Building Steam in Lithium Valley

This article appears in the December 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

BRAWLEY, CALIFORNIA – A giant cloud had formed a wall, enveloping the horizon in darkness. They call it a haboob, a collapsed thunderstorm that stirs up silt and clay after plummeting to Earth. The dust tornado sat between me and my hotel, and once I started down the country road, which ran along a cow feedlot that stretched for (I counted) three miles, visibility dropped to maybe a couple of feet.

Not even 30 minutes earlier, it had been a normal afternoon in southeastern California’s Sonoran Desert, under a blazing sun and cloudless sky. But first the rain came down in buckets, and then the haboob. I’d have thought at least the former would be welcomed, after seeing billboards throughout the area urging water conservation due to “La sequía”—the drought. But the ground is so dry that it can’t absorb condensation, which bounces off and slides wherever the land slopes downward.

Within minutes, my phone beeped: first for a flash flood warning, then a dust storm warning that said “Pull Aside, Stay Alive … Infants, the elderly and those with respiratory issues urged to take precautions.”

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I didn’t pull aside, but my pace was slow as I hugged the edge of what I hoped was still the road. When I finally reached the hotel, there was a thin film of dust over everything. The clerk gave me the key, and a disclaimer: “There may be some dirt in the room. I can’t control the weather, even though everyone thinks I can.”

Embedded within that dust is more than a century of policy mismanagement, environmental disaster, and regional despair. The recent fortunes of Imperial County, along the U.S.-Mexico border, have risen and fallen with water levels at the Salton Sea, California’s largest inland lake. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was a travel destination, where mid-century luminaries like Frank Sinatra would lounge and play. But flooding drove away the tourists, toxicity killed off most undersea wildlife, and years of drought conditions and reduced water allocations exposed roughly 30,000 acres of playa.

Dust from that dry lake bed, polluted with agricultural chemicals, blows into nearby towns. Pediatric asthma hospitalizations in the region are as much as twice the state average, a crisis for the disproportionately poor residents. Despite restoration plans, almost nobody believes there’s a simple solution. “It will get worse before it becomes better,” Frank Ruiz, Salton Sea Program Director for the National Audubon Society, told me.

Local officials have tried in vain to revive Imperial County for decades. The latest salvation can be found deep beneath the Salton Sea. An underground reservoir contains one of the world’s largest deposits of lithium, a primary component in electric-vehicle and energy storage batteries that are critical to the green transition. While extracting this mineral is typically a dirty business, companies in the Salton Sea are pioneering a cleaner process, bolted onto geothermal operations that have thrived here for 40 years. In January, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called Imperial County “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

Imperial County unemployment in September was over 16 percent; the state average was 4 percent.

On paper, it’s the perfect concept: renewable energy unlocking the key to more renewable energy, bringing jobs and prosperity to a region that has been knocked down for too long. But that’s only on paper. Companies have yet to perfect direct lithium extraction outside the lab; community members are skeptical that they’ll see real benefits; and a balance between maximizing economic opportunity and protecting the environment and public health must be struck.

Areas blessed with precious metals or fossil fuels often succumb to the resource curse, with poor outcomes for development and growth. That’s a good description of Imperial County’s past, in fact. “This area has been exploited for the needs of the urban coast,” said Ryan Kelley, a member of Imperial County’s Board of Supervisors who has been instrumental in designing the plan for what is being called the Lithium Valley. “We provide all those things that you’d find in the produce section, we provide the water that comes out of taps indirectly. And we’re providing the power that’s keeping their lights on and their air conditioners running.”

Kelley and his colleagues are staking their careers, and the region’s future, on this time being different.

There have always been Salton Seas, even when only Native communities lived in the area and they called it Lake Cahuilla. The water ebbed and flowed into the natural sink, depending on fluctuations in the Colorado River. “Water was part of their origin stories,” said Traci Brynne Voyles, author of The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism. “What the Salton Sea is covering right now is Cahuilla village sites on the desert floor.”

In 1905, the region’s would-be saviors planned an agricultural bounty, building a canal from the Colorado River to irrigate crops, with runoff funneled to the lake bed. But a heavy rainy season sent water over the canal. It flooded for two years before being fixed, forming the modern-day, 400-square-mile Salton Sea. The lake, cut off from the Colorado, its traditional direct water source, sustained itself year after year with farm drainage.

