for everything from electric-vehicle batteries to lithium-ion smartphone batteries, and could even hasten the switch toward renewable energy plants that rely on grid storage. But setting up a mine to extract the massive deposit of lithium in Thacker Pass is not a simple task: It will require a wholly new process to separate the lithium from its natural clay deposit.