Add lithium to water in a chemistry lab, and you’ll get an incendiary reaction. The same might be said of opening new lithium mines: The prospect can spark conflicts when it comes to water.

Mining companies and the U.S. government are investing in increased extraction for lithium, which is a critical component in some renewable energy technology, especially electric vehicle batteries and large grid-scale storage batteries.

The IRA injected the Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Programs Office with about $11.7 billion to support new loans for energy projects, including mines for needed metals like lithium. This builds on earlier Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) grants for battery material supply chains. The IRA also offers tax credits of up to $7,500 on eligible electric vehicles, creating additional demand for lithium by the auto industry.

With funding from the IRA, DOE and BIL, lithium miners have gained new financial vigor and governmental votes of confidence. Yet some worry what impact this newfound funding will have on the environment.

Domestic mining is still primarily governed by the outdated 1872 Mining Law, which didn’t enshrine environmental protections, but “declared all valuable mineral deposits in land belonging to the United States to be free and open to exploration and purchase,” according to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) website.

Through the National Environmental Policy Act, environmental impact statements are required ahead of major projects like mines, although some statements have been criticized as rushed or insufficient. But ultimately, it’s up to companies to choose and monitor their own environmental protections and community agreements, even if they’re collecting federal subsidies.

Lithium mining poses a range of risks to biodiversity and groundwater supplies, depending on the methods used. There are three main types of lithium extraction: brine evaporation, hard rock mining and clay mining.

In brine evaporation, groundwater is first pumped to the surface. There, 90% of it is evaporated away to concentrate the lithium brine, with additional freshwater needed to complete extraction.

Hard rock and clay mining often begin with “dewatering,” or removing groundwater to reach the ore, in addition to needing more water to process the ore. These methods also require chemicals such as sulfuric acid for processing, which in cobalt and copper mining has led to contamination of local water systems.

Concerned about the risks, local residents and environmentalists have resisted new mines with tactics from protests to litigation — but a government-supported lithium boom appears to be underway regardless.

New mines emerge

A Center for Biological Diversity map lists more than 125 lithium extraction projects in the western U.S. alone. Seven are inactive, and the majority are in various stages from exploration to development. Most of the proposed mines are in Nevada, predicted as a future “Silicon Valley of lithium.”

Albemarle’s Silver Peak mine in Nevada, a brine evaporation mine that has come under scrutiny for depleting groundwater aquifers in an increasingly-arid region, is the only currently active U.S. lithium mine. That’s likely to soon change, since the IRA has incentivized metal and mineral extraction in the United States and in countries with a U.S. free trade agreement.

Through its loan support and EV sales incentives, the IRA has made lithium mines more profitable, and less financially risky for companies opening new ones. Several lithium companies, including ioneer, Allkem and Albemarle, lobbied for the IRA’s passage or for provisions within it. A 2023 IRA impact report from S&P Global noted “aggressive mine capacity additions” for lithium planned in countries including the United States, Chile and Australia.

Domestically, most lithium deposits are in the West, where water supplies are already stressed.

“There’s a critical minerals and specifically a lithium rush unfolding, especially, but not exclusively, across the western U.S.,” says Providence College political scientist Thea Riofrancos, who specializes in studying the impact of resource extraction on communities. She adds that some of the mining interest predates the IRA, “but it’s picked up a lot since the IRA, because that sent such clear signals.”

Yet new mines pose risks to the region’s biodiversity. In a lawsuit against a Rover Metals exploration project, the Center for Biological Diversity and Amargosa Conservancy alleged that even exploratory drilling near springs in the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada would threaten endangered and endemic species. Active mines can have even bigger impacts.

“We need lithium as a part of our transition off of fossil fuels, but it can’t come at the expense of biodiversity or our most precious protected areas,” Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity, said in announcing the lawsuit. “Some places have to be off-limits to resource extraction, and Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is at the top of the list.”

Thacker Pass on track

The Thacker Pass mine run by Lithium Americas is on track to become the second active lithium mine in the United States. The project in far northern Nevada may be indicative of what’s to come as more government-fueled mines pop up.

The lithium clay mine is under construction, with most Phase 1 construction costs covered by IRA support: General Motors is investing $650 million in exchange for the mine’s lithium. The U.S. Department of Energy provided a conditional $2.26 billion low-interest loan. Permitting came earlier, from President Trump’s administration. In 2028, the Thacker Pass mine is expected to reach full capacity production.

