And if the batteries are made there, why not the whole electric car? “This is not alchemy,” says Jonathan Weisgall, vice president for government relations for Berkshire Hathaway Energy Co., which owns 10 of the region’s geothermal plants. Developing lithium from the Salton Sea in California can help anchor a multi-billion dollar domestic electric vehicle battery supply chain and inject thousands of jobs and billions of dollars into California’s economically disadvantaged Imperial Valley, according to a new report from New Energy Nexus.. They want as many future jobs to be clustered in California as possible. “The infrastructure is there, the workforce is there,” says Rod Colwell, chief executive officer of Controlled Thermal Resources Ltd., which plans to build a new geothermal plant, complete with lithium extraction, at the lake. While lithium extraction projects at the Salton Sea are still unproven, the idea is “tantalizing and intriguing” said Rod Eggert, deputy director of the Critical Materials Institute at the Colorado School of Mines. Government Initiatives 20 IV. The U.S. badly wants its own supply. California Wants Its Imperial Valley to Be ‘Lithium Valley’ The region’s Salton Sea contains a massive trove of the metal needed for electric-car batteries. Lithium Valley Vision 20 6. Developing lithium from the Salton Sea in California can help anchor a multi-billion dollar domestic electric vehicle battery supply chain and inject thousands of jobs and billions of dollars into California’s economically disadvantaged Imperial Valley, according to a new report from New Energy Nexus. They’ve even started using the name “Lithium Valley” to brand the idea. Lithium Valley Overview 17 1. But it’s one thing to extract lithium from the region’s brine as … After years of false starts and disappointments, the Salton Sea lithium story may get a happy ending after all. The Salton Sea 17 2. “If we manage to snag one battery plant, you’re talking 3,000 jobs. Lithium is abundant around the Salton Sea and could play an important role in the region’s future economic development. A group of investors, policymakers, startups and energy providers are hoping to build a domestic battery manufacturing, mining and innovation hub around the Salton Sea's lithium, coined "Lithium Valley." It’s been running a pilot project at its plant, off and on, for about four years, he says. Lilac in February won $20 million in funding from investors including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy ventures (Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek, is an investor in Breakthrough Energy), and Controlled Thermal Resources plans to use Lilac’s technology at the Salton Sea. 1516 Ninth Street The brine containing it already flows to the surface day and night through a series of 11 geothermal power plants, clustered around the southeastern edge of the Salton Sea. What was once the Red Hill Bay Marina, in the sea’s southeast, must regularly be cleared of sand. A final report is due to the State Legislature by October 1, 2022. The question is, can it be done in a commercial way?”. The conventional ways of extracting lithium use a lot of water and can be bad for the environment, but the process that would be used in the Salton Sea would be different. Removing the lithium before reinjecting the brine would add a few steps to the existing cycle, giving the plants a new product worth far more than the electricity they sell. For generations, Imperial Valley residents have been breathing in a Periodic Table of minerals and metals, as well as agricultural chemicals. Overview of Active Salton Sea Projects 22 1. CTR is also now creating Hell's Kitchen Co, facilities for lithium extraction and chemical processing at its geothermal plant at Imperial Valley’s shallow, saline Salton Sea. The federal Energy Department awarded its Salton Sea project a $15 million grant. Dust storms laced with toxins sweep across California’s Imperial County, where mud volcanoes spit and hiss near the shores of the slowly shrinking lake known as the Salton Sea. There’s no doubt the lithium is there. “If you tried to use conventional exchange technologies, you’d just end up with a lot of sodium.”. Salton Sea land owners may luck out Lithium in the geothermal brine – if they can only extract it. With the opportunity to develop lithium from the Salton Sea in California, the Blue-Ribbon Commission on Lithium Extraction (Lithium Valley Commission) is directed to review, investigate, and analyze opportunities and benefits for lithium recovery and use in the state. The deal didn’t go through, and Simbol collapsed in 2015, shuttering its plant. When the power plants were built in the 1980s, no one gave the lithium much thought; the first commercial lithium-ion batteries didn’t hit the market until 1991. Companies around the world are beginning to see their products as part of a circular economy rather than one that extends in a straight line from the manufacturer to … Deep-pocketed Berkshire is one of three companies developing facilities