This California desert could hold the key to powering all of America's electric cars
I found this article to be very encouraging....
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/11/business/salton-sea-lithium-extraction/index.html
(CNN Business)The Salton Sea Basin feels almost alien. It lies where two enormous chunks of the Earth's crust, the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate, are very slowly pushing past one another creating an enormous low spot in the land. It's a big, flat gray desert ringed with high mountains that look pale in the distance. It's hot and, deep underground, it is literally boiling.
The Salton Sea, which lies roughly in the middle of the massive geologic low point, isn't really a sea, at all. The largest inland lake in California, it's 51 miles long from north to south and 17 miles wide, but gradually shrinking as less and less water flows into it. At one time, it was a thriving entertainment and recreation spot, business that has also largely dried up. It's left behind abandoned buildings and shallow, gray beaches. The highways that ring the lake are traversed now mostly by passing trucks.
A super-heated mineral stew
Over the past few years, companies have been coming here to extract a valuable metal, lithium, that the car industry needs as it shifts to making electric cars. Lithium is the lightest naturally occurring metal element on Earth, and, for that reason among others, it's important for electric car batteries, which must store a lot of electricity in a package that weighs as little as possible.
What's more, with the Salton Sea Basin's unique geography, engineers and technicians can get the lithium with minimal environmental destruction, according to companies that are working there. In other places, lithium is taken from the earth using hard rock mining that leaves huge, ugly scars in the land. Here, it exists naturally in a liquid form, so extraction doesn't require mining or blasting.
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(Cerium is named after Ceres, in analogy to the way Uranium was named after Uranus. (Neptunium and Plutonium were created/discovered much later.))
...and a host of other sugary breakfast treats.