The DOE said the loan will provide General Motors with enough lithium for 800,000 electric vehicles a year and “reinforces the Biden-Harris Administration’s whole-of-government approach to strengthening America’s critical materials supply chain, which is essential to building America’s clean transportation future and enhancing our national and energy security.”

Questions about ‘voluntary’ mitigation

Lithium Americas plans to recycle and reuse withdrawn water an average of seven times. Its Phase 1 water consumption is estimated to be about 929 million gallons per year, equal to “around five alfalfa irrigation pivots,” according to the company’s blog.

Lithium Americas purchased existing agricultural water rights, so the operation won’t increase groundwater withdrawal, although existing groundwater withdrawal may still be unsustainable. It has also outlined plans for nearby habitat restoration. A post-mining reclamation plan is intended to reduce long-lived environmental impacts by refilling pits and restoring the surface.

But implementing and tracking mitigation strategies like these is left up to the companies. 

“What I think is concerning is the proliferation of lots of voluntary governance mechanisms that companies don’t have to do,” says Riofrancos. “What’s important — and it sounds old-fashioned, maybe — is regulation that’s binding; that’s enforceable; that carries sanctions, fees, punishments, fines, whatever, if the regulations are not obeyed.”

Riofrancos believes such regulations, plus sustained protests against irresponsible mines, could get the mining industry to “do better.” She says the IRA-supported DOE loan program represents a missed opportunity to tie robust regulations to mining projects: “It’s very light on guardrails and requirements for loan recipients.”

It’s also unclear how much mitigation is realistically possible.

“There’s ways to tinker around the edges, but ultimately, there’s no mitigating an open-pit mine,” Donnelly, the Great Basin director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an interview. “(These mines) cause impacts to the water table, impacts to wildlife, impacts to local and Indigenous communities.”

He believes IRA loans and other federal subsidies help new mines get permitted in spite of environmental risks: “The DOE’s kind of waving a magic wand and saying, ‘This mine is okay to permit.’ ”

But the exact risks of each new lithium mine are tricky to measure. The three different types of mines can have different effects, depending on variables including location, says David Boutt, a hydrogeology researcher and professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Companies are often reluctant to share data that would help scientists evaluate impacts, he says.

“It’s hard to establish a number, like, ‘This one has like a 30% less environmental impact than the others,’ ” Boutt says. “We don’t see these numbers, because a lot of the impacts are local and hard to quantify.”

Sacred site to become lithium mine

Yet for people living near mining sites, the risks can feel tangible. Dean Barlese, an elder from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, says he’s opposed to the Thacker Pass mine both because it’s at an Indigenous sacred site, and because his people’s lives are intertwined with the local ecosystem.

“A lot of people think it’s just a desert wasteland,” he says. “But the medicines we use are still out there. As Native people, we still gather our food, roots, berries — we’ve survived here for thousands of years.”

Barlese says he’d rather not see mining projects near Indigenous communities at all, regardless of community benefits agreements and environmental mitigation plans. “I would encourage the public to really look into the devastation that getting a bit of lithium does.”

Lithium demand could be reduced if investments were made in public transit and walkable communities, so fewer people were buying cars, Riofrancos says. Although the IRA includes investments in battery recycling, it doesn’t incentivize efforts to reduce surging lithium demand. Instead, it supports extraction to meet the demand, and helps ensure that the extracting companies can profit.

“ ‘Green energy’ is not green energy,” says Barlese. “Money speaks louder than anything else.”

Another possible solution to the mining debate would be an energy transition that uses less lithium.

“One way to reduce demand for lithium (or any battery metals) would be to make smaller batteries, or batteries that are more resource-efficient,” says Riofrancos. Two-thirds of current EV models are SUVs or large vehicles; small- and medium-sized EVs account for only a quarter of EV sales in the United States. Incentivizing smaller vehicles, which can use smaller batteries, could ultimately lead to fewer lithium mines.

Other battery chemistries are another option.

“Given the complexity of getting a permit, of getting the social license, of having everything in place, it’s going to take a long time (to open new mines),” says Boutt, the hydrogeologist. “And perhaps by the time we get to the point where we are developing those resources, we’ll have different battery technology where we’re not as reliant on lithium.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Billions in US funding boosts lithium mining, stressing water supplies is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This story was originally published at High Country News (hcn.org) on June 9.

