WAMU - As demand for electric vehicles heats up, there’s concern about a shortage of the key minerals needed to make them. The Biden administration has called for boosting domestic production of such minerals, including lithium for the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles. And that has many hoping for big business in a desolate spot of California’s Imperial Valley.
“They’re pumping the groundwater out, and that causes problems with the groundwater table. It’s displaced farmers and llama herders in those countries,” says Michael McKibben, associate professor of geology at the University of California, Riverside.
Lithium is in such high demand globally that it’s now being called “white gold,” says MihriOzkan, an expert on lithium batteries also at UC Riverside. She says this demand is driven mostly by electric vehicles.