Lithium was virtually 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 track. As we speak, the steel is again within the highlight with a brand new id: “white gold.”
That nickname, coined over the previous decade, stems from lithium’s extraordinary worth spike, hovering to just about $70,000 per metric ton in 2022 (for reference: In 1991, when Nirvana launched “Lithium,” the mineral offered for about $4,200 per metric ton, roughly 6 % of its current peak). The increase was laborious to disregard, even for billionaire Elon Musk, who advised on X that Tesla “would possibly truly need to 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, folks now use practically 28 instances extra lithium per capita than within the Nineteen Nineties. After China, the US is the world’s second-largest shopper of lithium, but it mines lower than one % 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 Cross in northern Nevada, the biggest lithium deposit ever found in america. To today, Nevada stays the one state that each mines and refines lithium domestically.
However this main funding could have come slightly too late.
For one, regardless of the rising demand, Earth is definitely in no brief 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 sources turned 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 % of the lithium on the earth.
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 Power’s funding in Thacker Cross 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 essential mineral.