One autumn evening four years ago, Ivan Bender, a Hualapai man in his mid-50s, took a walk with his fluffy brown-and-white Pomeranian, Sierra May, to check on the ranchland he tends. Nestled in western Arizona’s Big Sandy River Valley, the ranch protects Ha’ Kamwe’ — hot springs that are sacred to the Hualapai and known today in English as Cofer Hot Springs. As the shadows lengthened, Bender saw something surprising — men working on a nearby hillside.

“I asked them what they were doing,” Bender recalled. “They told me they were drilling.” As it turns out, along with sacred places including the hot springs, ceremony sites and ancestral burials, the valley also holds an enormous lithium deposit. Now, exploratory work by Australian company Hawkstone Mining threatens those places, and with them, the religious practices of the Hualapai and other Indigenous nations. But this threat is nothing new: Centuries of land expropriation, combined with federal court rulings denying protection to sacred sites, have long devastated Indigenous religious freedom.

Cholla Canyon Ranch, where Bender is the caretaker, includes approximately 360 acres about halfway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, flanked to the west by the lush riparian corridor of Big Sandy River. The valley is part of an ancient salt route connecting tribes from as far north as central Utah to communities in Baja California and along the Pacific Coast, documented in the songs and oral traditions of many Indigenous nations.

“There are stories about that land and what it represents to the Hualapai Tribe,” Bender said. “To me, it holds a really, really sacred valley of life in general.”

According to tribal councilmember Richard Powskey, who directs the Hualapai Natural Resources Department, the Hualapai harvest native plant materials along the river corridor for everything from cradle boards to drums.

The mining company (USA Lithium Ltd., which has since been acquired by Hawkstone Mining Ltd.) hadn’t told the Hualapai Tribe it was searching for lithium on nearby Bureau of Land Management lands. That evening, Bender was shocked to see the destruction taking place. The company eventually bulldozed a network of roads, drilling nearly 50 test wells more than 300 feet deep in the sacred landscape.

This summer, Hawkstone plans to triple its exploratory drilling, almost encircling Canyon Ranch and the springs it protects. In the next few years, Hawkstone hopes to break ground on an open-pit mine and dig an underground slurry to pipe the ore about 50 miles to a plant in Kingman, Arizona, where it will use sulfuric acid to extract the lithium. Lithium, which is listed as a critical mineral, is crucial for reaching the Biden administration’s goal of replacing gas-guzzling vehicles with electric vehicles, and Big Sandy Valley is relatively close to the Tesla factory in Nevada. Altogether, Hawkstone has mining rights on more than 5,000 acres of public land in Arizona for this project. Yet tribes whose sacred sites are at risk have almost no say in its decisions.

Public lands from Bears Ears to Oak Flat contain countless areas of cultural and religious importance. But when tribes have gone to court to protect these sites — and their own religious freedom — they’ve consistently lost. Courts have narrowly interpreted what counts as a religious burden for tribes, largely to preserve the federal government’s ability to use public lands as it sees fit.

The roots of this policy are centuries deep. In the landmark 1823 case Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Supreme Court ruled that Indigenous people could not sell land to private owners in the United States, because they did not own it. Instead, Christian colonizers were the rightful owners, based on the Spanish colonial “Doctrine of Discovery,” a racist and anti-Indigenous policy holding that non-Christian, non-European societies were inferior, and that Christian European nations had a superior right to all land.

“Part of what justified the claiming of the land was that (colonizers) would teach the Indigenous people Christianity,” Michalyn Steele, an Indian law expert at Brigham Young University and member of the Seneca Nation of Indians, said. “If they rejected Christianity, then they essentially forfeited their rights to the land and resources.”

By the late 1800s, the United States had banned Indigenous religious practices, forcing tribes to socially and politically assimilate, and to adopt Christianity through agricultural, lifestyle and religious practices.

More recently, courts have continued to weaken protections for Indigenous religious freedom on public lands. In the precedent-setting 1988 case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, the Supreme Court ruled that the Forest Service could widen a logging road in Northern California’s Six Rivers National Forest, even though it would destroy a region that was essential to the religious beliefs of tribes including the Yurok, Carok and Tolowa. The Supreme Court reasoned that although the location might be utterly wrecked, that destruction did not violate the Constitution, because it would not force tribal members to violate their religious beliefs or punish them for practicing their religions.

