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| Derek Benson, the chief operating officer of EnergySource Minerals, gesturing toward the pipe that carries super-hot water from subterranean faults into the company's geothermal plant. David Ferris/E&E News |
Derek Benson, chief operating officer of the geothermal power producer EnergySource, pointed to a white shipping container, where fiberglass tanks are being used to pull lithium out of the same brine from the sandstone depths.
EnergySource, based in San Diego, is making an expensive gamble that it can be the first to tap a vast reserve of lithium here that has frustrated engineers for decades. Lithium has always been valuable, but the arrival of electric vehicles presages an enormous new market. That market could be dominated by Chile, or Australia, or China, each of which has its own lithium reserves. Or, if the geothermal entrepreneurs of the Salton Sea have their way, the winner could be America.
"People may look back on 2019 as the next gold rush, in terms of what's begun this year," said David Hochschild, the new chairman of the California Energy Commission (CEC), who has become a leading advocate.
A prodigious quantity of lithium lies below and around the Salton Sea, which itself lies 226 feet below sea level. The leading geothermal company, Berkshire Hathaway Energy (BHE), estimates that its properties alone could produce 300,000 metric tons of lithium a year. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the entire world produced 43,000 tons of lithium in 2017.
