USA, California:

Lithium, the Salton Sea and a Startup that’s Trying to Change the Game (Gigaom)

The EnergySource, Hudson Ranch Power I, or John L. Featherstone plant,
is the location of Simbol’s demo plant. Image by Katie Fehrenbacher.

Just south of the Salton Sea — the salty, shrinking 350-square-mile lake that was formed as the result of an engineering accident in the early 1900s — a six-year-old tech startup has been extracting the “white gold” that lies thousands of feet below the surface. That valuable material, lithium, can be used in batteries for electric cars and cell phones, and the project has piqued enough interest that execs from a handful of battery makers, as well as electric car company Tesla, have visited the site.

What the Salton Sea area does still have — no matter what happens to the water — is abundant geothermal power assets underground, as well as lithium deposits. The two actually go hand in hand, and the sea sits directly on the San Andreas fault. A dozen geothermal plants are already built in the region, including the most recent one that went online in 2012: EnergySource’s project, where the Simbol lithium extraction is happening.

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