Lithium Dreams

AS WE SHIFT TO VARIABLE renewable energy sources like solar and wind, the need to store a few hours of energy available throughout the day on a large scale is critical. And while novel ways to store potential energy, like pumped water storage and compressed air storage, are being explored, the batteries of lithium-ion batteries being built across the land that are filling the current need are limited by international supply chains that extend to the sources of lithium itself.

The USA usually ranks pretty low on the list of actual and potential lithium production, far below the dominant suppliers of Chile, Australia, China, and Argentina. But, as with many minerals, lithium is actually fairly common and widespread in small quantities in the ground. Extraction is more a matter of technology, economics, and politics.

The search for mineable sources in the USA is booming. Mining projects have been proposed for northern Nevada, northern Arkansas, North Dakota, Maine, southern Oregon and elsewhere, though nothing has expanded beyond preliminary stages yet. Today there is just one major lithium mining operation in the country, in a remote valley in the western part of Nevada, and it’s been operating for half a century.

Silver Peak is a brine extraction operation, where groundwater from this saline valley is evaporated in open ponds, leaving a precipitate that is scooped up and processed to extract the lithium. The mine opened in 1966, and was operated for decades by the Cyprus Foote Mineral Company. The mine covers more than 20 square miles, with more than 20 ponds, where it can take as long as two years to produce a crop of lithium-rich precipitate, which is taken to a plant nearby to be filtered and mixed with lime and soda ash to become lithium carbonate.

More than 5,000 tons of this material is produced at the plant every year, enough for around 80,000 car batteries—a drop in the bucket, on a global scale. Lithium carbonate is shipped to other processing sites around the country, including directly to lithium battery factories.

Silver Peak’s current owner is the Albemarle Corporation, an international catalyst chemical company based in North Carolina. Albemarle’s roots are in the Ethyl Corporation, founded by General Motors and Standard Oil in 1923 to produce Tetra-ethyl lead, a gasoline additive that reduced engine knock in cars. Leaded gasoline became the norm for decades, before the pollution it produced provoked a movement to ban it.

The extraction of lithium from briny deposits at dry lake beds, and from the mineral-rich deposits around them, is common. The Salton Sea region, for example, is considered to be one of the largest potential reservoirs of lithium in the US, and a number of companies are developing processes for extracting lithium from high pressure and high temperature wells. This area is one of the largest geothermal energy sites in the country, with more than a dozen plants producing electricity from wells thousands of feet deep that bring hot mineral-rich water to the surface, running turbines that produce electricity, then injecting the water back into the ground.

Many of these plants are now owned by BHE Renewables, a division of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company, based in Omaha. One of the plants has been converted to a lithium recovery demonstration project, with funds from the State of California and from the Department of Energy. The project extracts lithium from the brine that normally circulates through the geothermal system. If proven successful, other geothermal plants may be converted to do the same.

A few miles away, an Australian company, Controlled Thermal Resources, has constructed the first phase of its Hell’s Kitchen Lithium and Power project. The company has completed a geothermal well, and is building a plant to extract lithium, and generate electricity. It is part of an imagined Clean Energy Campus, where co-located corporate partners will manufacture finished lithium-ion batteries on site, and deliver them to the hungry world. The company envisions that this “Lithium Valley,” currently the second largest geothermal producer in the country, will someday produce geothermal energy as a byproduct of lithium production. ♦