Avishai Artsy

I'm Avishai Artsy. I'm a senior producer on Today Explained.

Yeah, I went to a place called the Salton Sea. It's in the desert in Southern California, just north of the border with Mexico, and the area between the Salton Sea and the border is called Imperial Valley.

It's mostly desert, some agricultural land, and right next to the Salton Sea at the southeastern corner, there's an area called the Salton Sea Geothermal Field, and that's where they are pumping brine, very heavily salty water, underneath the ground, because within that brine is lithium.

Yeah, it's kind of a wild place. Here's how Manuel Pastor describes it. He's a professor at the University of Southern California, and he co-authored a book about the lithium that is in Imperial Valley.

In 1901, there was a company that tapped into the Colorado River to irrigate the farmlands, and the US government stopped them. So they went to Mexico and made a deal with the dictator there to funnel water from the Colorado River south of the border.

So that's how the Salton Sea was created. Irrigation water continued to fill the Salton Sea, and it took a big turn in the 1950s and 60s.

Developers went in. They built resorts and yacht clubs. People were water skiing. The Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby all vacationed there. The place was hopping. It was called the American Riviera.

But then things started to really go downhill for the Salton Sea. Beginning around the 70s and 80s, the agricultural runoff that had been feeding the sea turned the sea toxic. Fish and birds started dying en masse. The sea began to shrink. That exposed sea beds. The wind started kicking up clouds of toxic dust.

And right now you have asthma rates in Imperial Valley that are among the highest in the state. Huh. A lot of people left, the resorts turned to ghost towns, and now only a few hundred people live in the area around the Salton Sea. It's got kind of a Mad Max, post-apocalyptic vibe now.

Yeah, things are really starting to look up for the Imperial Valley. And it's not just President Trump that's excited about this. California officials even have a nickname for the area, Lithium Valley. Maybe not as famous as Silicon Valley, but it's a neat bit of marketing. Governor Gavin Newsom even visited.

Local officials are into it. So from the federal government on down, there is a real desire to make this happen. How are you? Nice to meet you.

And I met up with a guy who is very excited about making this happen.

So CTR is Controlled Thermal Resources, one of three companies that are looking to develop the lithium potential around the Salton Sea. I met up with him on a windy day on a bluff overlooking the Salton Sea, where he pointed out the site for the project that his company is trying to build, and it's called Hell's Kitchen.

Yeah, so first his company has to build a way to get the lithium out of the ground. So as we established, lithium is in the brine, which is the salty water underneath the ground. They need to drill down over a mile deep to get to it. And because it's so deep, the brine is very hot. It's being heated by the Earth's core.

But what's cool about this is that a mining company could use that heat to power the process of bringing the brine up to the surface and then separating the lithium out from the salt water. And then after they have the lithium, they can just put the brine back in the ground.

The process would be much more environmentally friendly than the other ways that we currently get lithium, like hard rock mining, which is just blasting a huge hole in the ground, or giant evaporation ponds that waste a lot of water. And the potential payoff would be huge. This would potentially generate enough lithium to power 375 million electric car batteries.

Well, yeah, part of it is infrastructure. The U.S. just doesn't have the kind of mining, refining, or production of critical minerals infrastructure that, say, China has. And so that's something that needs to be developed. But one of the main things that's held this project back is local opposition. Huh.

This is Luis Olmedo. He's executive director of a local group called Comité Cívico del Valle.

And he told me about how there's been a lot of companies who've swooped into the Imperial Valley, made big promises of economic development and jobs and bringing a new industry. Like a few years back, farmers gave up valuable land to solar companies that promised lots of good jobs.

And most of those turned out to be short-term jobs, just installing the solar panels. And then those jobs quickly went away and people felt tricked.

So Luis's group sued to stop the project, or at least to slow it down. They joined another group called Earthworks. And they've listed a bunch of concerns, water usage, air quality. And they said that Indigenous groups weren't adequately consulted.

Yeah, Rod says that the lawsuit has slowed the project down by a year or more.

Now, a Superior Court judge did throw out the activist lawsuit earlier this year. They're now appealing that decision. But meanwhile, the company is looking to start construction on the geothermal power and lithium extraction plant. You know, they have customers waiting for this lithium. They've already made purchase agreements with auto manufacturers like GM and Stellantis.

So now Rod says the goal is to start generating geothermal energy by the end of 2026 and start extracting lithium in 2027. But this is just the latest version of Delay. I met up with a guy named Ryan Kelly. He's on the board of supervisors for Imperial County. We met up at his house and we drove to the Salton Sea in his pickup truck and he gave me a tour.

Ryan Kelly went away to college and then came back. He worked as a firefighter and an EMT. He was also mayor of his hometown, and he's been trying to get lithium extraction off the ground for well over a decade. Wow.

So you've been a supervisor since 2012 and I think you've been working on lithium that whole time. Is it frustrating that it's taking this long and we're still not seeing active lithium mining here?

Yeah, it tells us that it's a lot harder than you would think to get critical minerals out of the ground. Even if you have the technology there, there are other things that get in the way. In other places like Nevada and Arizona, there are similar projects that have been held up by lawsuits from environmental activists and indigenous tribes who don't want to see this happening in their backyard.

You destroy the land to build cars, basically. How green is that? They don't want to see their areas become what they're calling sacrifice zones. They accuse these mining companies of what's called green extractivism, exploiting resources and perhaps harming the environment under the banner of fighting climate change. And so that creates an interesting tension, right?

I mean, in China, they can build mines wherever they want. Here in the US, there are lots of state and federal regulations that make mining projects hard to launch. And you have local groups who are trying to protect their own interests.

So this comes down to how do we meet the critical mineral needs of the future, but in a way that respects the people and the environment that are directly impacted by producing and processing these minerals? It's a tricky balance to strike.

Oh, you're welcome, Noel.