USA, Hawaii:

Opinion: Could Hawaii Geothermal Plant Become a Windfall for Public? (Honolulu Civil Beat)

If power plant on Big Island were to start extracting valuable minerals like lithium on state-owned land, royalty payments should increase.

Puna Geothermal Venture (Courtesy Ormat)

An emerging technology is making it possible to extract lithium from the hot, mineral-rich brine that geothermal power plants pump out of the ground to generate energy. And the technology is not limited to extracting lithium — it can also recover a variety of other rare earth elements and valuable metals out of what is now being treated as wastewater.

In the parlance of geothermal engineering, this is called “solution mining by nature,” and the potential profits to be made from it are immense — so much so that it has gained the attention of two Hawaii County Council members, Margaret Wille and Daniel K. Paleka Jr., who are convening a hearing on the subject next month.

Does Ormat Technologies Inc. — the owner of Puna Geothermal Venture, which operates Hawaii’s only geothermal power plant — have plans in the works to adopt the technology?

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