Lithium used to be almost an afterthought — found in small quantities in medicine and tempered glass, and peaking in pop culture fame in the ’90s thanks to an eponymous Nirvana song. Today, the metal is back in the spotlight with a new identity: “white gold.”
Video
Why we need so much lithium
And only one state in the US is mining it.
Dolly Li is Lead Producer, Shortform Vertical Video, at Vox.
That nickname, coined over the past decade, stems from lithium’s extraordinary price spike, soaring to nearly $70,000 per metric ton in 2022 (for reference: In 1991, when Nirvana released “Lithium,” the mineral sold for about $4,200 per metric ton, roughly 6 percent of its recent peak). The boom was hard to ignore, even for billionaire Elon Musk, who suggested on X that Tesla “might actually have to get into the mining & refining directly at scale.”
Fueled by the global rise in electric vehicles and the proliferation of lithium-ion batteries in everything from laptops to phones to solar panels, lithium consumption has skyrocketed: globally, people now use nearly 28 times more lithium per capita than in the 1990s. After China, the US is the world’s second-largest consumer of lithium, yet it mines less than one percent of the global supply. And lithium isn’t just powering our devices, it’s powering a future in clean energy.
To rectify this lack of domestic lithium, the US government approved a $2.26 billion loan in October 2025 to Lithium Americas, a Canadian company developing Thacker Pass in northern Nevada, the largest lithium deposit ever discovered in the United States. To this day, Nevada remains the only state that both mines and refines lithium domestically.
But this major investment may have come a little too late.
For one, despite the growing demand, Earth is actually in no short supply of lithium, and the price of this mineral dropped to $14,000 per metric ton just two years after the 2022 high, as new lithium resources became available worldwide. More importantly, the real bottleneck in the lithium supply chain isn’t mining — it’s refining. And China is already decades ahead in the battery-making process, refining over 70 percent of the lithium in the world.
In this video explainer, we’ll explore how lithium is fueling the “white gold rush” in Nevada and other parts of the country, whether or not the US Department of Energy’s investment in Thacker Pass will pay off, and what the history of mining ghost towns and boom and bust cycles can tell us about the future of this critical mineral.
