[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by WolfpackS2k

Good luck getting the green wackos to sign off on mining that.

The first few sentences kind of lay out the situation, which seems like it can't get much worse there for the environment, and it seems like a lot of people are talking about the income from the industries providing money to fund restoration projects.

About 40 miles north of the California-Mexico border lies the shrinking, landlocked lake known as the Salton Sea. Though the lake was once the epicenter of a thriving resort community, water contamination and decades of drought have contributed to a collapse of its once-vibrant ecosystem and given rise to ghost towns.

But amid this environmental disaster, the California Energy Commission estimates that there’s enough lithium here to meet all of the United States’ projected future demand and 40% of the world’s demand.

Traditionally, lithium extraction involves either open-pit mining or evaporation ponds, which work by pumping lithium-containing brine to the surface and waiting for the water to dry up. Both of these methods have huge land footprints, are often very water intensive and can create a lot of contamination and waste.

But at the Salton Sea, three companies are developing chemical processes to extract lithium in a much cleaner way, taking advantage of the Salton Sea’s rich geothermal resources. Near the lake, there are already 11 operating geothermal power plants, 10 of which are owned by Berkshire Hathaway
’s renewable energy division, BHE Renewables.

“We are already pumping 50,000 gallons of brine per minute across all of our 10 geothermal facilities to the surface,” said Alicia Knapp, president and CEO of BHE Renewables, “and we’re using the steam from that brine to generate clean energy. So we’re really halfway there in that we’ve got the lithium right here in our hands.”

Environmentalists also see this as a moment to catalyze momentum around habitat restoration at the Salton Sea. While California has been working on the problem for years, advocates are pushing the state to expedite projects that involve creating lower-salinity ponds on the dry lake bed where fish and bird species can thrive. And with the state’s budget surplus, things are finally moving.

As mining projects face community concern and backlash in other parts of the country, it seems that lithium recovery at the Salton Sea could be the rare-minerals project that unites most stakeholders.