Where Is There More Lithium to Power Cars and Phones? Beneath a California Lake.

March 17, 2022

An article by this title was published in the Feb. 8, 2022 Wall Street Journal.

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.

Three companies at California’s Salton Sea, including one owned by Warren Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc., are pushing ahead with plans to do just that. Those efforts are backed by money from governments eager to secure supplies of critical minerals that are key to several modern technologies. Prices of lithium recently rose at their fastest pace in years as supply-chain bottlenecks mounted and demand from electric-vehicle makers such as Tesla Inc.

The plans could turn this southeastern corner of California into one of the largest producers of what some call “white gold” at a time when most of that material comes from Australia, Chile and China. The geothermal reservoir under the Salton Sea area is capable of producing 600,000 metric tons a year of lithium carbonate, according to estimates from the California Energy Commission. That level of output would surpass last year’s global production.

The Salton Sea is in southern Riverside and northern Imperial counties.

Occupational Services, Inc. (OSI) is ready to provide Industrial Hygiene services for workplace safety and Health Physics services to isolate naturally occurring Radium-226 to the engineering companies developing geothermal lithium mining.