
The major car companies have ambitious plans for fleets of electric vehicles. Those cars and trucks run on lithium batteries.
The U.S. has massive quantities of lithium but has been slow to invest in the mining and extraction of the metal. That’s about to change. Lithium operations powered by clean energy are being developed in a long neglected, impoverished part of California by the Salton Sea, not far from the Mexican border. The region is being called Lithium Valley and just like the 1849 Gold Rush, companies are racing to strike it rich.