Ryder Kimball

A study published in 2023 declared what western miners have long known: there’s fortune in the desert. But its authors aren’t reporting on the gold rush or the oil boom after. Their focus is the mineral that will define the energy industry for decades to come.

Many understand that lithium is the indispensable ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries that power renewable energy. Fewer understand the complicated impact of its supply chain. And hardly any can foresee what this economic entanglement entails: falling back into industry’s familiar pattern of expedient environmental destruction.

China understood the importance of lithium decades ago. They took stock of its reserves located mostly in Australia and Chile, bought the mines, and established domination over the supply line from extraction to its placement in iPhones and Teslas. And with demand set to increase by up to 4,000% over the upcoming years, the race for energy superiority is on. 

America is playing catch up. It takes about a decade to build a lithium mine and currently the country has only one—Silver Peak—that’s responsible for less than 4% of global production a year. To further complicate matters, Indigenous and environmental opposition to the development of new projects is growing. Meaning the US is not only late to the decarbonization and electrification race, its legs are also tied.

President Biden’s administration is hoping to politically capitalize on the EV boom by keeping it local. Tax credits and subsidies are now awarded to companies with supply chains linked to local businesses, spurring prospectors to search across the US for new lithium deposits. They don’t have to search far. It turns out they’re everywhere.

Some of the companies racing to match this demand are hoping to eliminate the evaporation pond—a water-intensive extractive practice that is a problematic constraint for deposits commonly found in arid deserts. Instead they’re employing a different process called direct lithium extraction (DLE) and marketing themselves as the sustainable battery option. The press releases are flying. The market is abuzz. They say there’s hope on California’s southern horizon in that neglected space next to Mexico: the Salton Sea.

The lithium deposit identified under the Salton Sea is the latest promise in the state’s century-long effort to tame and profit from this stretch of desert. Situated in the low-lying Imperial and Coachella Valleys, the current lake formed just over 100 years ago from diverted irrigation floodwater. In the decades since, it’s served as a microcosm for the booms and busts of industry.

Tourism exploded in the 1950s and 60s as resorts expanded across its shores. At one point it attracted more visitors than Yosemite. Then it crashed. It turns out beachgoers prefer the salt of the ocean to the brine of algae-packed toxic runoff. It’s hard to lay down a towel on a beach covered with the skeletons of dead fish.

Walk along the Salton Sea’s shores today and a smattering of neighborhoods sit among the relics of that hope-filled era. But the sea remains important for the flocks of migrating birds and its large agricultural industry. Yet both of these are threatened. The lake shrinks every year. The bird populations are plummeting. Public health issues are dramatically rising. There’s toxic dust in the air, fertilizer in the ground, and algae blooms in the water.

And, beneath it all, there’s lithium—enough lithium to meet one third of global demand. The companies building DLE plants claim it will bring jobs and economic opportunities to local residents. They say, best of all, it will help facilitate the green energy transition. Locals are dubious. It’s never that simple.

It’s not necessarily profitable to sustainably extract resources under the current economic models. Lithium companies aren’t paid for restoring the habitability of an ecosystem in the long-term or using less water in the short. They’re paid for the amount of minerals they can extract, and how cheaply they can do it. The faster, the better. And when you’re racing against China, a country with a general disregard for environmental standards, then a situation has been set up in which the countries most willing to destroy their environment will profit faster.

The entire global community stands to benefit from electrifying transportation. But if the tradeoff is the continued exploitation and destruction of local communities, then we haven’t learned anything at all.

This is mostly an idea-board for a larger story I’m working on. If you’re interested in publishing it, please reach out!

Special thanks to EcoFlight for taking me onboard a flight over the Salton Sea.