At first, the farm economy complemented a tourist economy, about an hour from the existing Hollywood getaway of Palm Springs. The Beach and Yacht Club sprung up in North Shore; Salton City, to the south, built a resort village. Fish and wildlife thrived in the desert oasis. The Marx Brothers and the Beach Boys were mainstays. They didn’t quite realize where they were frolicking, Voyles explained: “The water these celebrities are bathing and fishing in is an agricultural sump.”

Rising waters in the early 1970s flooded attractions and businesses, adding another ruined civilization to the lakeside destruction. But something stranger was happening. The irrigation water replenishing the sea carried fertilizers and pesticides; evaporation left behind arsenic and selenium and other poisons. The natural inflows from hundreds of past Salton Seas also contained salts; today, the sea is about twice as salty as the ocean.

When I visited the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, which has been turned into a museum, a few years ago, the shoreline was littered with solid, desiccated spheres. I learned that they were dead fish. Agricultural runoff often leads to algal blooms, which suck oxygen out of the water. In the late 1990s, nearly eight million fish died in a single day. Fishing and recreation at the area essentially ended. The resorts were abandoned. High hydrogen sulfide levels created a lingering rotten-egg smell.

The mega-drought, which Ruiz describes as “a new normal,” was the culmination of these overlapping crises. In 2003, the Imperial Irrigation District, the local water authority, agreed to send much of its water allotment earmarked for agriculture to the growing San Diego metro area. In exchange, the Salton Sea would continue to get water for 15 years before dropping precipitously. Officials promised a solution before then. But recession aborted early efforts and neglect sunk the rest.

As 2018 arrived, no alternative Salton Sea water source had been secured. More than 45 square miles of playa has already been exposed, and that could double by the end of the decade, with as much as three-quarters of the sea drying up. That translates into exponentially more dust finding its way into the lungs of nearby residents. The state has initiated a ten-year plan for dust suppression, tree planting, and wetland habitat projects by 2028, but little has gotten done so far. In October, a state panel rejected a fanciful idea to truck millions of gallons in from the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. The panel instead focused on desalinating the sea.

In the Inflation Reduction Act, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) secured $4 billion in drought mitigation funds for the Southwest, but whether Imperial County will see any of that is tied to the larger question of how to distribute water from an oversubscribed Colorado River. Squabbling has ensued among the seven states that rely on the Colorado, amid federal threats to make mandatory water cuts if there’s no cooperation. Sinema’s Democratic colleague in Arizona, Sen. Mark Kelly, has proposed that no federal money go toward Salton Sea restoration until California agrees to deeper cuts.

Ruiz has proposed a water budget, where all users figure out how to live with less, through recycling or other sustainability measures. He was more inclined to agree with the state panel’s recommendation of a stable but smaller lake. “The Salton Sea may not be the restoration project that everyone envisions,” he said. “I live in Coachella. I would love that body of water to be the way it used to be in the ’50s. But times have changed and situations have shifted.”

The sea still dominates the landscape, majestic and blue from the road. But at the shoreline, it’s more of a bubbly black soup. The cracked land near the sea gives way as you step on it. The smell can be overpowering and pollution is evident. Though migratory birds, faced with few options as wetlands recede statewide, stop to rest here, they are often the only sound for miles, bare echoes of an ecosystem that once teemed with life.

But the sea is supposed to come and go naturally. Only now would that be an ecological catastrophe. “It’s in some ways poetic justice for the artificial maintenance of the sea over the course of the 20th century,” Voyles noted acidly. “It’s never been in a situation where it’s been completely cut off from the Colorado River. It’s never been in a situation when it’s polluted with chemical toxicants and farm runoffs. The conditions have been created that you don’t have a choice but to artificially sustain it.”

ABOUT FOUR AND A HALF MILES from the city of Niland, a rust-colored collection of pipes and tanks culminate in a flash of steam flying skyward, looking like a postmodern cloud-creation machine. This is where Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) is building a lithium extraction facility from scratch called Hell’s Kitchen, in honor of a cabin with the same name built on the shores of the Salton Sea in 1908. Other than the ruined surrounding landscape, the only infernal aspect at this relatively small facility is the ungodly noise. CEO Rod Colwell, a large Australian with wraparound sunglasses, motioned at me to get into his truck; it was the only way we would be able to hear each other.

