Cali's white gold mine: Lithium reservoir in Imperial Valley worth staggering $540bn could launch US to battery dominance... but it's run by an AUSTRALIAN energy firm

A California lake in Imperial Valley is sitting atop one of the world's largest 'white gold' mines — but one of the chief beneficiaries will be an Australian energy firm.

Controlled Thermal Resources, founded Down Under in 2013, has spent two decades developing and managing energy projects in the valley south of Palm Springs.

Many of those projects generated geothermal energy, a power source that use molten, magma-hot temperatures deep below Earth's crust to power steam turbines for an environmentally sustainable means of making electricity.

But in recent years, the firm has turned its eye toward southern California's lithium metal reserves, dubbed white gold because of the soft, silvery-white look of these 'lithium salts.' 

CTR's big promise to the California officials who approved the project, is a chance to harvest vast troves of lithium to boost US energy independence without damaging local communities and ecosystems, or contributing to global warming, experts say.

Reports say this salty California lake is sitting on top of the world's largest 'white gold' mine

The Department of Energy (DOE) shared the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory results, which determined the underground pool could hold 18 million tons - enough to meet the US's demand for the valuable metal for decades

But the US government will be hoping the project jumpstarts America's energy independence from the high volume of lithium-ion batteries imported from China. 

Lithium is a critical component for batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles to solar panels - and China has dominated the market for decades because 90 percent of the metal mined is refined in their nation. 

At a trade volume of $9.3 billion in 2022 alone, according to the United Nations Comtrade Database, Chinese lithium-ion batteries account for the vast majority of US battery imports today.

California regulators, environmentalists, scientists and many of the companies vying for a piece of the Imperial Valley's burgeoning lithium empire themselves are hoping to become a part of that shift without ravaging SoCal's land and local population.

'Nothing is going to be completely clean,' as local geochemist Michael McKibben, who teaches at UC Riverside, told the Desert Sun.

'But this is the cleanest way we can do it, using geothermal.'

McKibben currently is collaborating with a research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to map lithium deposits, and game out the potential ecological and human costs of their extraction.

'The traditional ways of mining lithium are really destructive and really hard on the environment for local communities,' McKibben said, 'and so the attraction of geothermal lithium is that the footprint is small.'

'You're not digging pits, you're not putting huge evaporation ponds on the surface, because the brine is already brought up for the steam,' McKibben said of the Salton Sea's unique lithium-salted water. 

'So it's just a matter of tacking on a lithium filter to that brine before you reinject it back into the ground.'

CTR, which first announced their Salton Sea lithium project in 2016, 'redomiciled' their firm to the US in 2022, according to their website, announcing that their new headquarters will be located right in California's Imperial County.

But the energy firm does still maintain an office in Brisbane, Australia.

Three companies will use power plants to extract the lithium to pull superheated brine from the ground

Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) announced in January that it had recovered lithium from its geothermal brine resource and is now set to construct a massive plant at the site (pictured)

This Australian expat firm, however, is not the only player looking to extract eco-friendly profits out of the landlocked salt water lake. 

The Salton Sea has been swarmed by companies large and small looking for cost-effective ways to extract the lithium dissolved in its scalding hot brine water, which  flows beneath the lake's southern point.

Last December a new study funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) found the basin has even more lithium than previously estimated, heating up the race for development contracts with state and local agencies. 

The DOE study found that there could be 18 million tons of extractable metal — enough to meet US demand for the valuable metal for decades.

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A small, quiet Arkansas town home to just 11,100 people is set to become the epicenter of the US 'white gold' boom. 

The findings would make the reservoir the largest in the world, overtaking Chile (home to nine million metric tons).

California Governor Gavin Newsom once described the Salton Sea as 'the Saudi Arabia of lithium mining,' and the moniker is a testament to the substance's immense economic value. 

One ton of lithium is currently priced at $29,000, making the supply in the Salton Sea worth more than $540 billion. 

The DOE said it could support over 375 million electric vehicle batteries.

Jeff Marootian, principal deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said: 'Lithium is vital to decarbonizing the economy and meeting President Biden's goals of 50 percent electric vehicle adoption by 2030.

'This report confirms the once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a domestic lithium industry at home while also expanding clean, flexible electricity generation.

'Using American innovation, we can lead the clean energy future, create jobs and a strong domestic supply chain, and boost our national energy security.'

Earlier this year, after roughly a dozen years of engineering, permit-haggling and finance-raising, CTR finally broke ground on construction of its lithium extraction and geothermal power plant.

'The work is going to be done by union labor. These are going to be good jobs,' President Biden's clean energy advisor, John Podesta, who attended the groundbreaking, told the Los Angeles Times. 

But, despite these big promises, many unknowns remain given the ambitious scope of the project, according to industry insiders. 

'Extracting lithium from geothermal brines has never been done before at scale,' according to Erik Desormeaux, a director at the energy efficiency firm Energy Recovery, Inc.

'So it remains to be seen whether the electric-vehicle industry, the local community and/or the environment will actually benefit,' Desormeaux told The Daily Beast.

General Motors, at least, is one firm betting on the project's success. The automaker has signed commitments to source lithium from CTR, according to Forbes, a sign of the palpable desire from US electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer's to source the lithium for their lithium-ion batteries domestically.

'I think people are very optimistic about the project,' Desormeaux said, 'but it's a lot of "Wait and see."'