This story was originally published by the Nevada Current.
A federal analysis released Tuesday confirmed Southern California’s Salton Sea contains enough lithium to meet the nation’s needs for decades.
Salton Sea has the potential to produce an estimated 375 million lithium batteries for electric vehicles — more than the total number of vehicles currently on U.S. roads, according to the analysis commissioned by the Department of Energy.
Those numbers dwarf the estimated lithium deposits available in Nevada’s Thacker Pass, long touted as the largest known source of lithium in the nation.
The long-awaited analysis was conducted by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It’s the most comprehensive analysis to date quantifying the domestic lithium resources in California’s Salton Sea region.
If the Salton Sea lithium can be extracted, it could give the U.S. the ability to produce domestically sourced lithium, ending ... Read more