Hell’s Kitchen uses the same geothermal technology that 11 power plants in the Salton Sea area have used since the 1980s. Super-hot brine is pulled from an underground reservoir a couple of miles below the surface. It is sent into a separator, where the steam rises; it will spin turbines and create electricity. (At Hell’s Kitchen right now, it’s being flared off during testing.) The brine is then reinjected back into the reservoir, closing the loop without depleting the resource.

Direct lithium extraction, or DLE, adds a few additional steps. Geothermal facilities already clean up the brine before reinjecting it; otherwise the well would clog. CTR takes this even further, picking out all the minerals and creating a clean stream. “In our simple philosophy, if you’ve got bad apples in the barrel, get rid of them all,” Colwell told me.

There’s one issue plaguing everyone involved with direct lithium extraction: It has not actually worked at the necessary scale.

First, the brine goes into clarifier tanks to remove silica, which for most geothermal plants is a waste by-product that must be trucked to a landfill. CTR plans to sell the silica to a company that makes carbon dioxide–free cement. In step two, minerals like iron, zinc, and lead would be extracted and sold as a bulk sulfide to a foundry. Then manganese, another mineral used in batteries, is pulled out; the expectation is that about five times as much manganese can be produced as lithium. CTR won’t recover much money from those sales, but once they are gone, the prized product, lithium chloride, can be more easily recovered and refined into lithium hydroxide.

The Hell’s Kitchen site, which has been in development since 2016, is expected to produce 49.9 megawatts of baseload power. Once fully developed, CTR expects to produce 1,100 megawatts throughout the project area, enough energy to power one million homes, and 300,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) per year. “The trick is we’re lithium first and power second,” Colwell said. He expects this plant to be up and running by early 2024, at a cost of close to $1 billion. And purchasers are already lining up. Last year, CTR secured a commitment from General Motors to purchase 20,000 tons of lithium for its electric-vehicle batteries, and Stellantis, an automaker and battery manufacturer, signed a separate purchase commitment this June.

Up until a couple of years ago, such an operation would have been unprofitable. Lithium has been a key element in batteries and energy storage since the 1970s, but it’s a fairly abundant natural resource, and demand has been manageable. Nearly all of it is produced and refined in China, Australia, and the “Lithium Triangle” of South America. Even when electric vehicles took off in the mid-2010s and investors started to position lithium as the new oil, the hype got ahead of actual demand, and prices crashed.

But a combination of post-crash underinvestment, the COVID-era crunch—which restricted Chinese production in particular—and continued momentum for EVs powered by lithium-ion batteries generated a supply-demand mismatch. In January 2021, lithium cost under $10,000 per metric ton; by April, it was up to $78,000, where it has mostly remained. Without new sources of production, prices will explode higher, making batteries less affordable and threatening the green transition. The International Energy Agency estimates that demand for lithium will rise 42-fold from 2020 levels by 2040.

This has created a rush for “white gold,” as the light metal is sometimes called. “Over the last 50 years, lithium hasn’t been an industrial-scale commodity,” said Kwasi Ampofo, an analyst with BloombergNEF. “There are a lot of players in the game, each of them claiming they found the holy grail. We definitely need disruption with lithium.”

Innovation is needed both to produce more lithium and to mitigate the residual environmental damage. Currently, lithium is produced in two ways: hard-rock mining after blasting open giant pits, or “evaporation ponds,” where brine is brought to the surface and left in the sun until lithium is left behind as the water vaporizes. Hard-rock mining was listed by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 as the most toxic industry in the U.S. It requires enormous amounts of energy and water, uses sulfuric acid to dig out lithium salts, and produces waste ponds that can contaminate groundwater. Evaporation ponds in places like the Atacama Desert in Chile, meanwhile, use 2,000 tons of water to produce just one ton of lithium. It also takes up to two years to recover the metal.

Direct lithium extraction, by comparison, is enormously more efficient. “Think of hanging wet clothes on a line,” Ampofo said. “You need sunshine to get it done in 24 hours. Now the dryer comes along, your clothes are dry in 20 minutes.” In testing, DLE recovers twice as much lithium from brine as evaporation. It is also far less energy-intensive, as the geothermal energy that powers it emits 99 percent less carbon dioxide than fossil fuel plants. Automakers wanting to sell EVs as environmentally friendly need clean sources of lithium to actually make that claim, and cheap sources of lithium to make the cars more affordable.

