Rod Colwell has a big plan to leverage lithium.
Site Selection Magazine - Gary Daughters
Excerpt:
Rod Colwell, CEO of Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR), has a vision that goes far beyond the “Lithium Valley” rush that has been touted as the economic savior of a remote patch of southern California near the border with Mexico. The Imperial Valley’s Salton Sea, polluted so badly that it drove out the tourists decades ago, turns out to be an unapparelled repository of the mineral lithium, essential to the production of lithium-ion batteries and, thus, electric vehicles.
The California Energy Commission has estimated that the Salton Sea could yield 600,000 tons of lithium per year, more than current U.S. demand.
CTR, its Salton Sea enterprise exclusively focused up to then on a geothermal energy project, began to test new horizons in the late 2010s and hasn’t stopped since, although, Colwell says, “geothermal is still our backbone.” Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables and California-based EnergySource also have joined the Salton Sea lithium sweepstakes.
“The whole EV transition,” Colwell says, “really sort of caught us all by surprise. In a good way, though.”
But that’s just the beginning of the story, at least as far as Colwell and CTR are concerned. With some 97,000 acres under CTR’s control, Colwell is on the way to assembling what he envisions as a massive green energy campus for start-to-end manufacturing of products that require both lithium and lots of green electricity. He hopes to co-locate a data center as well.
“Cathode-active materials to cathode facilities is what we’re working with now,” Colwell tells Site Selection. “It’s a crying shame to have to send battery-grade lithium to China to turn it into a cathode and then send it back to the U.S. to the battery cell manufacturer. Trying to close the loop on the supply chain is what we’re trying to get on top of. If we can just put a pipe through the wall and not do all of that back and forth, it saves hundreds of millions of dollars on both sides and brings down the cost of the ultimate battery.”
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