CTR achieves efficient lithium extraction from Salton Sea geothermal brine

Controlled Thermal Resources CEO Rod Colwell (source: CTR)

Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) has reported that they have achieved the highly efficient and real-time recovery of lithium from the company’s Salton Sea geothermal brine resource in Imperial County, California.

With this development, the construction of Hell’s Kitchen Stage 1 is expected to commence this year. This facility will deliver 49.9 MWe of geothermal power and 25,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide by 2024. CTR had previously selected Hargrove Engineers & Constructors as the engineering contractor for this project.

This achievement comes after several months of optimizing engineering and process parameters at the Hell’s Kitchen plant. Through this process, the engineering team was able to improve several process stages including the optimization of the brine preparation stage.

“CTR took an integrated design approach to optimize the recovery of lithium, and I’m pleased to report our team has delivered impressive results ahead of schedule,” said CTR CEO Rod Colwell. “The plant will continue to run for a few more months. We intend to repurpose the facility to optimize recovery of other critical minerals, including manganese, in parallel with our Stage 1 construction program.”

“Our motto is to measure twice, cut once, and in most cases, we are measuring three times,” Rod added. “Designing an efficient, modular engineering framework means we can replicate these modular facilities at each project stage to scale up faster and more cost-effectively.”

The Hell’s Kitchen project has a projected resource capacity to produce 1,100MW of baseload renewable power and ~300,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) products per year.

Source: Controlled Thermal Resources