This California desert could hold the key to powering all of America's electric cars

CNN Business - Peter Valdes-Dapena

Controlled Thermal Resources Steam Testing, April 2022

Excerpt:

Lithium is abundant in the Salton Sea Basin. In fact, people working to extract it say there could be enough to make batteries for all the electric cars expected to be built in this country for many years, freeing the United States from reliance on foreign lithium suppliers. That's been a priority for the Biden administration.

Not far from EnergySource's tan-colored geothermal power stations, a company called Controlled Thermal Resources has its own small power station. This one is currently in the testing phase, but CTR has already formed a partnership with General Motors, which will purchase lithium produced here for its electric vehicles. More recently, the Italian EV battery company Italvolt announced plans for a spin-off company to work with CTR. Plans call for Statevolt, as the spin-off is called, to build a battery manufacturing facility nearby, using both energy produced by CTR's generators and lithium taken from brine there. The plant could someday produce enough batteries for 650,000 electric vehicles annually, according to Italvolt.

Putting battery manufacturing on-site will eliminate material shipping costs as well as the carbon dioxide emissions from all the ships, trains and trucks needed to carry the lithium to battery factories that are, today, mostly located in Asia, said Rod Colwell, CEO of CTR.

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