“Even assuming that the Government’s actions here will virtually destroy the Indians’ ability to practice their religion, the Constitution simply does not provide a principle that could justify upholding respondents’ legal claims,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the majority opinion.

The court ruled, in part, to avoid granting tribes broad control over their ancestral lands through the exercise of their religious freedom. “Whatever rights the Indians may have to the use of the area … those rights do not divest the Government of its rights to use what is, after all, its land,” the ruling said.

Though Congress partially protected that sacred region by adding it to the Siskiyou Wilderness Area, the Lyng ruling still reverberates across Indian Country today, creating what Stephanie Barclay, the director of the University of Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Institute and a former litigator at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, calls a “double standard” in how Indigenous sacred sites are treated.

Barclay compared the situation of tribes such as the Hualapai, which rely on the federal government to access sacred sites, to that of Jewish prisoners who adhere to a kosher diet, or Sikh members of the military whose faith forbids them to cut their hair. In all of these cases, religious freedoms are controlled by the government. But, Barclay said, tribal members don’t get the same religious protections.

“If the government is unwilling to accommodate an access for different Native peoples so that they can practice their religion in those sacred sites, then it won’t happen,” she said. But the Supreme Court has narrowly interpreted religious protection of Indigenous sacred sites on public lands, to the point of allowing wholesale destruction.

In a recent Harvard Law Review article, Steele and Barclay urge the federal government to protect Indigenous religious practices as one of its trust responsibilities, and to be very cautious about allowing destruction of sacred sites on public lands.

As things stand, state and federal agencies may permit irreversible damage with little input from affected Indigenous communities. Indeed, communication between the BLM and Hualapai Tribe about Hawkstone’s Big Sandy River Valley lithium impacts has been almost nonexistent. Although the BLM invited the Hualapai Tribe to consult with the agency in June 2020 about Hawkstone’s exploration plans, the agency later rebuffed the tribe’s request to be a coordinating agency on the project. It also rejected the suggestion that a tribal elder walk through the area and educate the agency about the cultural resources and history that mining might imperil.

The BLM said that it found only four cultural resource sites in the proposed drilling area. Of those, it said it would attempt to avoid one, which was eligible for protection under the National Historic Preservation Act. Meanwhile, in its publicly available environmental assessment, the agency stated that effects to Native American religious concerns or traditional values were “to be determined,” and that it was consulting with the Hualapai Tribe, among others. As of this writing, BLM staff had neither agreed to an interview nor responded to written questions from High Country News.

For its part, in March Hawkstone said that “All (I)ndigenous title is cleared and there are no other known historical or environmentally sensitive areas.” Hawkstone’s report ignores the fact that even when tribes lack legal title to their traditional lands, those spaces still hold religious and cultural importance.

When asked for comment, Doug Pitts, a U.S. advisor at Hawkstone Mining, emailed HCN that, given the early stage of the project, “we do not feel a discussion on the project is worthwhile at this time.”

Even without a clear legal path forward, the Hualapai Tribe has not given up on protecting its religious practices from lithium exploration. Nor is it alone: In April, the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona, representing 21 nations including the Hualapai, passed a resolution objecting to the lithium mining, calling the BLM’s environmental analysis “grossly insufficient.” Recently, the BLM agreed to extend the comment period until June 10. But Councilmember Powskey pointed out that during the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline — which in part concerned the destruction of burials — the authorities’ response was violent, and tribal nations, for a long while, were the only ones who seemed to care. And in the end, the pipeline was built.

Big Sandy is not the first battle the Hualapai have fought to protect sacred landscapes in this remote corner of Arizona, where wind turbines, gold mines and other private interests already have destroyed culturally important places — and it won’t be the last. “You know, there’s more to come,” Powskey said.

Meanwhile, the likelihood of more lithium exploration around the ranch upsets caretaker Ivan Bender. The double standard in how Indigenous sacred sites are treated galls him.

“They come in here and desecrate your sacred land,” he said. “Would they appreciate me if I go to Arlington Cemetery and build me a sweat lodge and have me a sweat on that land?” he asked, comparing the valley to another site considered sacred. “I’d rather they go somewhere else and leave history alone.”

