California company set to become major lithium producer

New York Times : A start-up company in California, Simbol Materials , plans to extract lithium and other elements from brine released by a geothermal plant. The plant makes electricity by pumping hot water from deep underground and using its heat to make steam to drive a turbine. The remaining water, which gets reinjected into the ground, is a very strong brine composed of about 30% dissolved salts. Company officials say they have developed a filtering process to collect the brine’s lithium and other “energy critical” elements. Lithium is a crucial element in electric car batteries, for example. Currently the biggest lithium producers are Chile and Argentina, but the new technology, if scalable, has the potential to turn the US into a major exporter of it.