I'm curious if anyone knows what happened to Rio Tinto's lithium extraction project from their Boron, CA mines [1]. They finished a demonstration years ago that extracted lithium from the brine waste from borax mining but I haven't heard anything about it since.<p>Even if they couldn't make it economically feasible I figured they'd at least use the same technology/setup for Salton Sea lithium mining.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.riotinto.com/news/releases/2021/Rio-Tinto-achieves-battery-grade-lithium-production-at-Boron-plant" rel="nofollow">https://www.riotinto.com/news/releases/2021/Rio-Tinto-achiev...</a>
There's an older geothermal power plant at the Salton Sea where the scale that gets deposited in the pipes is a kind of high grade silver ore, including native silver metal. It's not economically exploitable, but it does provide a model for the formation of actual silver ore bodies.
Marketplace's "How We Survive" did an episode on the Salton Sea.<p><a href="https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/gnarly-brine/" rel="nofollow">https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/gnarly-brin...</a><p>The whole podcast is excellent.
I remember watching a documentary on the Salton Sea and it interviewed some residents who were holding out that eventually there was gonna be a turn around and kept buying real estate in the hope of that. I wonder how they're fairing now with this latest development<p>Doc in question: Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TjGAWxL23c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TjGAWxL23c</a>
I mean let’s not pretend that Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t own interests in 10 of the 11 lithium projects at this location.<p>This is a very big money project and it was <i>always</i> going to happen. They kept pretending like there was some debate but it seems mostly just optics management than any reality.