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The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced this week the closing of a $2.26 billion loan to Lithium Americas Corp. to finance the construction of its Thacker Pass lithium processing facility in Nevada.
The facility will be next door to Lithium Americas’s mine in Humboldt County, Nevada. Lithium Americas stated that the mine has “the largest confirmed source of lithium in the US.” The loan will help fund the construction of the first phase of the Thacker Pass facility, which will process mined lithium into battery-quality lithium carbonate.
Construction of the lithium processing facility is expected to take three years and create around 1,800 construction jobs. Lithium Americas announced a project labor agreement with Bechtel earlier this year for Thacker Pass’s engineering, procurement, and construction management.
Map of the Thacker Pass Project location in northern Nevada, where a lithium mine and processing plant, once built and operational, are expected to produce battery-quality lithium used in electric vehicles. Image: Lithium Americas
General Motors supports the project and is anticipated to be the biggest buyer of the site’s processed lithium for its electric vehicle batteries. The lithium mined and processed at Thacker Pass should produce around 40,000 tonnes per year of battery-grade lithium carbonate, which the DOE said could support the production of batteries for up to 800,000 electric vehicles a year.
Lithium Americas added that the opportunity to mine and process lithium at Thacker Pass is “the most significant opportunity to create a North American lithium battery supply chain for electric vehicles.” Through various programs, the US government has committed to secure a domestic supply chain for critical minerals to reduce reliance on foreign imports.
In this June 2023 image, a bulldozer performs initial site work for permanent facilities at Thacker Pass. Developer Lithium Americas closed this week on a multi-billion dollar loan to begin construction of the processing facility on the site. Image: Bectel
The loan to Lithium Americas falls under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program (ATVM). The US government provides loans through programs like these to support domestic manufacturing of vehicles and components that improve fuel economy.
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