Lithium powers the products we rely on every day — but the U.S. has only one operational mine.
A mile beneath the arid, orange crust of Green River, Utah, flows a key ingredient in batteries: lithium. It’s trapped in brine, left over from an ancient marine bay. Extracting the critical mineral is technologically doable in 2026 — but it is a political and legal labyrinth.
Bruce Richardson, CEO of A1 Lithium, set out in 2017 to extract the element without wreaking havoc on the environment. He planned to use direct lithium extraction (DLE), which pumps lithium-rich brine from the earth, pulls the element from the water, then shoots the now-lithium-free liquid back to the depths.
After scouting sites on multiple continents, A1 Lithium settled on Moab, Utah. Richardson suspected the area was full of lithium-rich brine, so he applied for a permit to poke around in several vacated oil wells. The wells sat on federal land — managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — which required him to begin the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) permitting process.
NEPA requirements are extremely common for projects in the West, due to the sheer quantity of federally owned land. Nearly all development on federal land triggers NEPA, which governs the ensuing environmental review. In Grand County, Utah, where Moab is located, about 87 percent of the land is federally owned; Emery County, just to the west, is about 92 percent federal.
As is typical with the five-decade-old process, Richardson’s quest for well exploration began with a one-year public consultation period. Then, with the community’s thoughts in mind, the BLM began putting together a 100-page environmental assessment (EA). The EA only allowed an initial probe of the wells and did not constitute approval for any commercial activity.
“There was considerable delay while the BLM kept changing their minds about the format of the report,” Richardson told National Review. “They were debating whether they wanted a bibliography or footnotes.” It took the BLM about three months to review the EA each time they made changes, he said.
After three years, the BLM granted A1 Lithium permission to perform an initial look at the wells. Almost immediately, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance sued the BLM, claiming A1 Lithium’s activities would hurt wildlife and lead to water contamination. SUWA is a nonprofit that “defend[s] America’s redrock wilderness from oil and gas development, unnecessary road construction, rampant off-road vehicle use, and other threats to Utah’s wilderness-quality lands.”
According to the BLM, SUWA has 20 closed legal cases against the BLM and six pending complaints.
Another three years after SUWA’s lawsuit, Richardson said he hadn’t heard anything about the state of the project.
SUWA did not respond to request for comment.
So Richardson and his team began looking for another site with access to the area’s deep brine. They purchased a private plot of land 30 miles north; while still subject to general federal laws, private land in Utah is largely governed by state and local regulations.
Aiding the second project’s success was President Donald Trump’s reelection. Former President Biden’s BLM had warned Richardson that he might face the same permitting issues on their new site in Green River. However, after Trump was sworn in, Richardson said he saw “a very quick change in in attitude from the within the BLM.”
So after years of wrangling with federal bureaucracies, A1 Lithium was able to jump-start the project. “It took from application to approval three months for the same thing,” Richardson said.
On this new site in Green River, Utah, A1 Lithium is on track to construct a 100-ton-per-year lithium plant by the end of 2027. They hope to eventually bump commercial production up to 10,000 tons per year of lithium carbonate.
As of late September, construction of limited infrastructure had commenced, and workers were in the process of piping municipal water to the site.
While there are millions of tons of undiscovered lithium locked beneath American soil, the country is currently home to only one operating lithium mine, accounting for less than 1 percent of global lithium production. The lithium that powers Teslas, iPhones, and more is largely extracted from mines in Australia, Argentina, Chile, and China.
America doesn’t lack for lithium supply, it’s the burdensome permitting process and onerous environmental regulations that suppress domestic production.
That bottleneck has left the U.S. second to last globally for the speed at which mining projects proceed. The only country with longer times is Zambia, according to S&P’s Global Market Intelligence.
From sea to shining sea, mines take nearly 30 years to go from discovery to first production.
But why does permitting in the U.S. take so long?
“If you and I were to sit down and talk about what permits you need to operate a lithium or copper mine or whatever in the U.S., we would need a three-ring binder,” Chris Berry, a critical minerals adviser who works primarily with investors, told National Review.
