How Lithium Could Be Calif.'s Next 'Gold Rush'

October 31, 2019

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by David Ferris and David Iaconangelo (E&E News) ... 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.

The Salton Sea area lies at the gap between two major fault lines and between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. The hot subterranean rocks are closer to the surface than other places, and drilling can access fissures where brine can be tapped.

In theory, all that lithium could be gathered from the brines coursing through the area's geothermal power plants. It could be done without digging hardrock mines, as is done in Australia, or flooding huge evaporation ponds, as is done in the deserts of Chile.

The problem is that no one is sure how to cheaply remove lithium, available in brine only at 250 parts per million. Those valuable molecules can be recovered in a brief window: the four or so hours in which the scalding-hot liquid emerges from underground at the rate of thousands of gallons a minute, rushes through tanks that harvest its steam for electricity, and is reinjected thousands of feet down.

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For the Trump administration, the interest is to create domestic sources of so-called critical minerals, including lithium.

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For California's part, adding a valuable commodity like lithium to its geothermal plants could make those plants cost-competitive with other, cheaper renewable sources of energy, like solar, and stimulate the building of more of them to provide valuable baseload power.

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Two years ago, Berkshire Hathaway resuscitated its own lithium dreams when it invited miners and battery manufacturers to propose lithium extraction projects from its geothermal plants. None mustered the investment to make a serious offer, said Weisgall.

The latest to try is EnergySource.

The company's process begins in that white shipping container at its John F. Featherstone plant, on the same ground as Simbol's failed project.

Elsewhere at the Featherstone plant, the brine's lithium is concentrated and separated from other salts, resulting in a lithium-chloride product of about 2,500 to 3,000 lithium parts per million. Then it's sent to an Illinois facility run by a water-and-waste management company named Veolia, which removes the remaining impurities to produce a battery-grade lithium.

The patron problem

Some veterans of previous Salton Sea lithium efforts think that EnergySource is on its way to a serious mistake.

EnergySource's current shipping-container-size project is a pilot that produces minuscule amounts of lithium. In early 2021, it plans to start construction of a full-scale commercial plant to be completed in two years. The plant would produce more than 16,000 tons of lithium per year, Benson said. "We will go from pilot to commercial scale, in one step," Benson said.

Going straight from a tiny pilot to a full-size commercial plant is exactly what Simbol tried and failed to do. Simbol's former chief technology officer, Stephen Harrison, said at the 2017 CEC hearing that doing so contributed to the company's demise. "It is a trough of technology that is very hard to step over," he said.

BHE, which has 10 geothermal plants at the Salton Sea to Eversource's one, is doing its lithium plan in a very different way.

It wants to foster a demonstration plant, which would be roughly one-tenth the scale of a commercial plant. Weisgall thinks that such a plant could be built for $30 million to $60 million.

The problem is finding investors who will front the money. "Investors do not want technology risk. We don't like it," said Anna Wall, a vice president at Capstone Headwaters, an investment bank that works with mining and geothermal companies. She also spoke at the CEC hearing. "These are mining investors who have very old-school technology, a very old-school way of looking at these markets. Chemical investors are just as bad."

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"My mandate has been given from my senior management to go monetize it with someone else's money," Besseling (Eric Besseling, BHE's vice president of business development) replied.

He went on to say that BHE's entrepreneurial phase is past. "It's questionable whether it's still in our DNA to go after a new line of development like this," the company's vice president said. "We're just as happy to sit on the sidelines and collect a royalty, a low-risk royalty."

With industry investors and the world's richest men sitting on the sidelines, the focus has turned to one entity to build that demonstration plant: the Department of Energy.

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A week ago, senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) proposed a bill that would dedicate $20 million to geothermal research over the next four years, focused in large part not on the energy itself but on the materials that come with it.

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"There's a bad side to all that lithium," said Sonia Herbert, owner of the Ski Inn, who has close-cropped grey hair and an alert, put-together vibe. "All that sludge. No one brings that up. All the waste." READ MORE

Most utility-scale batteries in the United States are made of lithium-ion (Energy Information Administration)

New battery technology could slash the cost of electric vehicles (The Lead South Australia)

RARE EARTH METALS FROM COAL (American Energy Society)

Report: Battery Improvements Could ‘Spell Trouble’ for Natural Gas, ICE Vehicle Markets (NGT News)

Breakthrough Batteries: Powering the Era of Clean Electrification (Rocky Mountain Institute)

Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) and Lilac Solutions team up on the extraction of lithium from one of the world’s largest known geothermal resources at the Salton Sea in Imperial Valley, California. (Think GeoEnergy)

Cheaper, lighter and more energy-dense: The promise of lithium-sulphur batteries (Horizon Magazine)

Excerpt from American Energy Society: Coal mines produce pollutants known as acid mine drainage. When it rains, water passes through the old mine and down a hill carrying the acid mine drainage. But the state (West Virginia) built a water treatment plant here. Water comes in and goes through a clarifying process. The clean water is safely released, but the sludge is pumped back up the hill where it dries and hardens. That sludge – and some of the water – contains those Rare Earth Elements that can be processed and sold.

Right now the United State imports over 80% of its Rare Earth Elements from China. But experts say developing more domestic sources, will help the U.S. economically and environmentally. “The value in that sludge and this was a few cells ago, was about $850,000,” said Dr. Ziemkiewicz (Dr. Paul Ziemkiewicz, WVU Professor and Director of the Water Research Institute).

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But there might be another benefit beyond the income. The whole process could help restore some of the environment at mine sites. “By extracting the Rare Earth Elements, you’re also cleaning up the water. So, the DEP is 100% supportive,” said Rob Rice, West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. “Coal ash and waste products from coal mining is a big problem. If there are some Rare Earths in there that we can generate, and generate some jobs about that. We certainly want to take a look at it,” said Bill Price, of the West Virginia Sierra Club

With the coal industry across Appalachia having lots of ups and down, extracting Rare Earth Elements could boost the economy in coal communities hit by hard times. “This mine shut down about 20-years ago, but it’s still producing a lot of Rare Earth Elements,” said Dr. Ziemkiewicz.

Editor's note: AES recommends a peer-reviewed article about Rare Earth Metals in coal ash. READ MORE