Perhaps best of all, DLE creates a virtuous circle. Geothermal plants have enormous up-front costs compared to solar and wind. But adding lithium extraction makes the payoff much more profitable, and subsequently enables more plants to get built, increasing clean baseload power.

The United States gave up intensive mining for metals like lithium precisely because it was so dirty. Only one site, the Silver Peak evaporation pit mine in Nevada, is currently in operation, producing about 1 percent of global supply, and other U.S. projects planned in North Carolina and Nevada also use older practices. A cleaner extraction process could return the U.S. to prominence without collateral damage, and serve as a model for wherever brines can be called up, including converted oil fields.

IN BRAWLEY, I MET LUIS OLMEDO, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle (Valley Civic Committee), a health and environmental justice organization. Signs in the lobby promote air quality management projects and an asthma management academy, while another echoed a familiar refrain: “Restore the Salton Sea Now.”

CCV manages 30 to 40 projects at once, yet “we’re still not even scratching the surface of the need out here,” Olmedo told me. Imperial County unemployment in September was over 16 percent; the state average was 4 percent. Nearly 1 in 5 of the 179,000 residents live in poverty. A high percentage of adults have no high school education. More than 85 percent of the county is Latino, many of them laborers in the winter vegetable fields, and English is often not the primary language spoken at home.

The county’s soaring asthma rates are likely undercounted, because they are derived from visits to hospitals. Many community members have no access to medical care and go across the border for treatment. Plus, threats to clean air do not come solely from playa dust. “There’s illegal dumping in the middle of the desert,” said Mariela Loera, a policy advocate with the Leadership Counsel who works with communities along the North Shore. “We get folks leaving sofas or appliances or cars, and because it’s dry they’re catching on fire.” Agricultural activities, including controlled burns of cropland, also contribute to poor air quality.

Olmedo spoke of the great wealth embedded in the Valley, but complained that other California communities “use our demographics, use our poverty and take the money to other metro areas.” Agriculture was the Imperial Valley’s first economic boom, but the crops flew across the country while food deserts persist at home. During the Obama administration, 10,000 acres of farmland was converted to solar arrays. But in addition to lost farmworker jobs, the renewable-power transmission lines bypass the local jurisdiction.

Even now, as Imperial County prepares to become a hub for electric-vehicle minerals, the county has only five EV charging stations, one at Olmedo’s CCV office, built with a grant from General Motors. “It demonstrates that whenever these programs are designed, they are not designed for low-income, disadvantaged communities,” Olmedo said.

On paper, it’s the perfect concept: renewable energy fueling the key to more renewable energy.

When I asked locals what the area’s greatest needs were, they mentioned things that seem more appropriate for the early 20th century. “We have these communities, whether it’s Niland or Calipatria or the Salton City area, they don’t have basic amenities,” said John Gay, director of public works for Imperial County. “We’re talking sidewalk curb and gutter, we’re talking parks, we’re talking community centers, things that are just so basic to areas outside of here.” Only half of the 2,500 miles of roads in the county are paved. When storms hit, buses can’t get to school through the flooded washes. Of the county’s 125 bridges, 77 are wooden; one being replaced now was first built in 1940. The cost of a recent bridge repair will be about $6–7 million; the county’s total infrastructure budget in the 2022-2023 fiscal year was $23 million.

Climate change will only exacerbate the problems, triggering more exposure of toxic dust, higher home cooling bills, and potential forced water cutbacks. Federal drought mitigation funds, if they come through, will most likely pay the farmers that use roughly 80 percent of the water in Imperial County not to plant, freeing up more for the lake and residents. But this would hurt the already-depressed county economically, with money flowing to agribusiness and landowners rather than workers. “If they fallow 20 percent of the lands, that will be 20 percent less jobs available,” Ruiz said. In addition, decreasing crop output at a time of already high food prices will have a national impact on inflation.

Olmedo wasn’t completely pessimistic. He noted that some state and local officials shared a broad vision for helping the county’s entire population, not just the usual elites. But in his voice, you could hear tinges of the legacy of distrust. “We still have all the harms of the past,” Olmedo said. “We need to have that kind of healing and reconciling process here.”

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY has sunk $3 billion into improving the electric-vehicle battery supply chain, and the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for electric vehicles are tied to building a homegrown battery and mineral industry. Practically everyone in Imperial County thinks that investment should start here.

