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Colossal Cache of Lithium Found in US May Be World's Largest
An area known as Thacker Pass on the Nevada-Oregon border is home to clay that contain tens of millions of tons of lithium.
futurism.com
In the race to hoard lithium, a metal crucial for creating the batteries that power electric vehicles, the US may have fortuitously stumbled on the world's biggest deposit yet.
A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, estimates that the McDermitt Caldera, a volcanic crater on the Nevada-Oregon border, harbors a colossal 20 to 40 million metric tons of lithium.
Based on these newest figures, the caldera dwarfs the amount of lithium in even Bolivia's salt flats, home to around 23 million tons.
"If you believe their back-of-the-envelope estimation, this is a very, very significant deposit of lithium," Anouk Borst, a geologist at KU Leuven University who was not involved in the study, told Chemistry World. "It could change the dynamics of lithium globally, in terms of price, security of supply and geopolitics."
Some of the world's richest lithium stores are contained in brine. But the McDermitt Caldera's lithium, particularly in its southern portion in Nevada, in an area called Thacker Pass, is locked up in clay.
The caldera formed after a massive magma eruption approximately 16.4 million years ago, dredging up untold scores of lithium and other metals. A lake eventually inhabited the caldera, which deposited a layer of sediment spliced with the lithium that today is over 600 feet deep. The result: a clay called smectite.
But that was just the first lithium injection. Eventually, as volcanic activity heated up again, hot brine containing additional lithium was driven up into the existing smectite, infusing it with even more of it. Now, the clay was no longer just smectite, but a uniquely lithium-rich illite.
"They seem to have hit the sweet spot where the clays are preserved close to the surface, so they won't have to extract as much rock, yet it hasn't been weathered away yet," Borst told Chemistry World.
