Lithium Americas Brand Guidelines: Building Thacker Pass, Nevada’s Lithium Clay Project

A Nevada clay project and an Argentine brine project, merged and then split.

The company now called Lithium Americas has two family trees. English Wikipedia says the first company of that name was set up in the summer of 2009 as a spin-off of lithium operations at Caucharí-Olaroz in Argentina, owned by Latin American Minerals and Grupo Minero Los Boros, an Argentine borax producer. The other line began in 2008, when Western Lithium USA was spun off from Western Uranium’s lithium project in Nevada’s King Valley, the area now known as Thacker Pass.

The two lines came together in September 2015, when the first Lithium Americas merged into Western Lithium USA, and on 22 March 2016 Western Lithium announced that it would take the Lithium Americas name, according to English Wikipedia. For several years the combined company carried both an Argentine brine project and a Nevada clay project under one roof.

That arrangement ended in 2023. When General Motors announced its investment in Thacker Pass on 31 January 2023, the Lithium Americas chief executive, Jonathan Evans, said in GM’s release that the agreement set “a foundation for the separation of our U.S. and Argentine businesses.” English Wikipedia dates the separation to 3 October 2023: the Argentine operations went to a separate company, then called Lithium Americas (Argentina) Corp., and the present Lithium Americas kept the Nevada project.

The Associated Press, in an October 2025 report carried by CBC, described Lithium Americas as Vancouver-based, and the company’s quarterly releases carry a Vancouver dateline. Its shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LAC, the company says.

A lithium clay deposit in the McDermitt Caldera.

Thacker Pass sits in Humboldt County in northern Nevada, inside the McDermitt Caldera, about 21 miles west-northwest of the small town of Orovada, according to English Wikipedia, which says the project is held by Lithium Nevada LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary. English Wikipedia notes that lithium is usually mined from hard rock or from brine; this deposit is a lithium-bearing clay. General Motors, in its January 2023 release, called it “the largest known source of lithium in the United States”; the company itself now describes Thacker Pass as hosting the largest known measured lithium resource and reserve in the world.

The process planned for the site is chemical rather than evaporative. English Wikipedia describes it this way: clay is dug with hydraulic shovels and turned into a slurry, sand and rock without lithium go back to the pit, and the lithium-bearing slurry is treated with sulfuric acid made on site by burning molten sulfur, a step that also generates much of the plant’s own electricity. The solution is then filtered and processed into lithium carbonate, with tailings returned to the excavated blocks as mining moves on.

The approvals and the building came in stages. The US Bureau of Land Management issued its Record of Decision approving the mine on 15 January 2021, and construction began in March 2023, according to English Wikipedia. In its first-quarter 2026 report, dated 14 May 2026, the company said Phase 1 is designed for a nominal 40,000 tonnes a year of battery-quality lithium carbonate, and that it is targeting mechanical completion in late 2027, with Bechtel on the project. The same report describes a housing site for construction workers in Winnemucca and a rail transload terminal west of the town, started in March 2026.

The project has also met opposition. English Wikipedia says it faced legal challenges and direct action; some tribes with traditional homelands in the area support the mine, while others oppose it and say they were not adequately consulted, and opponents have also raised concerns about the environmental review and wildlife habitat. Construction began after an emergency appeal to the Ninth Circuit was denied.

Salt flats, pits and cathode kilns.

Lithium and battery-materials companies sell to other companies, not to shoppers, and their imagery is built for investors, carmakers and governments as much as for the public. Most of it starts at the source. Brine producers show their evaporation ponds from the air: long rectangles of turquoise, green and pale yellow laid out across a white salt flat, with mountains on the horizon. Hard-rock miners show open pits cut in terraces into red or ochre earth, haul trucks on the benches and stockpiles of pale spodumene ore.

The next layer is chemistry. Company photographs move indoors to white lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide powders held in gloved hands or poured from a scoop, bulk bags stacked in a warehouse, and the long kilns and furnaces of refineries and cathode-material plants. These images carry the industry’s main argument: that a mineral dug or pumped in one country becomes a battery-grade chemical in another.

The end use usually appears last, and it is almost always the same: battery cells, electric cars, charging cables and grid-scale storage containers. The pictures show where the material is meant to go.

Much of the visual language is corporate rather than consumer. Investor-day slides and annual reports lean on world maps dotted with mines, plants and offices, flow charts of the supply chain from resource to cathode, and the logos of listing exchanges. Industry gatherings such as Fastmarkets’ Lithium Supply and Battery Raw Materials conference bring producers, refiners and buyers into the same rooms, and the same maps and pond photographs reappear on stage. In a sector where few people see the product, the identity rests on landscapes, laboratories and the cars at the end of the chain.

General Motors, then the Department of Energy.

The project’s money has come with partners. On 31 January 2023 General Motors and Lithium Americas announced that they would jointly develop Thacker Pass; GM said in its release that it would take an equity stake in Lithium Americas in two tranches, the first held in escrow until conditions including the outcome of the court case over the Record of Decision were met, and that it would receive exclusive access to Phase 1 production, with the lithium carbonate going into its Ultium battery cells. In 2024 the two companies formed a joint venture for the mine; the company says Thacker Pass is now owned 62% by Lithium Americas and 38% by General Motors.

The US government has also taken a stake. English Wikipedia says the Department of Energy announced a loan for the mine’s construction on 14 March 2024. On 1 October 2025 the Associated Press reported, in a story carried by CBC, that the Department of Energy would take a 5% equity stake in Lithium Americas and a 5% stake in the Thacker Pass joint venture with GM, as part of changes to the loan. The company says the amended agreement with the department was signed on 7 October 2025, and that on 30 January 2026 it issued the department a warrant for shares equal to 5% of the company, while the joint venture issued a separate warrant for a non-voting 5% economic interest in the project. The company says it received a second advance on the loan in February 2026.

Thacker Pass is still being built. As of the company’s May 2026 report it was not yet producing, and the timetable it gives runs to mechanical completion in late 2027. The Associated Press quoted Phase 1 at 40,000 metric tons of battery-quality lithium carbonate a year, enough, it said, to help power 800,000 electric vehicles.

For a design guide, Lithium Americas shows how a company with no product on sale yet presents itself through a place, a process and its partners. Compare Albemarle, whose history runs from blotting paper and bromine to lithium, and SQM, Chile’s saltpetre company turned lithium producer. For this guide we use sagebrush green, playa sand and a clay ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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