American Interests Clash in the Nevada Desert

Green Energy vs. Climate Monitoring

NASA image of Railroad Valley, Nevada

I feel as though I’ve landed on the Moon.

I’m in Railroad Valley, Nevada, a place so dry and desolate that nothing grows on its “playa,” the 10-mile long bottom of what was once a massive lakebed.

I’ve driven here from my home on California’s Central Coast, a 1,550-mile round trip with a detour in Carson City and two nights at the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah. (The hotel is allegedly haunted, and the howling wind made it difficult to sleep, but at least it was more inviting than The World Famous Clown Motel down the street, aka “America’s Scariest Motel.”)

From Tonopah, the drive to Railroad Valley is another 100+ miles along U.S. Route 6, nicknamed “The Grand Army of the Republic Highway.” That’s followed by 25 miles driving off-road, past an oil refinery and cattle operation, until all vegetation stops, and you’re left with a large white pancake of earth.

Why did I journey to a place called Railroad Valley? A place where the closest bathroom is two hours away? Where there is no railroad? Where I planned to do live shots for CNBC on land that might not support a satellite truck, forcing us to rely on one cellphone tower located miles away? (The eventual live shots were touch-and-go, and I aged 10 years from the stress.)

I’m too old for this. Why am I here??

Because I love a good story, and this worthless-looking valley is actually worth a lot, but for different reasons... to opposing parties.

For one thing, Railroad Valley may contain the largest lithium deposit in North America.

“We have 84 million tons of lithium [on site] in this playa area,” says Vincent Ramirez, CEO of 3 Proton Lithium Operating, Inc. (3PL). How much of that lithium is recoverable? “Probably 20-25 million tons,” he tells me.

That would be enough lithium to supply the U.S. electric vehicle industry for decades.

The Biden administration is pushing for more EVs, and those car batteries need lithium. Securing more American lithium means depending less on producers in China and South America. Nevada is seen as a potential mother lode.

Ramirez is a driller-turned-entrepreneur who once worked for Shell and spent many years in Russia. He’s a throwback to an earlier age of prospecting; a Fresno-born geologist who insisted that I pull over on the way to Railroad Valley so he could show me where lava once percolated up to the Earth’s surface. He’d rather spend a half hour explaining geological testing graphs to a novice (me again) than talk about anything else. “I don’t do social media,” he tells me with pride.

Back in 2016, Ramirez saw that the EV market was growing, and he began researching lithium. He studied technical journals in China. “They got me thinking about salts in a different way.” He used mining logs to learn about the makeup of ancient dry lakebeds in Nevada. That led him to Railroad Valley, where he discovered the “conductive brine” that might signal lithium’s presence.

“My ‘Eureka moment’ was when I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I had read an electric log incorrectly, because I'd read it from the top down and it should be read from the bottom up,” he says. “In fact, what appeared to be no data was [data] that was so big it had gone off scale.”

So maybe, just maybe, he’d found something really big.

Ramirez spent $48,000 buying up mining leases from the Bureau of Land Management for over 30,000 acres of Railroad Valley. He managed to raise $3 million to dig his first well, mostly from friends and family in Canada. He then drilled down almost 2,000 feet into a briny deposit. “I had never seen this before,” he says. He smeared some of the extracted mud on his face, “like war paint,” and it stung so much, “I had to wash it off.” The pH of the mud was 10.3, meaning it was very salty. “That's how I knew that we were onto something.”

Ramirez dug two more wells and tested others already on the land from old oil operations. He took in hundreds and hundreds of samples and calculated that the lithium deposit was huge, the biggest in the country. “With 1,100 data points,” he says confidently, “it’s a pretty good calculation.”

He brought in other investors, including Kevin Moore, who’d previously run a large construction company in Oklahoma City. Moore put a chunk of his own money into 3PL and came aboard as chairman and CFO. “Theoretically,” Moore says, “we can triple the amount of lithium resource in the United States.”

Moore opened his digital rolodex and reached out to other investors in the oil and gas industry, green energy and finance. “We went out and raised privately about $30 million.”