Mining for lithium, at a cost to Indigenous religions is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

On the edge of the Salton Sea, state officials and investors are seeking to turn brine into ‘white gold’ that can power electric cars. But will this help solve the Imperial Valley’s troubles — or add to them?

This story originally appeared in CalMatters and was republished with permission.

California’s desert is littered with remnants of broken dreams — hidden ghost towns, abandoned mines and rusty remains of someone’s Big Idea. But nothing looms larger on an abandoned landscape than the Salton Sea, which languishes in an overlooked corner of the state.

The water shimmers and broils in the desert like a rebuke: born of human error, made worse by 100 years of neglect and pollution. California’s largest lake is also one of its worst environmental blights, presenting a problem so inverted that its toxic legacy intensifies as its foul water disappears. 

For generations, Imperial Valley residents have been breathing in a Periodic Table of minerals and metals, as well as agricultural chemicals. But for all the misery that these receding waters have unleashed — asthma and other respiratory ailments triggered by dust clouds — the Salton Sea now offers a potential way out: A bounty of lithium, called “white gold,” one of the planet’s most prized elements, used to manufacture batteries that power electric cars and drive a fossil-fuel-free future.

And the state of California wants to be in on it.

The California Energy Commission has stepped in as an angel investor, doling out $16 million in grants to a handful of companies to determine if it’s technically and commercially feasible to extract lithium from the brine that geothermal plants are already pulling from the Salton Sea.

One of the recipients, CalEnergy Resources, a subsidiary of the giant Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables, is using $6 million in state grants to piggy-back a lithium-extraction pilot project onto its existing geothermal plants near Calipatria, at the southeast end of the dying sea. The company, which expects to break ground soon, will build a small-scale demonstration plant to begin operating next year. Should all go well, it envisions that it could eventually produce nearly a third of the world’s lithium.

From the standpoint of California public policy, the project offers a unique intersection of two state priorities: increasing sources of renewable energy and encouraging new battery technology for electric cars and energy storage. The state’s target for electric cars, for example, could use a boost. Gov. Gavin Newsom last year directed the state to ban all new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.  

Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat from Coachella, gave the idea a jump start last year, writing a law that created the Lithium Valley Commission, an optimistic reference to the economic juggernaut that is Silicon Valley. The blue-ribbon commission members, appointed by state agencies, legislators and the governor, held their first meeting Thursday and will file a report to lawmakers next year.

State officials envision not just lithium extraction and power plants, but also constructing links along the supply chain, battery-building facilities, electric vehicle manufacturing plants and everything else local authorities can dream of.

Such an expansive project would transform the entire Imperial Valley, home to 174,000 people, 85% Latino, who face chronically high unemployment and few job opportunities outside farm fields. 

But environmental justice advocates worry about the potential impacts of additional waste and air pollution from extracting and processing lithium at the Salton Sea. Since it’s an experimental technology, the environmental effects have not been analyzed yet.

The Imperial Valley already is perennially ranked at the top of California’s most polluted places — with all the serious health problems that go along with it. 

“Disadvantaged communities are always going to be on the losing end,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico Del Valle, a health and social services organization in Brawley. 

“Do we see opportunity for jobs, do we see opportunity for economic benefit for community development? We see all of that, but unfortunately the way the system is set up right here in this region, the monies are not reaching those vulnerable disadvantaged populations.”

On the ‘Toxic Tour’

Geothermal plants at the Salton Sea, with their huffing stacks and snaking pipelines, are difficult to miss, jutting up from the Imperial Valley’s flat desert floor. 

Getting to the facilities requires negotiating narrow county roads bordering alfalfa fields and past teeming cattle feedlots. But the out-of-the-way plants are not out-of-mind to valley residents. They are included on a local group’s “Toxic Tour” when state officials come to town.

Even as Garcia ushers in a project that could invigorate the economy of his ailing district, he is adamant that whatever future industry materializes, it cannot make things worse in the environmentally-challenged region.

“One of the main principles is to do no harm,” Garcia said.  “A lot of information is still to be gathered and understood before we are able to determine that this is going to be the best thing to happen and will have the return investment from a social, human health, economic perspective. Otherwise, we are not meeting the overall goals.

“It would do us no good if all we were doing is extracting the minerals and leaving behind an environmental mess on top of an existing mess that we are making strides to address. We cannot regress.”

