U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Post

Transcript

It's a pleasure to announce the 20 some million dollars coming for the lithium Tech Hub, that was created through the Department of Commerce. Really through that CHIPS and Science Act as we wanted to build out our technology all around the country, have things made in America, for America, for our future. We're standing here at a local company called Dragonfly whose doing lithium ion batteries and working on battery storage. We're going to be helping companies who do things like this in research and development, but when a company like Dragonfly who employs a few hundred individuals, when these companies pop up and we work on these partnerships, well, small businesses around the community thrive too. And so what does this mean? Nevada has critical minerals. We all know it. We have some of the largest fossil lithium in North America. So through partnership, University of Nevada, Reno, we're going to build out and train workforce. We're going to work on research and development. We're going to help to develop those public and private partnerships that not only mine lithium, in this case critical minerals, and then recycle it, because these are critical minerals. It matters, so we're going to do that entire loop. That's why it's called the lithium loop. We're going to create the gold standard for what it takes to mine critical minerals and how we do that. It's going to create thousands of jobs. University of Nevada, Reno has been leading the way in so many things, and it's really important when we think about an academic institution like UNR, and its ability to train students in every area of the workforce, its ability to bring those public private partnerships, its ability to work with the state, local governments and the federal government. That's a perfect way to make them the hub and the center for all of this activity. It's going to be so important for our future, and I tell people all the time that Nevada's geology and geography put us on the forefront of the 21st century solutions for technology, energy and our economy is happening right here, and I can't wait to see it.