to pull lithium from the brine. California officials, who have spent years studying the idea, don’t merely see Imperial County as a glorified mine. With the opportunity to develop lithium from the Salton Sea in California, the Blue-Ribbon Commission on Lithium Extraction (Lithium Valley Commission) is directed to review, investigate, and analyze opportunities and benefits for lithium recovery and use in the state. If you haven’t heard of it, the Salton Sea is a 350-square-mile, shrinking lake that’s a looming ecological disaster located a couple dozen miles south of Joshua Tree National Park. Hell’s Kitchen Lithium Co. The combination of geothermal resources and lithium at the Salton Sea in California, create a seemingly and incredibly attractive development opportunity and one can hope that plans for large scale geothermal power plant and lithium production facilities materialise. “This pandemic has only uncovered what many people were not aware of,” says state Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, who grew up in the area and now represents it in Sacramento. Garcia calls the opportunity a “Wayne Gretzky moment,” citing the hockey great’s famous method of skating to where he thought the puck was going to be. The region’s Salton Sea contains a massive trove of the metal needed for electric-car batteries. Existing Geothermal Power Production 19 5. That would be the valuable lithium that lies beneath the ground in the geothermal brines of the Salton Sea. A plan to fill the area with pumped water from the Alamo River to suppress habitat dust is progressing slowly. Oakland, California — Developing lithium from the Salton Sea in California can help anchor a multi-billion dollar domestic electric vehicle battery supply chain and inject thousands of jobs and billions of dollars into California’s Imperial Valley, one of the state’s most economically disadvantaged regions. His startup in Oakland, Calif., has developed its own version of ion-exchange technology—the same concept behind water softening—that uses ceramic-based beads to collect the lithium, without the impurities. Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, and Jeff Bezos are digging up lithium from the Salton Sea. Because the lithium is there, they reason, why not make the batteries there, too, at factories powered by clean geothermal energy? Many have tried—and failed—to pull the resource from the sea before. Governor Gavin Newsom in September signed a bill written by Garcia creating a committee to explore how best to develop the county’s lithium resources. I wrote about the increasingly bright prospects for Salton Sea lithium extraction in October 2019. At the Salton Sea, the potential for big lithium revenues could help spur construction of new geothermal power plants, which are more expensive to build than solar and … the Salton Sea. Beneath the lake, a bubble of magma—partially molten rock—heats the water that the geothermal plants use. The plants at the Salton Sea draw their superheated brine from wells thousands of feet deep, let it turn to steam inside the plant, use the steam to turn turbines and generate power, then pump it back underground to reheat. The Imperial Valley straddles the Mexican border. Tesla Inc. has announced plans to produce its own lithium from Nevada clay—something never done at commercial scale. "Extraction of this definitely can turn this area into the Lithium Valley, not the Silicon Valley but the Lithium Valley." The county is one of California’s poorest, most of its jobs tied to a thin strip of irrigated land surrounded by desert. Despite its reputation as an expensive place to build anything, the state boasts a growing number of EV manufacturers, including Tesla and would-be rival Lucid Motors, Zero Motorcycles, and bus maker Proterra. Yet this overlooked moonscape may hold the key to America’s clean-car future. Each company with projects at the lake—Controlled Thermal Resources, Berkshire Hathaway, and EnergySource Minerals LLC—has its own approach to the technology, and each insists reaching full-scale production won’t require further breakthroughs. The company expects to begin construction in a year or so and enter production in late 2023. It’s not easy to extract commercial quantities of lithium from the brine, which is packed with potassium, iron, manganese, and sodium. Red Hill lies in the distance. Even before the pandemic, unemployment in Imperial County typically ran to 15%. California Energy Commission A March 2020 report from research organization SRI International estimated that the Salton Sea area could produce 600,000 tons of lithium a year, almost eight times last year’s global production. With its eco-conscious population and aggressive climate change policies, California has become home to half of all electric vehicles sold in the U.S. Plugging In: The EV Transition Gains Speed. A March 2020 report from research organization SRI International estimated that the Salton Sea area could produce 600,000 tons of lithium a year, almost eight times last year’s