The American Battery Technology Company said on September 8 the US Bureau of Land Management had given the go-ahead for its Tonopah Flats Lithium Project mine and refinery in Nevadaa. This follows after completing its review of the project — one of the US’s largest known lithium resources.

Acceptance of the mine and refinery plan of operations is the culmination of over four years of work, including demonstrating the performance of ABTC’s own technologies for manufacturing high-purity lithium hydroxide.

ABTC said Tonopah encompasses one of the largest known measured, indicated and inferred lithium claystone resource deposits in the US.

The project is one of a number selected as a federal priority project for streamlined permitting, to aid the Trump administration’s moves to stop the US being exploited by overseas battery supply chain dominance.

Tonopah Flats is designed to bolster domestic production of critical minerals needed for grid-scale BESS systems, EVs and datacenters.

ABTC chief executive Ryan Melsert said BLM’s certification of the mine and refinery plan of operations was a major accomplishment by his team and a critical milestone in the construction and commercialisation of the project pre-feasibility study of Tonopah published in October 2025 indicated that the project had a highly competitive cost of production of $4,307 per tonne of lithium hydroxide monohydrate.

Earlier this year, the US Department of Energy reinstated a grant to support building the project.