$540 Billion in 'White Gold' Found Beneath California's Salton Sea

[EndtheMadnessNow]

White Gold stories from 2022:

The coming "white gold" rush under the Salton Sea to fuel the Biden battery revolution. Gov Newsom calls it the "Saudi Arabia of lithium" and developers are making big plans to extract it. But will locals get left behind?

Lithium is obtained from brine.

Extracting it is like drilling for oil. You drill from a derrick a mile or more into the earth and pump out water. The lithium is removed from the brine. Then, around the Salton Sea at least, the water would be injected back into the ground.

“It’s kind of a clean process,” Myers says.

“It’s 75% water and 25% gunk. Solid gunk,” says Jonathan M. Weisgall, vice president for government relations of Berkshire Hathaway Energy. “The challenge is to get the lithium out of the gunk in an environmentally responsible and economically viable manner without getting out the other stuff.”

The Salton Sea could produce the world's greenest lithium, if new extraction technologies work

White Gold or Fools Gold

The U.S. currently imports almost all of its lithium, but research shows large reserves in underground geothermal brines—a scalding hot soup of minerals, metals and saltwater. The catch: Extracting lithium from such a source at commercial scale is untested.

At California’s Salton Sea, three companies, including one owned by Warren Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc., are pushing ahead with plans to do just that.

Last July, auto giant General Motors Co. announced a multimillion-dollar investment in CTR to get first rights to the miner’s future lithium production.

“The jury is out, but they are putting the jury into the jury box right now,” said William Stringfellow, an expert at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Our friends down under apparently have plenty. Largest lithium mines in the world. At #1 is the Greenbushes Lithium Operations, is a surface mine situated in Western Australia. Owned by Albemarle, the brownfield mine produced an estimated 0.21 mtpa (million metric tons per year) of lithium in 2023. The mine will operate until 2039.

The world’s ten largest lithium mines



Global Lithium Deposit Map