Every aspect of mining is covered by various permits at various bureaucratic levels. Permits and regulators will assess the proposed projects’ impact on water, air, dust, noise, wildlife, vegetation, soil and erosion, environmental remediation, and more.
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have these in place, but it’s the level of red tape that has stifled the mining business, and again, the lawsuits,” Berry said.
In a conversation with National Review, BLM director Stevan Pearce said lawsuits filed by environmentalist groups have cost his agency enormously in terms of time, resources, and money.
As of October 9, the BLM had 200 active legal cases against them, 150 of which were pressed in the last six years. A vast majority of the $11.7 million the BLM paid out in legal fees between 2018 and 2026 — 81 percent — went to environmental and animal rights groups. Meanwhile, corporate groups accounted for only 14 percent of these payouts.
Pearce described environmental litigation, as it operates within Congress’ Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), as a lucrative occupation. Under EAJA, if an environmental group files a lawsuit listing multiple claims and wins on even a single procedural technicality — such as the BLM missing a deadline by two days — the government is obligated to pay the legal fees for the entire lawsuit.
Environmental groups have sought attorneys’ fees for as high as $700 per hour, Pearce told NR.
Of the environmental groups that sue the BLM, several have emerged as major players in the game of litigation; 13 repeat groups collected nearly three-quarters — 71.5 percent — of all money the BLM paid in legal fees between 2018 and 2026.
The groups that won the most money from the BLM include the Western Environmental Law Center, which won 13 settlements and $2.1 million since 2018, and Advocates for the West, which won about $1.7 million in the same period.
Once environmental groups win money from the BLM, even if they won on a technicality, the organizations often leverage the win to solicit small-dollar donations from the public, Pearce said.
Their zeal for litigation has caused the BLM to slow down its own processes, though they’ve had little success in staving off further lawsuits.
Pearce said he regularly hears from state BLM directors that “NEPA is taking longer, because we know we’re going to be sued on it.”
Even after long public consultation periods, “they turn around and sue us anyway,” Pearce said. “It tells you that they’re after the delay, not after the input. We were talking to them; they were part of the negotiations. They were part of our process, then they bring lawsuits.”
Even within the litigation process, Pearce said his legal teams have seen patterns of environmental groups slowing down the courts. Environmental attorneys will file myriad motions, which have no legal outcome at all. “All they do is push a deadline . . . when it’s close to the judge making the decision, they file another motion to push that decision off, and so they kind of walk their way through the months, and meanwhile, the cost for their lawyers, and the cost for our lawyers, goes up.”
The ultimate loser in this cycle is the taxpayer, he added. “The taxpayer is being very badly served by this whole lawfare problem that we’re facing, and the Equal Access to Justice Act definitely needs serious overhaul.”
Meanwhile, private developers like Richardson are deterred from proposing projects atop federal land.
Coming from Australia, Richardson originally sought out Utah because it is “well known as a mining province” with “good regulations,” he said. His experience with state leadership in Green River fit his original expectations; his experience with NEPA and SUWA did not, he said.
Rampant litigation is due, in part, to an attitude shift over the past several decades, Berry told NR. What used to be contained to a “not-in-my-backyard” philosophy has grown to a “not-in-your-backyard” dogma.
“As our quality of life has increased in this county, and as we’ve gotten familiar with creature comforts, instant gratification, clean air, and clean water, we’ve sort of forgotten what it takes to have them,” Berry said. “Access to internet, access to clean water, computers, and technology — all of that stuff, everything we use — is either mined or grown. And a lot of what’s grown is grown with the help of things that are mined.”
Berry continued, “Environmental groups have really pushed hard against domestic mining in this country for a long time, and that’s part of the reason why we find ourselves in the situation that we’re in right now.”
However, for as difficult as it is to extract minerals in the U.S., Richardson described A1 Lithium’s privately owned site in Green River as a (figurative) gold mine.
Geological pressure from nearby mountains makes it easier to extract the brine, the brine itself has high purity, and the private site they selected has much of the infrastructure they need already there, he said.
Richardson holds out hope that his site’s geological features — and the state’s willingness to green-light projects — will economically boost the country’s lithium production. “The Green River project is going to be really good for Utah,” he said.