This “mess” was created in 1905, when engineers cut into the west bank of the Colorado River, diverting water to slake the thirst of Imperial County’s agricultural field. Water sluiced into the valley. Heavy flooding overwhelmed the man-made channels, and for two years the river ran unimpeded into the Salton Basin.

The floodwaters were tamed, but the great lake, cut off from its freshwater supply, began the inexorable process of evaporating and receding. It stayed alive with surplus agricultural water and runoff, but the tainted water that fed the sea began to lay down generations of toxic sludge buried in sediment.

Fish died, migratory birds that fed on them detoured and the yacht clubs, marinas and shoreline vacation homes were left stranded in muck. The exposed lake bed’s mineral-laden soil is whipped by frequent winds, and the dust clouds contribute to the region’s chronic respiratory health problem. 

Today the Salton Sea’s nearly 350 square miles of shallow water remains one of the state’s most stubborn and expensive repair jobs, and as each new restoration plan is unveiled but not implemented, the legacy continues to make residents sick.

“The community faces high rates of asthma and respiratory conditions that have been existing ever since this valley was created. You have all different sources of pollution, the sea being one of the strongest ones, and the (geothermal) plants out there,” said Miguel Hernandez, co-chair of the Environmental Justice Enforcement Task Force for Imperial Valley and the Eastern Coachella Valley.

Anyssa Garcia has lived in Brawley, population 26,000, a dozen miles from the southern edge of the Salton Sea, her entire 21 years. Her family and friends are frequently sick with respiratory illness.

“My mom and my cousins have asthma, I see the struggle they go through,” she said. “Everyone carries an inhaler. I’m paying more attention to the air we breathe now.”

According to University of Southern California researchers, Imperial County’s children visit emergency rooms and are hospitalized for asthma at double the rate of the state average. Another measure shows double the state rate of active asthma among adults older than 65. 

Anyssa Garcia said the environmental problems are so intractable that she longs to join the diaspora of young people away from the valley. 

 “I’ve never seen my family struggle like this,” she said. “I would love to get out of this valley, the conditions here are very unhealthy.”

State officials just launched a $200 million wetlands and air quality project, part of a pledge to spend nearly a half-billion dollars to restore the lake for fish and birds and cover the exposed playa to control the dust.

The lithium extraction efforts are not connected to the Salton Sea restoration projects, but there is a great temptation to conflate them and imagine how the lithium bonanza might improve the health of both the lake and those who live around it. At least one geothermal developer has floated the idea of contributing to  a long-term fund dedicated to lake remediation. 

To David Hochschild, chairman of the California Energy Commission, it’s inevitable, and even fitting, that the Salton Sea’s lithium windfall might be leveraged to fix its age-old problems.

“It’s not possible to work in a region like the Salton Sea and not deal with the pre-existing issues, which are substantial,” he said.

Extracting ‘white gold’

Although the costliest of clean energy options, geothermal is in many ways the ideal renewable energy — not dependent on wind blowing or sun shining, and ever-ready to provide reliable power. 

“Lithium is the oil of the clean energy future,” Hochschild said. “I do think the revenue from the industry as it grows can be part of the solution. What I think you’re going to see over time is rather than geothermal facilities that produce lithium on the side, it will be that lithium facilities produce geothermal power on the side.”

CalEnergy’s 23 geothermal wells pull up naturally superheated water from deep beneath the salty lake and use the steam created to run turbines, providing reliable renewable energy to the state’s power grid. The brine is brimming with lithium and other coveted elements, including cobalt and zinc. 

The pilot project will extract lithium from the brine, then, in a two-part process, convert the raw material first into lithium chloride and then into battery-grade lithium hydroxide. The company aims to have the two small processing plants operating next year.

CalEnergy hopes that lithium plants will have the side benefit of lowering the price of geothermal energy, making it a more competitive renewable power source.

“If successful, lithium could be the tail that wags the geothermal dog,” said Jonathan Weisgall, vice president for government relations at Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which has committed $40 million to the ongoing research. The federal Energy Department awarded its Salton Sea project a $15 million grant.

While lithium extraction projects at the Salton Sea are still unproven, the idea is “tantalizing and intriguing” said Rod Eggert,deputy director of the Critical Materials Institute at the Colorado School of Mines. As investors anticipated the growth in demand for lithium-ion batteries 10-15 years ago, he said, developers began to look at unconventional sources for the element, including geothermal brine.

