California’s Salton Sea region has been touted as an emerging “Lithium Valley” because of large deposits of the mineral that underpins energy storage for electric vehicles and thousands of other applications.
The prospect has been for potential huge resource to be extracted with minimal surface impact while producing clean energy as a by-product.
That time is now.
I’m finally convinced: California’s Imperial Valley will be a major player in the clean energy transition.
After a dozen years of engineering, permitting and financing, the Australian firm Controlled Thermal Resources is ready to start building a lithium extraction and geothermal power plant at the southern end of the Salton Sea, more than 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles. A groundbreaking ceremony is planned for Friday near the shore of the shrinking desert lake.
John Podesta, who once served as President Clinton’s chief of staff and is now President Biden’s clean energy advisor, will be at the groundbreaking. When I talked with him ahead of the event, he stressed the importance of the U.S. lessening its reliance on China and other countries for critical minerals such as lithium — and the particular benefits for Imperial County, an agricultural mecca that sits along the U.S.-Mexico border and has some of California’s lowest incomes.
“The work is going to be done by union labor. These are going to be good jobs,” Podesta said.
Unlike solar panels and wind turbines, geothermal plants can generate pollution-free electricity 24 hours a day by tapping into a powerful pocket of underground heat thousands of feet below the Salton Sea. If we want to transition away from planet-warming fossil fuels and power our homes and businesses with 100% climate-friendly energy, geothermal can help.
Lithium, meanwhile, is a key ingredient in the batteries that power electric cars — and also store solar and wind energy for times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. And unlike many other lithium mines, Controlled Thermal’s “Hell’s Kitchen” project — and others planned for the Salton Sea region — would do little environmental damage.
But until now, I wasn’t sure whether Hell’s Kitchen would move forward.
Companies have been trying to resolve the economic and technical barriers to Imperial Valley lithium extraction for years. Some of my first stories for the Desert Sun newspaper, nearly a decade ago, were about Simbol Materials, a startup that claimed it had cracked the code. In 2015, I wrote about Simbol’s plans for a lithium plant that would employ 400 construction workers.
Less than a month later, the company fired most of its staff.
So when I first wrote about Controlled Thermal’s plans eight years ago, I was skeptical.
Would the company bring down the high up-front costs that had stymied other developers looking to add to the Imperial Valley’s aging fleet of geothermal power plants? And would Controlled Thermal’s lithium extraction plans be foiled by the highly corrosive, superheated underground fluid in which the valuable metal is dissolved, which can degrade equipment?
I kept asking those questions when the company started moving dirt around, and when it actually drilled its first wells. I remained skeptical when General Motors invested in Hell’s Kitchen, and when auto giant Stellantis agreed to buy some of the lithium.
Now, though? With a groundbreaking ceremony on the docket for Hell’s Kitchen and one of the president’s top advisors planning to attend, I’m finally feeling confident that the lithium revolution has arrived at the Salton Sea.
“It’s been a journey, as you know,” Controlled Thermal Chief Executive Rod Colwell told me.
Colwell and his collaborators still have big plans in the works. They envision the project that breaks ground Friday as the first of seven phases, with the potential to eventually produce 175,000 metric tons per year of lithium hydroxide and 350 megawatts of round-the-clock geothermal power. Other companies could add to the haul, with federal researchers estimating last year that the superheated brine deep beneath the Salton Sea contains enough lithium to fuel 382 million electric-vehicle batteries.
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There are still qualifiers and caveats. Price of lithium bouncing around, but very little doubt in long term prospects for demand.
I recall an interview with a mayor in the Salton Sea area anticipating the jobs and growth associated with the lithium extraction project. The dust from the exposed lake bed is bad for your lungs, and the area should be treated as a remote work site only, with no residential children and families (like an offshore rig or a remote Alaskan drill site).
When I went to look up the ceramic-lined pipe I thought they would use for those sites. Instead I found a paper describing a plausible thermoplastic: chlorinated polyvinyl chloride (CPVC).
An excerpt for chemistry nerds from https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1820/ML18207A604.pdf
At its most basic level, CPVC is a PVC homopolymer that has been subjected to a chlorination reaction. In PVC, a chlorine atom occupies 25 percent of the bonding sites on the backbone, while the remaining sites are filled by hydrogen. CPVC differs from PVC in that approximately 40 percent of the bonding sites on the backbone are filled with strategically placed chlorine atoms, while the remaining 60 percent of available sites are filled with hydrogen. The chlorine atoms surrounding the carbon backbone of CPVC are large atoms which protect the chain from attack. Access to the CPVC carbon chain is restricted by the chlorine on the molecule. It is the additional chlorine that provides CPVC with its superior temperature and chemical resistance.