Michael McKibben, a research professor with the University of California, Riverside, told me that current geothermal operations at the Salton Sea field could produce 115,000 metric tons of lithium per year. But there’s currently only 400 megawatts of geothermal in the Salton Sea area, far less than capacity. McKibben estimated a top-end extraction rate of 330,000 metric tons annually. “To give you an indication, that’s 60 percent of global production of lithium,” he said. In a June 2021 report, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory put the number at nearly twice that. Essentially all lithium use in the United States could be satisfied at this one site.

But there’s one issue plaguing everyone involved with direct lithium extraction: It has not actually worked at the necessary scale. As McKibben explained, the typical DLE system uses nanotechnology particles inside ceramic beads, which select for and absorb lithium or other minerals out of the brine. It’s unknown whether those particles will fully survive the super-high temperatures, the acidity, or the salinity of the brine. Pipes can corrode or clog, and the concatenation of metals can be complex to separate. “It’s worked on the lab bench scale, but the scale-up is the challenge,” McKibben said. “That’s what keeps them awake at night.”

The three companies in the Salton Sea field all created their own proprietary DLE technology to solve this problem. EnergySource, which operates the John Featherstone power station in the area, expects their ILiAD lithium extraction facility, which is already permitted, to be online by early 2025, according to COO Derek Benson. “Our process has demonstrated very high lithium recovery, while providing excellent separation from other salts,” Benson said over email.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables, part of Warren Buffett’s conglomerate, owns the other ten power plants in the area, and is building a DLE demonstration project. President Biden held a meeting with BHE Renewables in February, hinting at federal support for the facility. But in October, it was revealed that a $14.9 million Department of Energy grant was rescinded, and anonymous sources noted “problems extracting lithium from the geothermal brines.” Dan Winters, VP of communications for BHE Renewables, said in an email, “I don’t have anything to share at this time, but I’ll keep you in mind as we keep moving forward with this exciting project.”

Colwell seemed pretty bullish. CTR plans to spend the next year-plus calibrating its ion-exchange approach, using different clarifier tanks at different temperatures. Computers hooked up to the tanks test the success rate and make modifications. It’s an endless trial-and-error experiment for the small group of chemists and engineers. “We’ll be always optimizing, tweaking like an old carburetor, you know, trying to get the best out of it,” Colwell said.

But this raises a question that nobody in Imperial County wants to answer: What if DLE never really works? Or what if it’s so difficult to recover lithium cleanly that the world decides to power their batteries another way? There are already companies experimenting with aluminum, zinc, sodium, and vanadium. “We know one thing about extractive sectors, they’re very volatile markets,” said Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor at Providence College who studies resource extraction. “When you have a municipality dependent on that, they dry up at times.”

But when you’re already as dry as Imperial County, you’ll make that big bet on transforming into the Lithium Valley.

A DECADE AGO, IMPERIAL COUNTY Supervisor Ryan Kelley began advocating for a company named Simbol Materials, which built a demonstration extraction facility in 2015. But acquisition talks with Tesla fell through and the company just ran out of money. Today, the economics of lithium extraction make much more sense.

Last year, in part due to the county’s advocacy, the state Public Utilities Commission set a requirement for power companies to purchase at least 1,000 megawatts of new geothermal by 2026. That creates a lot of forward pressure to permit and approve new plants; if they’re 50 megawatts or below, the county can permit itself, a relatively rapid process.

In February, the Board of Supervisors adopted a plan laying out requests for economic investment. The state delivered on two centerpieces. SB 125, which passed this legislative session, institutes a severance tax of $400 per metric ton for the first 20,000 tons of lithium, scaling up to $800 for every metric ton above 30,000. The tax takes effect January 1, with 20 percent of the funds going to Salton Sea restoration and the other 80 percent to Imperial County. The state also freed up $80 million for a San Diego State University STEM campus on an existing site in Brawley, built in 2003 but never used, that could support a local pipeline of engineers and chemists.

This represents a quantum leap over past efforts to revitalize Imperial County, officials say, providing a major contribution to infrastructure, quality of life, and sustained workforce development. “All of us have family members who grew up here,” said John Gay. “The pathway for our kids is out of the Valley … To have an engineering program to help support our future generation is huge.”

While he lauded the STEM campus, Colwell tried to temper the idea that geothermal and lithium extraction would only need chemists with advanced degrees. “It’s actually 90 percent trades, and 95 percent local sourced. It always has been,” he said. As an example, Colwell cited one of his operators, 34 years old with four kids, who previously managed a ranch. “This guy went and done a part-time course at the college, went from $34,000 a year supporting four kids and a wife, to $90,000 to start,” he said. “And now his kids are going to college, you know?”

