Boiling Point: The Salton Sea Lithium Rush

Welcome to Boiling Point. I’m Melody Petersen, a reporter on The Times’ climate team, writing the newsletter this week to fill in for my colleague Sammy Roth.

There’s a lithium bonanza happening at the Salton Sea.

CBS News likened the scene of companies lining up to mine lithium from under the Southern California lake to the 1849 Gold Rush.

To Gov. Gavin Newsom, the area is “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

The boom started when one of the world’s largest supplies of lithium was discovered one mile below the dying lake. The metal is required to produce electric car batteries and is essential to reducing carbon emissions.

Yet lost in the excitement about the money and new jobs that the mining projects could bring are the concerns of the people who live there.

The impoverished area — which is more than 80% Latino — already has a childhood asthma rate that is more than twice the national average.

The asthma cases have been tied to the toxic dust created as the Salton Sea recedes from lack of water. And some local residents fear that the number of respiratory cases could soar even higher as the lithium mining projects drink up more of the area’s much fought over allocation from the Colorado River.

Residents also worry about the hazardous waste that the mining projects could create. And the area’s Indigenous tribes are concerned that sites they consider sacred, including Obsidian Butte, a volcanic outcropping on the Salton Sea’s shore, could be disturbed.

In March, a local community group called Comite Civico del Valle, along with Earthworks, a national nonprofit, filed a legal petition to stop the first of the planned lithium mining projects, which is known as Hell’s Kitchen.

The groups say the potential hazards of the project by Controlled Thermal Resources, a privately held company, were not properly studied before the Imperial County Board of Superiors unanimously approved it in January.

“Controlled Thermal Resources boasts about the sustainability attributes of direct lithium extraction, yet public health, hazardous waste, and water concerns remain unresolved,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle.

The two groups want the project halted until the risks are studied and measures are taken to mitigate any harm that could happen to the communities or environment.

The county and company disagree and say that the project’s potential risks were properly considered in the environmental impact statement that California law requires.

“The County believes that the concerns were adequately addressed during the initial stages of the project development,” said Eddie Lopez, a county spokesperson.

Jim Turner, Controlled Thermal Resources’ president, said the company spent two years performing studies to ensure that the lithium could be extracted safely. The board of supervisors agreed that the company had completed that work, he said. “The official opinion is that the job was done very well,” he said.

The lawsuit shows the tension between those in Imperial Valley who want to move swiftly to capitalize on the potential of lithium extraction and those who want to move more slowly to ensure people and the environment aren’t harmed in the process.

Government officials are among those who want to move quickly. They say the Salton Sea could be the cleanest major source of lithium in the world and make the U.S. a major player in production.

Controlled Thermal Resources and two other companies with mining projects in the works use a process in which the metal is extracted from the hot, steaming brine that geothermal power plants bring up from the depths to produce electricity.

Lithium is removed from the brine before it is reinjected back into the geothermal reservoir deep underground.

The process, known as direct lithium extraction, is said to be far less damaging to the environment than hard rock mining or by pumping brine into large evaporation ponds.

The U.S. produces very little lithium even though the demand is great and growing fast with the rising purchases of electric vehicles.

Already 11 geothermal plants have been built around the lake. Controlled Thermal Resources’ project would be the first to combine electricity generation with lithium extraction.

Last year, Jeff Marootian, a U.S. Department of Energy official, said the Salton Sea was a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a domestic lithium industry at home while also expanding clean, flexible electricity generation.”

But the groups that filed the lawsuit point out that the direct lithium extraction process has not yet been used on a commercial scale, leaving many things uncertain.

“Studies show that direct lithium extraction may require 10 times more freshwater than conventional lithium brine evaporation that is already notorious for depleting water,” said James Blair, associate professor of geography and anthropology at Cal Poly Pomona, who is an advisor to the groups.

“This potential constraint on water availability is a critical local concern because water is urgently needed to ensure environmental health through ecological restoration of the Salton Sea,” he said.

The lake, a popular tourist destination in the 1950s and ‘60s, was accidentally created in 1905 when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal that was under construction in the Imperial Valley.

Since then, the 35-mile-long lake has been fed by drainage from the surrounding agricultural fields, and in recent years, has been evaporating faster than what flows in. As the Salton Sea shrinks, it has exposed more of the lakebed, which is contaminated with pesticides and fertilizer from the agricultural fields.

A study last year by UC Riverside tied dust from the shores of the lake to the region’s high childhood asthma rate.

Many local residents came from Mexico to work in the nearby fields. As many as 10,000 of them are Purepecha, an Indigenous group from the Mexican state of Michoacan. Those families often speak only their traditional language, limiting their understanding of Spanish or English.

Researchers interviewed mothers from dozens of those families where children have been stricken with chronic respiratory diseases. The women spoke about how their children’s condition improved when they traveled away from the lake.

“I have noticed that in the month of February, this is when my son’s nose bleeds the most,” one woman told the researchers, according to their report published last year. “Why does my child have a nosebleed in the seasons when it’s windy?’ When we went to the Central Valley, they did not have nosebleeds.”

Comite Civico del Valle and Earthworks say they believe that the company and county have underestimated the amount of water that Hell’s Kitchen and the other planned lithium extraction projects will use. And they worry that the dust problem could get worse.

Turner, the company’s president, dismissed that concern. He said the company was finding ways to reuse the water it receives. “We’re very sensitive to the use of water in the desert,” he said.

And he said the project would not create hazardous waste.

None of the local residents’ fears are new to county officials. Dozens of people and organizations sent comments and spoke at a hearing before the supervisors’ final vote.

“Despite raising these concerns in multiple rounds of comments on the project, Imperial County did not address them,” said Jared Naimark of Earthworks.

The two groups say they aren’t against lithium extraction, but they want it to be done right.

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