global production. Its two hospitals were so overrun that some patients were airlifted 500 miles away to San Francisco. The pandemic came at an awkward time, when the companies had intended to be finalizing plant designs and raising money. Salton Sea Environmental Status 17 3. Bombay Beach gleams aside the Salton Sea. Interest in the metal lithium is soaring thanks to its application in lithium-ion batteries, which are used to power portable electronics, electric vehicles and other technology. Assembly Bill 1657 (Garcia), Chapter 271, 2020 (AB 1657), authorizes the California Energy Commission (CEC) to convene a Blue-Ribbon Commission on Lithium Extraction in California (Lithium Valley Commission), with 14 members appointed by a combination of the CEC, other state agencies, Assembly Speaker, and Senate Committee on Rules. Six years ago startup Simbol Materials LLC claimed to have cracked the code at its Salton Sea demonstration plant, attracting a $325 million buyout offer from Tesla, the Desert Sun newspaper reported. A March 2020 report from research organization SRI International estimated that the Salton Sea area could produce 600,000 tons of lithium a year, almost eight times last year’s global production. A campground in Mecca Beach, by the Salton Sea. Once the lithium in the batteries leaves Imperial Valley, a Salton Sea lithium industry could continue to exert a positive influence. The county, 85% Latino, suffered one of the state’s worst Covid outbreaks this summer. The statute requires the Lithium Valley Commission to submit, on or before October 1, 2022, a report to the Legislature documenting its findings and recommendations. San Diego and the Golden State’s prosperous coast lie only 100 miles away across a jumble of mountains, but it might as well be another world. "You have so much rich lithium source in the Salton Sea," says Ozkan. All that’s needed is a way to strip out the lithium before pumping the rest of the brine back underground. That water, far from pure, holds a sizable chunk of the periodic table. Kelley hopes the lithium at the Salton Sea will not only benefit the Imperial Valley economy with new investments, but projects brought in to extract lithium can also help restore the drying Salton Sea. “Lithium is particularly hard to separate,” Snydacker says. Economic and Jobs Opportunity 20 7. Located in Imperial Valley, California Hell’s Kitchen Lithium Co. is the largest and most advanced thermal brine, lithium development in the United States.. Elsewhere in California, mining giant Rio Tinto Group has been pulling the metal from old mine tailings. Developing lithium from the Salton Sea in California can help anchor a multi-billion dollar domestic electric vehicle battery supply chain and inject thousands of jobs and billions of dollars into California’s Imperial Valley, the state’s most economically disadvantaged regions. In part that’s because lithium and sodium atoms behave similarly, says David Snydacker, founder and CEO of Lilac Solutions. “California has some of the highest standards of labor relations and environmental regulations,” Assemblyman Garcia says, “so we really want to tout the idea that we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it right.”. “The lithium’s there, and we have recovered it in the laboratory. The federal Energy Department awarded its Salton Sea project a $15 million grant. “We who live here and have been living with the economic challenges have been ringing the bell for years now.”. Lithium This month, the Speaker of the Assembly agreed to create a Select Committee on California's Lithium Economy with the goal of exploring how the state can enable the creation of California’s Lithium Valley in the Salton Sea region. The key to unlocking the potential of the Salton Sea region is realizing the Lithium Valley vision, which the CEC is leading through its support of the Lithium Valley Commission.” Details on the grant: Grant lead organization: BHER Minerals, LLC Most of that lithium now comes from Australia, China, and South America. Represents a local city or county government in the Salton Sea geothermal resource area, Member with knowledge of economics and the effectiveness of local, state, and federal incentives, Represents a national vehicle manufacturer organization, Member appointed by the Secretary of the Natural Resources Agency, Member appointed by the Public Utilities Commission, Represents a local public electric utility, Represents disadvantaged and low-income communities in the Salton Sea geothermal resource area, Represents a local environmental organization, General member appointed by California Energy Commission, Member appointed by the Speaker of the Assembly, Represents the lithium extraction industry, California Power Generation and Power Sources. A final report is due to the State Legislature by October 1, 2022. “You can say this is where the puck is going, in terms of our need for lithium batteries and the electrification of our nation,” Garcia says. 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