A California lake in Imperial Valley is sitting atop one of the world’s largest ‘white gold’ mines — but one of the chief beneficiaries will be an Australian energy firm.
Controlled Thermal Resources, founded Down Under in 2013, has spent two decades developing and managing energy projects in the valley south of Palm Springs.
Many of those projects generated geothermal energy, a power source that use molten, magma-hot temperatures deep below Earth’s crust to power steam turbines for an environmentally sustainable means of making electricity.
But in recent years, the firm has turned its eye toward southern California’s lithium metal reserves, dubbed white gold because of the soft, silvery-white look of these ‘lithium salts.’
CTR’s big promise to the California officials who approved the project, is a chance to harvest vast troves of lithium to boost US energy independence without damaging local communities and ecosystems, or contributing to global warming, experts say.
Reports say this salty California lake is sitting on top of the world’s largest ‘white gold’ mine
The Department of Energy (DOE) shared the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory results, which determined the underground pool could hold 18 million tons – enough to meet the US’s demand for the valuable metal for decades
But the US government will be hoping the project jumpstarts America’s energy independence from the high volume of lithium-ion batteries imported from China.
Lithium is a critical component for batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles to solar panels – and China has dominated the market for decades because 90 percent of the metal mined is refined in their nation.
At a trade volume of $9.3 billion in 2022 alone, according to the United Nations Comtrade Database, Chinese lithium-ion batteries account for the vast majority of US battery imports today.
