Ioneer's Rhyolite Ridge lithium project on course for environmental lawsuit

Environmentalists expect to challenge Ioneer Ltd.'s Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron mine in court if the Biden administration approves the project.

On April 15, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) published the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for the greenfield, open-pit project in southwestern Nevada, applauding the project as "another step by the Biden-Harris administration to support the responsible, domestic development of critical minerals."

President Joe Biden has made creating a domestic supply chain for rechargeable batteries a top administration priority, and Rhyolite Ridge could produce an average of 20,600 metric tons of lithium carbonate per year over a 26-year mine life, according to a feasibility study completed in April 2020. The US Energy Department has offered a conditional commitment to lend the project up to $700 million.

In the draft EIS, Ioneer outlined its plan for protecting an endangered wildflower known as Tiehm's buckwheat, which included redesigning and relocating its facilities and quarry.

But the project is facing heavy pushback from environmentalists who claim the mine could drive the plant to extinction. The mine would disturb about 22% of the wildflower's 910 acres of critical habitat. Environmentalists said the overlap would violate the Endangered Species Act of 1973 by damaging the plant's ecosystem. The miner has said there will be no direct impacts to the existing flowers.

"We're certainly willing to litigate if need be," John Hadder, director for Great Basin Research Watch, a regional environmental justice organization, said in an interview. "We've done it before. We certainly are willing to do it again."

Hadder said it is difficult to visualize a final plan of operation that would sufficiently protect the plant.

Mitigation in process

Tiehm's buckwheat was designated an endangered species in December 2022 after a 2019 survey found that only around 43,900 individual plants were still in existence and that mineral exploration and development posed a threat to the species.

Ioneer revised its plan of operations in July 2022 to avoid any direct impact on Tiehm's buckwheat, and after the plant was listed as endangered, the company revised its plan again to reduce indirect impacts and activity within designated critical habitat.

The company has now moved the processing facilities outside the critical habitat, set up a conservation center and developed a formal Tiehm's buckwheat protection plan that includes a commitment to spend $1 million a year, Bernard Rowe, managing director at Ioneer, said in an interview. The protection plan includes a dedicated greenhouse and full-time botanist to propagate and transplant Tiehm's buckwheat seeds to Rhyolite Ridge.

"We obviously can't change the location of where the deposit is," Rowe said. "We've managed to come up with a mine plan that minimizes the impacts and does it over a gradual period of time inside that critical habitat area."

Rowe said the only direct disturbance inside the critical habitat "is really the quarry." Mining work would enter the critical area in the fourth year of operations and affect 10% of the Tiehm's buckwheat habitat that year, increasing to 21.6% over time, the executive added.

Once the mine closes, around 9% of the critical habitat will remain unreclaimed after recovery efforts.

"A large part of [the quarry] will be backfilled," Rowe said. "We're not having solar evaporation ponds. We're not having tailings dams."

Rowe was confident Rhyolite Ridge could be developed in harmony with Tiehm's buckwheat.

"Not every deposit will be developed because there will be some that have environmental sensitivities that make that balance impossible to achieve, but in the case of Rhyolite Ridge, I'm extremely confident that the balance is very achievable," Rowe said.

Damage by proximity

Environmentalists said the real danger to Tiehm's buckwheat will be a host of indirect impacts from the presence of an industrial zone within walking distance, such as dust and loss of pollinators, on top of the permanent damage from the quarry. The Endangered Species Act is intended to protect the plant from those hazards, they said.

"The integrity of the Endangered Species Act is at stake here. It very specifically states that this act provides a means to protect the ecosystems to which endangered species rely," Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told S&P Global Commodity Insights. "An approval would say that any mining company can make up whatever theories they want and we are just going to go along with it because we really want lithium."

Donnelly says his organization "will fight this mine" if it moves forward.

"They are literally destroying 22% [of the plant's critical habitat] and putting it at the bottom of an open pit mine," Donnelly added.

The Center for Biological Diversity has a long history of litigating over extraction projects, notably blocking the PolyMet Mining Corp. copper-nickel mine in Minnesota, while Great Basin Research Watch was part of litigation against Lithium Americas Corp.'s Lithium Nevada, commonly known as Thacker Pass, in northern Nevada. The Thacker Pass project has moved forward.

Hadder said balancing mining for clean technology minerals and conserving the environment will require a multipronged approach of reducing consumption and careful permitting.

"How much damage can we avoid? In the long run, we may need to think about other policies that can address climate besides just new technologies," Hadder said. "If there's going to be additional mining for these transition minerals, we need to do it carefully and judiciously, and not sloppy and fast."