Excerpt from the LA Times - Story by Sammy Roth

Want to produce a huge amount of lithium for electric vehicle batteries — and also batteries that keep our homes powered after sundown — without causing the environmental destruction that lithium extraction often entails?

Then the Salton Sea may be your jam.

Companies big and small have been swarming California’s largest lake for years, trying to find a cost-effective way to pull out the lithium dissolved in scorching hot fluid deep beneath the lake’s southern end. Now a new federal analysis suggests even more of the valuable metal is buried down there than we previously understood.

The new analysis — led by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and reported here for the first time — finds we may be able to extract 18 million metric tons of “white gold” from the heated underground pool, which is not connected to the surface lake. That’s the first thoroughly documented public estimate of how much lithium is available at the Salton Sea, said Alex Prisjatschew, an engineer with the U.S. Department of Energy, which funded the analysis — and it’s higher than past guesses.

“It’s going to be roughly the equivalent of 382 million electric vehicle batteries,” Prisjatschew told me.

There are fewer than 300 million cars and trucks registered in the United States today. So yeah, that’s a big deal.

The Imperial Valley is far from the only place where the silvery white metal can be found. But extraction efforts in other parts of the country — such as Nevada’s Thacker Pass and Utah’s Great Salt Lake — have faced pushback from conservation activists and Native American tribes over their potential to destroy wildlife habitat, gobble up scarce water and desecrate sacred sites.

At the Salton Sea, environmental experts have found relatively little to worry about.

“Across the board, it’s a much more environmentally friendly way to extract lithium,” Prisjatschew said.

Several companies are racing to profit off that resource, aided by state and federal funds. San Diego-based EnergySource, which runs a geothermal plant at the Salton Sea, signed a contract earlier this year to sell lithium to Ford Motor Co. A few months later, Australian startup Controlled Thermal Resources won an investment of more than $100 million from Stellantis — the automaker behind Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram vehicles — to fund its efforts to generate geothermal electricity and produce lithium.

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