One approval, one footprint
The Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that manages public land, signed a Record of Decision, the final approval a federal agency issues before a project can go ahead, for the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Humboldt County, Nevada, on January 15, 2021. The decision covers 5,700 acres of public land within the project area, the wording the agency itself used. Lithium Americas, the company building the mine, plans to work that land for 85 years. It is adding capacity in 4 equal steps of 40,000 tonnes a year each, reaching a nominal 160,000 tonnes a year of lithium carbonate, the processed form of lithium used in electric vehicle batteries, without taking any new land for the later steps.
All 4 phases sit on the 5,700 acres the Bureau of Land Management approved in 2021. No later phase adds land.
Show the numbers
| Phase 1 | 40,000 |
| Phase 2 | 40,000 |
| Phase 3 | 40,000 |
| Phase 4 and 5 | 40,000 |
Winnemucca District Manager Ester McCullough of the Bureau of Land Management said this about the decision.
The Thacker Pass Mine will provide a long term solution for the growing need for lithium while providing economic benefits for Humboldt County, especially around Orovada, McDermitt and Winnemucca
Ester McCullough, Winnemucca District Manager, Bureau of Land Management. Source 1.
What that capacity is meant to supply
Just the first step, Phase 1, is enough on its own, according to Lithium Americas and General Motors, to supply the lithium for up to 1 million electric vehicles a year. General Motors backs that estimate with a 650 million dollar investment in the project.
The oil and gas land it sits beside
The same agency that approved Thacker Pass also leases land nationwide for oil and gas drilling. In fiscal year 2025 the land under that lease covered 21,394,971 acres, and 12,346,001 acres of it were actually producing oil or gas. The producing figure alone is about 2,170 times the size of the entire Thacker Pass project area, a ratio calculated by MAOWCE from the agency own 2 figures. That leased total has shrunk by close to half since 2001, from about 38 million acres then to about 21.4 million now.
Figures are rounded to 1 decimal place for the chart. The exact acre counts behind each bar are 37,990,113 in 2001, 41,186,158 in 2010, 32,193,368.9 in 2015, 26,604,169 in 2020, and 21,394,971 in 2025.
Show the numbers
| 2001 | 38.0 |
| 2010 | 41.2 |
| 2015 | 32.2 |
| 2020 | 26.6 |
| 2025 | 21.4 |
What the comparison does and does not show
This is a comparison of scale, not a measure of land used for each barrel or each tonne produced. No source states the size of a single oil field, so these numbers cannot say one lithium mine replaces one oil field acre for acre. What they show is that a single mine, approved once on a fixed footprint, sits beside federal land leased for oil and gas that is orders of magnitude larger and kept in production continuously rather than dug once. Federal land is also only part of the national total. Of the 918,481 oil and gas wells producing across the United States in 2024, on every kind of land, the 91,935 well bores on federal land account for roughly 1 in 10.