A vast amount of a metal that is critical for manufacturing climate-friendly technologies lies in reservoirs about a mile below the ground in the southern Imperial Valley, California.
It’s contained in a substance called superheated geothermal brine. In plain English: extremely hot, salty water.
The brine has been used for decades at 11 geothermal power plants, which bring the brine to the surface via wells and then create steam that turns turbines, generating electricity.
But developers are now eying the brine for an additional use: The superheated liquid contains an estimated 15 million metric tons of lithium, a silvery-white metal used in batteries. There’s enough of it dissolved in the brine to electrify the entire U.S. auto fleet and still have some left over for making batteries to store renewable energy.
Traditional lithium extraction methods – which involve either mining or flooding deserts with water – are controversial because they can destroy habitats and pollute water. Extracting it instead from brine could better protect the environment, proponents say.
That’s good news for Imperial Valley, a region burdened by environmental degradation, poverty, and labor exploitation. The community is rebranding itself as “Lithium Valley,” and residents are working to ensure the new industry will boost the local economy with investment and good jobs.
Manuel Pastor, the director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California, says the lithium industry has the potential to benefit the community. But he cautions that it will require a lot of work.
“Good outcomes don’t just come from good wishes, they come from hardheaded strategies,” Pastor says.
Yale Climate Connections spoke with Pastor about why Lithium Valley is a promising spot for environmentally friendly lithium mining, and how the community could maximize the local economic impact and achieve a just transition to a cleaner economy.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Yale Climate Connections: How were the lithium deposits in Imperial County discovered?
Manuel Pastor: There are three methods of extracting lithium. One is hard rock mining. It’s practiced in Australia and other places. It’s quite environmentally destructive, as hard rock mining usually is.
The second is evaporation ponds, which involve basically flooding deserts with water, surfacing lithium if it’s in the sand, and extracting it as the water recedes. That’s very environmentally wasteful with regard to water.
The third method of extracting lithium is what’s called direct lithium extraction. It promises to be the cleanest, greenest method of extracting lithium. It involves going down beneath the surface to geothermal reserves that might be rich in lithium, bringing them to the surface as brine – salty water – extracting the minerals from the brine, and then using this hot water to generate electricity, which can help with the extraction, and then injecting the water back into the reserves.
There’s only three places in the world where it seems like there’s geothermal reserves that are rich enough in lithium for this to be commercially viable, and Imperial Valley, which is now being renamed Lithium Valley, is one of them.
While this method of lithium extraction has long been thought to be theoretically viable, whether or not it’s commercially viable has been uncertain. It’s just over the last few years that a company operating in Imperial Valley has demonstrated that there’s a commercially viable way of doing this. And so it’s quite possible that this area is on the precipice of a major boom that could bring significant economic activity.
But whether or not it actually benefits the residents, gives them jobs, that the resources get plowed in to clean up other environmental problems, that the extraction doesn’t have a lot of leakage of minerals, all of that is much more uncertain.
YCC: What are some of the concrete steps that must be taken to make sure that people and local communities are helped and not harmed by tapping into this resource?
Pastor: Imperial County is a site of tremendous labor exploitation, long reliant on agriculture with low wages and difficult working conditions, often with migrant workers who come from Mexicali. It’s a place of tremendous racialized distribution of power – it’s a county that’s 85% Latino, but the Latino community is close to poverty and far from power in terms of making decisions.
And it’s the site of enough lithium to redo the entire American auto fleet to electricity and have 100 million batteries left over. It’s important in and of itself, but it’s this huge stage for what’s going to happen in our new economy if we move in a direction of clean energy. It will also be a direction that repairs not just the environmental damage of the past but the social damage of the past and the present.
One of the things that is crucial is making sure that the lithium extraction jobs go to people who live in the community. Local community actors are fighting for mandatory community benefits agreements that would require local hiring. The local community college is working to train people for the jobs that will be there in plant maintenance, operations, and construction. And those are all important steps.
The other set of important steps has to do with understanding that there are actually very few jobs in lithium extraction and that there are more employment possibilities the further you move up the supply chain. So when you move to battery assembly, more jobs. When you move to EV assembly, even more jobs. Battery recycling, there are jobs there as well. So one of the important things will be whether or not the county, the companies, and communities can actually attract other parts of the supply chain, like battery assembly and maybe even EV assembly – if not in Imperial County itself, nearby – because that will make the lithium from Imperial Valley and batteries, if they’re produced there, even more attractive because of the reduction in transportation costs.
So getting the benefits that people want is going to require an interesting combination of community power building – people show up at the table with sufficient power to force concessions – but also with economic expertise to be able to understand the supply chain and generate the maximum benefits.
There’s a bit of an analogy to what the autoworkers did during the 1930s. They mastered the sit-down strike, where autoworkers actually just sat down and occupied plants – they seized the means of production, built power, and forced the companies to the negotiating table. But they followed the sit-down strike with sitting down at that table and negotiating what would make the auto industry viable and yield maximum wages and benefits for the workers who operated in it. And that set the contours for a postwar social compact, not just within auto, but within manufacturing generally in the United States – a sort of golden era in which our economy grew, the companies did well, and workers’ wages rose in tandem with their productivity. Getting back to that set of arrangements is once again going to require community power-building and economic expertise.
YCC: Do you feel optimistic and have hope that the positive outcomes you describe are achievable in the amount of time people have?
Pastor: I’m always optimistic, but hope is not about foolish imagination. It’s about understanding the terrain ahead and making calculated moves to make dreams come real. The way community-based organizations have been learning about the industry, working with labor unions and national groups to think through community benefits, particularly in a new formation called Valle Unido or Valley United for Community Benefits, I think that is a calculated strategy – that gives me hope.
The fact that these companies have begun to realize that in order to do well, everybody in that region needs to do well gives me hope. The fact that community officials have acquired enough knowledge to be involved in active bargaining with the corporations – and not simply trying to bring them to the table with the lowest possible taxes – gives me hope.
One of the things that was very important was seeing community groups and county officials team up to lobby the state of California for an excise tax on lithium that is supposed to benefit the most distressed communities and will disproportionately go to Imperial County. There’s some dispute about whether it will really do that, but the fact that they’ve done that work and then set aside some of the tax for remediation of the Salton Sea – this toxic body of water that needs not just our love, but our dollars – that gives me hope that people are thinking about the future in a realistic way. But it’s going to require a lot of work. Good outcomes don’t just come from good wishes; they come from hardheaded strategies.
If this is successful, it will be a set of lessons, not just for one particular location, but for all the questions surrounding just transition. You’ve got an Imperial Valley renamed Lithium Valley, a really critical mineral. You’ve got environmentalists excited because it’s clean and green. You’ve got corporations excited because of the dollars they see in the future. You’ve got local officials excited because economic development could take place. You’ve got communities that are wary because they’ve often been subject to false promises, but they’re trying to figure out how to get the most benefits from it.
And that is really the whole set of actors that are involved in our movement to a clean energy economy. Environmental forces, companies that may have good intentions – but are mostly motivated by the money that they can make, government, which needs to provide the guardrails, and community and labor forces that are trying to make sure that a transition is not only clean, but just as well. So what is happening in Imperial Valley will not stay in Imperial Valley. The lessons are crucial for just transition in multiple locations.
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