Your Future EV Battery Could Come From The Salton Sea, But At What Cost?

The glory days of the Salton Sea glistening with beachgoers, celebrities and schools of Corvina fish are long gone.

But a new lithium dream has arrived at the dead sea that sometimes reeks like boiled eggs.

The new lithium dream

The Department of Energy says there's enough lithium to power an estimated 375 million batteries for electric vehicles. Conservation Director at the Wildlands Conservancy and Professor Emeritus at the University of Redlands, Tim Krantz, estimates around 60 million metric tons of lithium underneath the Salton Sea — about a third of the world's supply.

"We're looking at just a year or two out before we're in the first pilot scale lithium extraction processes," Krantz said.

The Department of Energy says lithium is vital to fulfilling President Joe Biden's goal of having 50 percent of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030.

The Salton Sea when there was water

The Salton Sea used to be filled with runoff from the Colorado River. The water flow was continuous from 1905 to 1907, bringing in sediment from the Grand Canyon.

By 1950, celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were beachgoers. It was famous for waterskiing and world-class fishing.

"You could just throw your line out there and pull in a 30-pound orange mouth Corvina," Krantz said.

Along with the fish, more than 400 migratory birds made a stop at the Salton Sea.

What happened to the sea?

By the 70s through the 1990s, the fish began dying off because of the water's high salinity caused by agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley.

“In the late 90s, there were days where I think reports of up to 7 million fish died in a day,” UC Riverside Professor of Biogeochemistry Tim Lyons said. “Because those sulfuric oxygen-lean waters came to the surface.”

Without fish to feed on, the birds also began to disappear.

The stench and dust

Lyons said the Salton Sea has become a major dust producer and will continue to produce more as lake levels drop.

"The nature of that dust will change because the sediments in the center are more rich in metals and likely more rich in pesticides," he said.

And along with that dust comes algal blooms produced by the agricultural runoff, controlling oxygen in the water and affecting the ecology.

"The other thing that really happens with these harmful algal blooms and bacterial blooms is that they produce pathogens," Lyons said. It's just like a perfect storm of things coming together with the harmful algal blooms, metals and pesticides that might become dust and be harmful when people inhale it."

A challenging future

The lithium boom could bring thousands of people to the region, and along with that billions of dollars that could support restoration projects, according to Krantz.

Meanwhile, Lyons said he is already concerned about the people living near the Salton Sea and the potential impacts they face from pathogens from the bloom and the dust from the lake bed.

“It seems folly to us in many regards to be moving thousands of people there to develop this white gold, but what they neglected to tell people is that you may be moving yourself and your family into harm's way.”

Lyons said one of his goals is bringing stakeholders together — conservationists, the energy industry and geochemists to find a solution.

“All of us really should be working together towards a common solution that minimizes the risks to all the different stakeholder concerns,” he said. “I don't really feel like that's happening to the degree that it should.”