The need to stop burning fossil fuels has us pointed toward a much more electrically-powered world.
Witness the commitment of the big automakers to going all-electric by the middle of next decade. That means we're going to need a lot of batteries, and at the moment, more batteries means more lithium. Which--like fossil fuels--is a finite supply on the planet.
Several different players, including the federal Department of Energy, are coming together to map out a lithium field near the Salton Sea in Southern California. The University of California-Riverside is one of the entities, and Michael McKibben is the former chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
He visits with details of the project.