Study Reveals Salton Sea’s Potential to Meet the Nation’s Lithium Demand for Generations

This story was originally published by the Nevada Current.

Southern California’s Salton Sea: A Potential Lithium Hotspot

A federal analysis released Tuesday confirmed Southern California’s Salton Sea contains enough lithium to meet the nation’s needs for decades.

Salton Sea has the potential to produce an estimated 375 million lithium batteries for electric vehicles — more than the total number of vehicles currently on U.S. roads, according to the analysis commissioned by the Department of Energy.

Those numbers dwarf the estimated lithium deposits available in Nevada’s Thacker Pass, long touted as the largest known source of lithium in the nation.

The long-awaited analysis was conducted by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It’s the most comprehensive analysis to date quantifying the domestic lithium resources in California’s Salton Sea region.

If the Salton Sea lithium can be extracted, it could give the U.S. the ability to produce domestically sourced lithium, ending the nation’s dependence on rival countries for a supply of the metal.

“Lithium is vital to decarbonizing the economy and meeting President Biden’s goals of 50 percent electric vehicle adoption by 2030,” said Jeff Marootian, DOE secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. “This report confirms the once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a domestic lithium industry at home while also expanding clean, flexible electricity generation.”

But that opportunity hinges on whether emerging technologies can make extracting lithium from brine cost-effective on a commercial scale. Over the last 12 months, the price of lithium has plummeted from roughly $85,000 per metric ton to less than $19,000, a plunge attributed to increased global production and unexpectedly soft demand.

Generating electricity from the Salton Sea, a geothermal hot spot, requires extracting hot brine from underground aquifers to produce steam that drives turbines. Brine used for geothermal energy also happens to be rich in lithium that can theoretically be extracted in a more environmentally friendly closed system.

The Salton Sea is believed to have the highest concentration of lithium, contained in geothermal brines, in the world.

Three companies — Berkshire Hathaway Energy, EnergySource, and Controlled Thermal Resources — have been working for years on plans to extract lithium by taking advantage of the Salton Sea’s rich geothermal resources.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy, the sprawling holding company with multiple subsidiaries, including NVEnergy, already operates 10 geothermal power generating plants on the southern shore of the Salton Sea, and recently commissioned a pilot facility to test the feasibility of extracting lithium from brine.

Estimates for lithium in the Salton Sea were modeled using the average annual brine production from existing geothermal plants in the region and the concentration of lithium in the brine, according to the report.

However, the DOE warns that those findings are based on existing companies’ ability to access the entire Salton Sea geothermal reservoir for electricity production, » …
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