Another good find, Cal. And another nugget in this paragragh:

"I think it’s going to be a challenging time for permitting. ... You’ve got some great Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service people in Elko in terms of the Elko District office and the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. You have a great state director at the Bureau of Land Management who is a solutions guy. But there have been some indications that … there’s a lithium issue down in Esmeralda County. Some folks are going through the permitting process and they’re having a pretty tough go of it. The folks closer to home at Nevada Lithium are pretty close to the end, although not completely."

Of course when he says Nevada Lithium he means Lithium Nevada (Thacker Pass). I see this name mixed up a lot. I like that he says they're "pretty close to the end".

The challenges in Esmeralda County relate to Ioneer's Ryolite Ridge project, with the Tiehm’s buckwheat flower issue, and this is also the county that ALB is operating their Silver Peak brine project. In addition, adjacent to Silver Peak are projects in the very early stages by Pure Energy (PEM) [brine], Spearmint (SPMT) [clay] and perhaps the most well known and advanced of these super juniors, Cypress (CYP) [clay]. 

I'm going to post the link to your article because it seemed truncated in my viewer.

'Challenging Time for Permitting' for Mines, Amodei Says