“Southern California’s Salton Sea contains enough lithium to meet the nation’s needs for decades,” according to Grist. It is unclear if there are legal obstacles to extracting it. “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…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.” As Grist notes,
If the Salton Sea lithium can be extracted, it could give the U.S. the ability to produce domestically sourced lithium, ending the nation’s dependence on rival countries for a supply of the metal….But that opportunity hinges on whether emerging technologies can make extracting lithium from brine cost-effective on a commercial scale….Generating electricity from the Salton Sea, a geothermal hot spot, requires extracting hot brine from underground aquifers to produce steam that drives turbines. Brine used for geothermal energy also happens to be rich in lithium that can theoretically be extracted in a more environmentally friendly closed system.
The Salton Sea is believed to have the highest concentration of lithium, contained in geothermal brines, in the world.
Right now, America is dangerously reliant on China for lithium, which is used in electric car batteries, medicine, and industrial applications. But if we could extract lithium in the Salton Sea or Nevada, that could change. Chemistry World reports:
A world-beating deposit of lithium along the Nevada–Oregon border could meet surging demand for this metal, according to a new analysis.
An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal lie within a volcanic crater formed around 16 million years ago. This is notably larger than the lithium deposits found beneath a Bolivian salt flat, previously considered the largest deposit in the world.
Although lithium is needed for things on the green agenda, such as electric cars, green activists have blocked lithium mining in other places in America like Maine. Previously, the world’s richest known lithium deposit was in the forest of western Maine, worth perhaps $1.5 billion, but Maine’s greens made it impossible to mine it, reported Time Magazine. It noted that that lithium
is desperately needed for the clean energy transition. By 2040, the world will need at least 1.1 million metric tons of lithium annually, more than ten times what it currently produces, according to projections by the International Energy Agency. Should the Maine deposit be mined, it could be worth as much as $1.5 billion, a huge windfall for the Freemans and a boon to … efforts to … to reduce the U.S.’ dependence on China. This is one of the few lithium deposits in the U.S. currently found in hard rock, which means it is higher-quality and faster to process than lithium mined from brine.
“I consider myself an environmentalist,” says Mary, who on a recent rainy visit to the test quarry, was wearing jeans, a sweater, and hiking boots, her white hair pulled into a low ponytail. Most of the country’s critical minerals are mined elsewhere and processed in China, she adds. “I think [the U.S.] should try to be a little bit more self-sufficient.”
But like just about everywhere in the U.S. where new mines have been proposed, there is strong opposition here. Maine has some of the strictest mining and water quality standards in the country, and prohibits digging for metals in open pits larger than three acres. There have not been any active metal mines in the state for decades, and no company has applied for a permit since a particularly strict law passed in 2017. As more companies begin prospecting in Maine and searching for sizable nickel, copper, and silver deposits, towns are beginning to pass their own bans on industrial mining.
Rather than working to promote energy independence in areas like lithium, the Biden administration is making America reliant on foreign energy, by making it harder to mine and drill for oil and natural gas. Recently, the Biden administration canceled the seven remaining oil and gas leases in Alaska’s ANWR, even though oil drilling took up only a microscopic fraction of that desolate area, and posed no problem for wildlife.
As the Heritage Foundation notes, Biden took many steps to reduce America’s supply of oil and gas, which will drive up gas prices and make America more reliant on foreign producers:
On Mr. Biden’s first day in office, he issued an executive order directing the Secretary of the Interior to put a …. moratorium on the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program. That program directs the Bureau of Land Management to lease certain lands in Alaska for oil and gas extraction.
A few days later, he issued another order “pausing” oil and gas leases on all public lands and waters.
According to the Bureau, Alaska’s Coastal Plain is “some of the most highly prospective land on Alaska’s North Slope.” It contains billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. It is a king’s ransom of energy wealth, and the law requires that the administration make it available for extraction….The result: Mr. Biden has unlawfully trapped much of America’s vast energy reserves behind a wall of bureaucratic red tape, leaving them unavailable now that the country needs them.
Biden has left America much more vulnerable to foreign oil embargoes, by depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Thanks to his policies, America can’t fully offset any sudden cuts in oil production overseas. Joe Biden has left the reserve partly empty, by releasing oil from it on multiple occasions, such as 50 million barrels in November 2021, 210 million barrels beginning in March 2022. Democrats kept President Trump from expanding the reserve back when oil was dirt cheap. The reserve now is now partly empty, and nowhere near its storage capacity.
In March 2020, President Trump proposed adding oil to the strategic petroleum reserve when oil cost only $14 per barrel (compared to $90 per barrel today), but Democrats blocked him from doing that.
Biden’s releases of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve have been illegal, because they weren’t in response to an emergency, and left the reserve with insufficient oil to respond to a true emergency. Biden’s actions violated the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act, notes Mark Robeck, the former deputy general counsel of the Department of Energy. The law prohibits releases from the reserve unless there is a severe domestic supply shortage, an act of sabotage or natural disaster. Biden’s “unlawful release of oil from the SPR threatens national security by depleting” the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Robeck says.
