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Through my work, I think we can make these decision-making processes more equitable by making as much information as possible available from the start instead of going back to study impacts after something like a mineral extraction event has already happened.

– Meg Slattery, Berkeley Lab LIRRIC graduate student intern

The idea, says Michael Whittaker, a research scientist with the Lithium Resource Research and Innovation Center at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is to power the entire lithium extraction process using carbon-free geothermal energy. Removing lithium from geothermal brines also has the potential to use far less water than the enormous, open-air evaporation ponds used to concentrate lithium from the shallower mineral-rich waters lurking beneath salt flats in Argentina and Chile.