This California desert could hold the key to powering all of America’s electric cars
The Salton Sea, which sits roughly in the middle of the massive geological low point, isn’t really a sea at all. California’s largest inland lake, it measures 51 miles long from north to south and 17 miles wide, but gradually shrinks as less and less water flows into it. At one time it was a thriving place of entertainment and recreation, an activity that has also largely dried up. There are still abandoned buildings and shallow gray beaches. The highways around the lake are now traveled mostly by passing trucks.
In recent years, companies have come here to mine a precious metal, lithium, which the auto industry needs to switch to making electric cars. Lithium is the lightest natural metallic element on Earth, and, among other things, for this reason, it is important for the batteries of electric cars, which must store a lot of electricity in a box that weighs as little as possible.
Additionally, with the unique geography of the Salton Sea basin, engineers and technicians can obtain lithium with minimal environmental destruction, according to companies working there. In other places lithium is extracted from the earth using hard rock mining which leaves huge ugly scars in the ground. Here it naturally exists in liquid form, so extraction does not require mining or blasting.
For thousands of years, floodwaters from the Colorado River, carrying minerals mined from the Rocky Mountains, Ruby Canyon, Glen Canyon, Grand Canyon and many more, have poured into these lowlands. Time and time again the water came and evaporated, leaving behind metals that ended up deep in the ground.
Lithium is abundant in the Salton Sea basin. In fact, the people working to extract it say there could be enough of it to make batteries for all the electric cars that are expected to be built in this country for many years to come, freeing the United States from dependence on vis-à-vis foreign lithium suppliers. This has been a priority for the Biden administration.
The Earth’s crust is thin here, and there is water deep underground near the bubbling hot liquid rock inside the Earth, called magma. Trapped in this natural oven, this water has become a superheated mineral stew.
Geothermal energy companies have been here for decades drilling into water at nearly 700 degrees, allowing it to instantly boil out of the ground. The steam from the hot brine – so called because of its high mineral content – spins turbines, generating electricity. It is then injected back into the Earth where it is reheated to start again. This type of energy is considered clean and renewable because it relies on heat occurring naturally in the Earth.
“It’s one of the largest geothermal energy deposits in the world,” said Derek Benson, COO of EnergySource Minerals.
The EnergySource Minerals value was established in 2018 by EnergySource, a geothermal energy company that has been producing electricity from hot Salton Sea brine for a decade. EnergySource Minerals is now working to obtain lithium from the brine it uses for energy.
Exactly how much lithium is there, and how much could be extracted from it, are questions a research team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories is working to answer.
According to Patrick Dobson, a Berkeley Labs geologist leading the research, about a quarter of the water extracted from deep underground here is dissolved rock, a mineral concentration much higher than that found in the Earth. ordinary sea water. Lithium is about 200 parts per million, he said, which compares to about 10 parts per million in some other hot geothermal fields.
“That’s why it’s of interest,” he said. “It’s not just any geothermal brine. There are some places where there’s lithium enrichment in the brine and the Salton Sea is where in the United States we’re really focusing our attention. “
People who have worked with this brine have long been familiar with its contents, but there is no use for fillers of undifferentiated minerals and their selective extraction was uneconomical. But that was before electric cars became a big deal and the price of lithium started skyrocketing. Companies have therefore invested in new technologies to extract lithium from brine.
“We use what we call selective lithium adsorption,” Benson said. “And so we pass the lithium-containing brine through one of our proprietary adsorbers. It has a chemistry that has an affinity for lithium and really only lithium.”
One of the challenges is how efficiently these technologies can extract lithium from brine, said Dobson of Berkeley Labs. Although there is a lot of lithium in the brine, these extraction techniques probably won’t be able to remove 100% of every drop.
Also, as lithium is extracted from the brine and the brine is then pumped deep underground, will the lithium levels be significantly depleted or will the levels be replenished as more lithium is extracted from rocks?
“We know from measurements of the rocks that are still in the reservoir that not all of the lithium is present in the brine,” he said. “There is still lithium present in the rocks.”
Collecting lithium now looks like a bigger source of revenue for companies like EnergySource than their original business of just generating electricity from hot soup. In fact, other companies are getting into the geothermal business largely to be able to get lithium. In their case, electricity is just a bonus.
Not far from the beige-colored geothermal power plants of EnergySource, a company called Controlled Thermal Resources has its own small power plant. This is currently in the test phase, but CTR has already entered into a partnership with General Motors, which will buy the lithium produced here for its electric vehicles. More recently, Italian electric vehicle battery company Italvolt announced plans to form a spin-off company to work with CTR. Plans call for Statevolt, as the spin-off is called, to build a battery manufacturing plant nearby, using both power produced by CTR’s generators and lithium mined from the brine there. The plant could one day produce enough batteries for 650,000 electric vehicles a year, according to Italvolt.
On-site battery manufacturing will eliminate material shipping costs as well as carbon dioxide emissions from all the ships, trains and trucks needed to transport lithium to the battery factories that are, today, primarily located in Asia, said Rod Colwell, CEO of CTR.
From the “Western Riviera” to “one of the worst nightmares”
This new wave of interest could mean good things for a community that needs help. Decades ago the Salton Sea was a tourist destination, with people flocking to the California desert oasis to enjoy boating and water skiing. That was before evaporation dried up the lake, concentrating pollutants in the shrinking body of water.
“You’d find people from Hollywood, luminaries from Southern California coming to boat and enjoy the great restaurants, golfing,” said Frank Ruiz, Salton Sea program director for the National Audobon Society. “That was Salton Sea life in the 1950s and 60s and only 50 years later that’s what we have,” he said, looking around a beach by the sea. a largely abandoned lake.
“You have gone from the Western Riviera to one of the worst environmental and public health nightmares,” he said.
The lake has shrunk due to a lack of natural inflows, combined with years of drought and rising temperatures due to climate change. As the lake continues to recede, it leaves behind pollutant-rich sand and slimy mud. That, combined with the region being a natural basin that tends to trap and hold smoke and smog from surrounding areas, contributes to high asthma rates, he said.
Today, the area looks almost abandoned besides some seemingly thriving date farms with rows of thick-trunked palm trees. Artists were drawn to the area’s blank canvas of empty structures and open spaces, creating a colony of extravagantly painted and decorated houses. Large wire and concrete sculptures populate the beach.
Which flooded the area several times over the eternities. The lake that exists today was created around 1905 when man-made channels overflowed into the desert plains. For a long time, the resulting large lake was a boon to traveling birds, as well as water sports enthusiasts.
“We used to have over 400 different species of birds and pretty much every species we have in California, in the Salton Sea,” Ruiz said. “From an environmental perspective, this is one of the last remaining gems along the Pacific Flyway, especially here in California.”
The lake and its water are unrelated to the lithium-rich underground brine, but, Ruiz hopes, lithium mining can provide jobs and income to help rebuild the economy of the Salton Sea region and perhaps even its damaged environment, in addition to putting more electric cars on the road.
“It can be very good for the region as a whole. Not just for Imperial County, for the Coachella Valley, for all Californians,” Ruiz said. “I mean, nationally, it can be a catalyst.”