CTR’s Hell’s Kitchen site has signed a project labor agreement to ensure quality jobs. But as I looked around, I didn’t see a lot of manpower. When Loera took some of her North Shore community members to the plants, she said they counted two workers at five sites. An EnergySource spokeswoman quoted me that their facility would support about 70 jobs.

If battery factories co-locate in Imperial County to be closer to the lithium, as CTR hopes for its “clean energy campus,” the job opportunity would be much greater. CTR signed an agreement in April with Statevolt, an Italian firm, to locate a battery factory on its site. “We can see 1,000 jobs for extraction and new geothermal, and that’s fantastic,” Kelley said. “If we can see a [battery] Gigafactory, just one, it would triple that employment.” That might come with its own challenges: There isn’t a lot of available housing in the county, and poorer residents could get priced out by incoming workers.

Even at modest job growth, the tax revenue should help the county, as long as lithium remains a prized resource. But both CTR and EnergySource told me they did not support the flat fee per metric ton, and would prefer a percentage royalty like what’s imposed on the oil and gas industry. It’s an odd request; under current rates, the severance tax would translate to a little more than 1 percent of gross revenue. A percentage royalty would likely commit companies to even higher sums if lithium prices remain high. Colwell even intimated that to me, saying a flat fee “shortchanges the community.”

Resource management is also critical. There will be an uptick in trucking to carry out lithium and other products, creating noise and kicking up dust. In addition, DLE uses a fraction of the water of other lithium recovery techniques, but it still uses some. When companies send lithium hydroxide to purchasers, the mixture includes 53 percent water. Colwell said CTR is using the steam condensate as a primary water source, and has used the same gallon as many as eight times. But in the middle of a drought where the Salton Sea’s water needs are urgent, figuring out where that excess water comes from is critical.

A paper authored by Michael McKibben and two other UC Riverside researchers highlights another problem. It suggested that the Salton Sea’s “receding shoreline opens new land suitable for construction” for geothermal plants. “The most favorable reclamation Scenario for adopting these specific technologies will be [one] in which the Sea is allowed to shrink.” In other words, maximizing industry operations is synonymous with perpetuating the continued public-health hazard of exposed lake beds.

I asked McKibben why that would be good for the community. He acknowledged that there needed to be a balance. “If we want to bring in thousands of workers for lithium extraction and battery manufacturing, we don’t want to expose them to playa dust and give them all asthma,” McKibben said. “The health problem needs to be solved in parallel with the development issue.” He added that the toxicity was really caused by agricultural runoff, and the geothermal companies don’t want to be blamed for it or asked to fix it on their own.

Colwell did express some frustration with some community members who think that geothermal operations take water from the Salton Sea or pollute it with chemicals; it’s a closed loop and nothing touches the lake. But he recognized the need to improve environmental conditions very personally. “I get asthma. I used to run, believe it or not, and I just can’t since I’m living here, I just choke up.”

COUNTY OFFICIALS MUST FIGURE OUT where to direct revenues. The plan is to share money with every city, and hold community conversations on how to spend it. “One of the things we’ve heard at multiple public forums is the voice of everyone has to be heard,” said Miguel Figueroa, CEO of the county government. “Our communication with the state, cities, local stakeholders, has been that we are open to listen, and understand their wishes.”

Community outreach is devilishly complex in a region with a large non-English-speaking population that’s wary of outsiders. Getting Spanish-language materials and transcripts to people has been a challenge. So has something as simple as finding a place to talk. “We’re out trying to borrow spaces, we have to bring in speakers and mics and tables and chairs,” Luis Olmedo said. “There are no suitable spaces to convene the community.”

Some key community members have found it rewarding. CTR is working with a local tribe, the Torres Martinez, on a proposal to cover portions of the playa with gravel pulled from tribal quarries, and use it as a footing for solar panels. The partnership was sparked through a community meeting. “We found their mission is parallel to the tribe’s,” said Thomas Tortez Jr., Tribal Council chairman of the Torres Martinez.

But others who work directly with community members, while optimistic about the opportunity of the Lithium Valley, are concerned about a lack of awareness. “When talking to new folks, the first thought is: What is that, where is it, what does it look like,” said Mariela Loera. “How is it going to affect my public health? How will it impact how my community looks, is it industrial? And how it will impact the Salton Sea?”

