Lithium was nearly an afterthought — present in small portions in drugs and tempered glass, and peaking in popular culture fame within the ’90s because of an eponymous Nirvana music. Right now, the metallic is again within the highlight with a brand new identification: “white gold.”
That nickname, coined over the previous decade, stems from lithium’s extraordinary worth spike, hovering to almost $70,000 per metric ton in 2022 (for reference: In 1991, when Nirvana launched “Lithium,” the mineral bought for about $4,200 per metric ton, roughly 6 p.c of its current peak). The increase was exhausting to disregard, even for billionaire Elon Musk, who recommended on X that Tesla “would possibly really should get into the mining & refining instantly at scale.”
Fueled by the worldwide rise in electrical autos and the proliferation of lithium-ion batteries in all the things from laptops to telephones to photo voltaic panels, lithium consumption has skyrocketed: globally, individuals now use practically 28 occasions extra lithium per capita than within the Nineteen Nineties. After China, the US is the world’s second-largest client of lithium, but it mines lower than one p.c of the worldwide provide. And lithium isn’t simply powering our units, it’s powering a future in clear vitality.
To rectify this lack of home lithium, the US authorities permitted a $2.26 billion mortgage in October 2025 to Lithium Americas, a Canadian firm creating Thacker Move in northern Nevada, the biggest lithium deposit ever found in the US. To today, Nevada stays the one state that each mines and refines lithium domestically.
However this main funding might have come just a little too late.
For one, regardless of the rising demand, Earth is definitely in no quick provide of lithium, and the worth of this mineral dropped to $14,000 per metric ton simply two years after the 2022 excessive, as new lithium assets grew to become out there worldwide. Extra importantly, the actual bottleneck within the lithium provide chain isn’t mining — it’s refining. And China is already a long time forward within the battery-making course of, refining over 70 p.c of the lithium on the planet.
On this video explainer, we’ll discover how lithium is fueling the “white gold rush” in Nevada and different elements of the nation, whether or not or not the US Division of Vitality’s funding in Thacker Move will repay, and what the historical past of mining ghost cities and increase and bust cycles can inform us about the way forward for this important mineral.