Ramirez then brought in Stanford-educated geologist Karen Loomis, who used to work for ExxonMobil. She showed me samples they’ve pulled out of the ground with layers of salty crystals sandwiched between clay. The good stuff is in the salt, she says, “because this is where the mineral resources are most concentrated.” (Fun fact: I licked a piece of the salt rock to confirm that it’s really salty.) The company believes it’ll be easier and “greener” to obtain lithium by injecting brine into the salt and sluicing it out rather than extracting it from clay, as other miners are doing.

But a funny thing happened on the way to making America greener and becoming wildly rich in the process. 3PL suffered a major setback.

The same U.S. government that’s encouraging domestic supplies of products for EVs also decided that Railroad Valley might not be worth all the lithium beneath the surface.

Because NASA needs the surface.

“Railroad Valley is unique,” NASA Project Scientist Hal Maring tells me. “In the United States, there’s no other place like it.”

Here’s what happened.

One day in 2019, NASA colleagues from the Jet Propulsion Lab and collaborators from the University of Arizona were in Railroad Valley checking equipment when they saw stakes in the ground with messages attached saying, “This area is being claimed for lithium mining.” The scientists freaked out.

NASA uses much of the valley’s playa to calibrate its optical satellites, which are about half of all NASA satellites. The images are used for a variety of purposes, like determining crop health for agriculture, or measuring air quality, “and then now we start talking about climate science,” Maring says.

But imaging equipment degrades in space over time and gets out of whack. Recalibrating that equipment by focusing on something on the ground is a whole lot cheaper than sending someone into space to fix the cameras. Railroad Valley is perfect for calibration: The surface is flat, solid, homogenous, and not too reflective. It’s large enough to be seen from higher orbits and has few clouds.

“Other places are flat and large, like White Sands and the Great Salt Lake,” Maring tells me, “but they’re very white and too bright.” There are places outside the United States that work well for calibration, like the Sahara in Libya, or China’s Gobi Desert, but Maring says “they’re really, really hard to get to, and too expensive, difficult and dangerous.” (NASA occasionally needs people on the ground at these sites.)

So when some company popped up out of nowhere with plans to mine the playa, NASA feared those plans would disturb the surface of the ground, messing up calibration. Maring says NASA reached out to the BLM and asked, “What’s the situation? Can you explain it to us, and if we wanted to limit lithium mining on the playa, how do we go about doing that?”

What followed was a process that led the BLM to take back much of 3PL’s leases, covering about 11,000 acres. CEO Vince Ramirez says that constitutes nearly a third of the land he bought the rights to, but more importantly, it may include up to half the lithium.

Congress has gotten involved.

CFO Kevin Moore appeared before a Congressional hearing debating the best uses of the valley, and Republican Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada has introduced a bill to give the leasing rights back to 3PL. Amodei also inserted language into the upcoming funding bill for the Interior Department “to prohibit funds for enforcing the withdrawal, effectively overturning it,” his office tells me.

This worries NASA.

“I’m hopeful that we don’t need to destroy Railroad Valley to get enough lithium to supply our need for lithium ion batteries,” Maring says.

Others depend on Railroad Valley to keep satellite imaging calibrated, like NOAA and the USGS, plus some private companies. I asked the Department of Defense if the military also uses the valley to calibrate satellites. I’m still waiting for a response. (I’m not holding my breath.)

3PL believes its extraction technology isn’t anything to worry about. In fact, the company claims its entire project — wells, roads, pipelines — would only impact 1% of the area.

“We're not questioning the importance of what NASA does,” Kevin Moore says. He believes the two can co-exist, and he’d like to explain the technology to all concerned. “We just haven't been allowed a seat at the table to discuss it.”

So What’s Next?

3PL still has leases outside the NASA zone, though, again, there may not be as much lithium there. Ramirez’s team is currently doing “flow tests” in those areas to further determine how much lithium he’s got. He’s also finding other metals and compounds to commercialize, like boron, tungsten, and sodium sulfate.

The company will need environmental permits before it can actually start mining, and assuming those are approved, it’ll be at least four years before they pull any lithium out of the ground.

NASA will be watching, and scientist Hal Maring says he’s open to changing his mind.

“If lithium miners can prove that they can extract the lithium from underneath and not degrade the surface, then we’re okay,” he says. However, the space agency will wait as the technology is proven outside its calibration area. “We don’t want to be the guinea pig.”