Olmedo’s CCV visited Hell’s Kitchen recently. But he distilled to me the community’s natural skepticism. “We’ve been trained to wait with the hope and promise of jobs. Do you want jobs or environmental protection? Taxes or health care protections? We’re always being asked to give up something.”

Kelley bristled a bit at these points. “We get challenged for not being historically transparent or inclusive or open. And I think those challenges may have been justified in years past but they are not today,” he said. “Today we’re being so inclusive. I’ve been going to the town of Niland every month except for COVID for the last ten years.”

The way a couple of community advocates put it to me is that there’s a difference between community engagement and community information. “It’s great to bring in community members, but if we’re going to bring them to the table, they need to know that they can change outcomes,” said Frank Ruiz.

Community outreach on the lithium projects is devilishly complex in a region with a large non-English-speaking population that’s wary of outsiders.

One attempt to assemble stakeholders has been the Lithium Valley Commission, a state-sponsored blue-ribbon panel run through the California Energy Commission. The LVC held more than 20 public meetings over two years, and its draft report was just issued in late September. But I talked to four members of that commission—Kelley (the vice chair), Colwell, Olmedo, and Ruiz. None of them had participated in writing or even seen the report before it was released to the public. Colwell said he was submitting comments in response; when I talked to Ruiz, he said he hadn’t read the whole thing yet.

The LVC draft report acknowledges long-standing community skepticism and the need to head off any new harms. It contains 44 recommendations, which fall into a handful of buckets. They include market opportunities like state research and development funding and tax inducements; environmental standards and required mitigation measures; a mandate to the Imperial Irrigation District, the local water authority, to identify water sources for anticipated projects; workforce and infrastructure development, including transmission upgrades so Imperial County benefits from geothermal power; and, at the top of the list, funding to “continue tribal and community coordination, education and engagement activities.” The final version must be delivered by December 1.

Olmedo, the LVC’s designated representative for disadvantaged communities, was reluctant to accept the invitation to serve. He didn’t want it to be seen as a way to project community support without substance. When he did join, he found it hard to truly represent the Valley. “How does a community know what they want when they’ve never had it?” he told me.

But despite his reservations, despite the weight of history and the legacy of exploitation, Olmedo’s concluding message to me was rather stirring, almost like an impromptu stump speech. “We can show the rest of the world what clean extraction looks like. That needs to be our legacy of our generation right now … We need to be a generation like Kennedy was, the vision of MLK and the civil rights leaders, of Cesar Chavez. We need to bring it all together. This is our moment. If we blow it, we don’t get another chance.”

ONCE UPON A TIME, Bombay Beach was a magnet for holiday recreation. Now it looks like what might happen if a comet wiped out all life on Earth. The low-slung buildings, littered with graffiti, appeared on the verge of collapse. People do live here, in barely upright trailers and fabricated homes. A county sheriff was trolling around, scoping out potential trouble. But practically everyone I saw was headed toward a road that curved up onto the Salton Sea’s shore.

Getting past the berm, you see why Bombay Beach has today become a postapocalyptic art colony. Sculptures appeared everywhere, drenched thick with irony: an empty phone booth with the receiver swinging lightly, a rusted-out mailbox, a doorframe detached from its home, two water skis stuck in the sand, a metal sculpture with cut-out lettering that casts a shadow on the ground reading: “The Only Other Thing is Nothing.”

This lakeside sculpture garden presents one way to think about the Salton Sea and the surrounding area. The decrepitude is intentional, the desolation part of the ambience. There’s a clear message received: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Perhaps unintentionally, the last installation I see on the beach offers a signal of the region’s possible future. It was a wooden replica of a Tesla charging station, complete with a “high voltage” warning and a corrugated tin roof meant to stand in for a solar panel. It was probably the artist’s idea of a joke. But in the earnest belief of elected officials and corporate executives and community advocates, it can be real: clean car engines built with clean metals, a green economic explosion, and the natural healing of a burning planet.

As much as Bombay Beach’s counterculture thumbs its nose at these grand visions, it also shows how Imperial County has survived the scars and the storms and the dust. The artists use every piece of the landscape, every found object, every resource, transforming driftwood and trash into beauty and life. No future for the Salton Sea and the people who live here is preordained. But the building blocks are all here, just waiting to be put to work.

Photos by David Dayen