Excerpt from LA Times - March 18, 2021

Story by: Sammy Roth

In a world rocked by climate disruption, success may finally be around the corner.

I wrote about the increasingly bright prospects for Salton Sea lithium extraction in October 2019. Today, I’ve got several updates on the companies trying to make the Imperial Valley the first major source of North American lithium production — including the entrance of some powerful new players.

Let’s start with Controlled Thermal Resources, an Australian firm that I first wrote about in 2016.

It’s been nearly a decade since the last new geothermal plant was built at the Salton Sea, and Controlled Thermal might build the next one. The company says it began construction on two well pads in February, with plans to drill test wells in the next few months. Here’s a photo of the work, taken this week by Chief Executive Rod Colwell:

Controlled Thermal has a contract to sell geothermal power, but lithium production has been its major pitch to investors. The firm doesn’t yet have an agreement to sell battery-grade lithium hydroxide — that’s when we’ll know if it’s really likely to succeed — but Colwell tells me they’re close enough that they felt comfortable starting to spend money moving earth around. They’re now raising a final $37 million toward the overall $500-million price tag to show “bankable feasibility,” he said.

Colwell has expressed confidence before; when I first met him, he told me he hoped to get a geothermal plant built by 2020, which obviously didn’t happen. But when he says this time is for real, he may be right. President Biden’s ambitious climate change plans, coupled with the growing number of automakers pledging to stop selling gasoline-powered cars, have led to a surge of interest in new domestic sources of lithium. Colwell says his company has been on the receiving end of that interest.

“After eight years,” he said, “suddenly overnight things started to come together.”

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