Electric vehicle demand spurs ‘white gold’ rush at California's largest lake

Yahoo Finance - Akiko Fujita and Dani Romero

Excerpt:

“This is a very defined boundary, very defined field, and so you can put a well down anywhere within the field and you know, strike white gold, if you want to call it that,” Rod Colwell, CEO of Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR), an Australian mining firm developing a geothermal power plant with a lithium mining plant on site, told Yahoo Finance. “The lithium resource would be the largest on the planet, fully developed… so it’s a very, very unique resource.”

Colwell said the region, which California Governor Gavin Newsom has dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of Lithium,” has such an abundance of the resource that it can source enough “white gold” to be used in every electric vehicle manufactured in the U.S. and still have enough saved up to export abroad.

'The whole supply chain can be located here'

The geology of the Salton Sea offers a solution for carmakers looking to localize their supply chains, according to Colwell.

At its Hell’s Kitchen plant, CTR envisions a full-scale operation that mines lithium using renewable energy, within driving distance of key EV manufacturers in Southern California and Mexico. Electric vehicle and component makers have begun flocking to the area.

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