Lithium fuels hopes for revival on California’s most significant lake

In the vicinity of Southern California’s dying Salton Sea, a cover future to a geothermal electrical power plant handles large containers of salty drinking water left guiding immediately after super-warm liquid is drilled from deep underground to run steam turbines. The containers join to tubes that spit out what looks like dishwater, but it is lithium, a critical element of rechargeable batteries and the most recent hope for economic revival in the frustrated area.

Need for electric motor vehicles has shifted investments into high equipment to extract lithium from geothermal brine, salty h2o that has been neglected and pumped back underground considering the fact that the region’s very first geothermal plant opened in 1982. The mineral-rich byproduct may perhaps now be additional important than the steam employed to produce electrical energy.

California’s major but rapidly shrinking lake is at the forefront of

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