Two types of lithium harvesting take place in the world today: open pit mines, found in Australia, and vast evaporation ponds in the Lithium Triangle — Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. China also produces lithium, and there is one production facility in Nevada. 

“As with any resource extraction, there are environmental consequences that need to be managed,” Eggert said. 

In countries where lithium is mined, the process uses a lot of water, and contaminates waterways with acid and other hazardous materials. 

If California industries do develop the new lithium-geothermal process that carries a small environmental footprint, it would likely create a competitive edge globally, Eggert said.

“It’s a tantalizing opportunity,” he said, “but it hasn’t been demonstrated.”

Jobs and toxic substances

As with most industrial processes, the geothermal power plants at the Salton Sea emit air pollutants and create waste: The plants unearth hazardous minerals, such as arsenic, lead and barium.

“Not only is geothermal generating an economic benefit, but it’s also generating waste streams and emissions, and has been doing so for years,” said environmental justice advocate Olmedo. 

Olmedo, a member of the Lithium Valley Commission, said he intends to make sure that the group is not so dazzled by the promise of jobs and revenue that it overlooks potential environmental issues from lithium extraction and processing. 

“We support economic development, but we support responsible economic development where we are not adding burdens to the already disadvantaged environmental justice community,” he said.

Imperial County planners exempted the lithium pilot project from environmental review requirements because the existing geothermal plant is already permitted. Full-scale commercial plants, however, would require environmental impact studies and new permits.

Most of the waste, which contains heavy metals, is reinjected in the ground from which it came, but some waste is held temporarily in ponds that are regulated by state officials to protect groundwater. The water board concluded that the lithium extraction would not alter the chemical properties of the waste, according to its 2020 report.

“We don’t anticipate any environmental issues,” Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s Weisgall said. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Riverside will test the demo project’s waste and emissions, he said.

Yet Katie Burnworth, who monitors the Salton Sea for the Imperial County Air Pollution Control District, said she worries that the waste might be hazardous. “It’s a dangerous, dirty process, with a lot of unknown material,” she said.

In 2006, CalEnergy’s geothermal facility was cited by state authorities for failing to properly dispose of hazardous materials after an inspection found elevated levels of arsenic and lead had been released into the environment. The company in 2007 entered into a consent agreement with state officials requiring a cleanup. 

Another of the company’s power plants at the Salton Sea was fined by the air district for operating for seven years without an emissions permit.

The CalEnergy plants emit several toxic air pollutants, including hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and fine particles, according to state Air Resources Board reports. 

Imperial County is eager to work with the industry to streamline the permitting process for lithium production.

“We’ve got to let them know that we want them here by making the permitting and planning process as least hard as it can be,” said Tim Kelley, CEO for the Imperial Valley Economic Development Corp., a public-private organization. “It’s never going to be easy and we want to make it easier for them.” 

Unemployment in the rural county hovers at 18%, about twice the state average. “Our biggest exports are water, crops and people,” Kelley said. “We want the jobs.”

CalEnergy, which employs about 250 people, estimates it would double its workforce if lithium production takes off.

“The first thing they are dangling is jobs, said Eric Reyes, an organizer with the group Amigos de la Comunidad. “We are all for jobs. But we cannot let everyone do whatever they want. Our community has a history of bending over for industry. We need to be smarter now. We are on the cusp of environmental disaster.”

James C. Hanks,president of the Imperial Irrigation District, which leases land to three geothermal operations, welcomes the potential for growth, but said desert denizens are ever-watchful for speculators. 

“The toughest part is sorting through and figuring out who’s the real deal or not,” said Hanks, who also serves on the state’s new Lithium Valley Commission.

Business as usual is not going to be acceptable this time, Olmedo said. Jobs and a healthy environment are the goals. Whatever economic boon the county has gained from past development has not improved life in the region’s poorest communities, he said.

“They’re not getting more libraries. They are not getting better schools. They are not getting better community services,’” Olmedo said. “They are not getting better health care. They are getting nothing but sickness and exposure to unhealthy conditions.

“We are fighting two fronts. One is supporting this huge opportunity. The other is whether those dollars are going to benefit the population of this region. Now the real work begins.”

Will California’s desert be transformed into Lithium Valley? is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.