I’ve been spending too much time doomscrolling about the Iran War, and I’ve found myself thinking a lot about energy. I saw a tweet that said something like “We could have got the Green New Deal the easy way under Biden, but now we’re going to get it the hard way under Trump [because of the oil price shocks from the Iran war]”.

Even if you set aside the most recent events (and any political opinions), energy has been a hot topic for the past year or so, and I think we’re still probably in the very early innings there.

Some stats for you (this is all US based):

Taken together, we’re in a situation where the grid hasn’t needed to handle increasing demand for several decades and even then construction wasn’t happening quickly enough to maintain it, AND now power consumption is expected to increase dramatically.

Nice.

In the context of all this, companies like Controlled Thermal Resources are super interesting.

I have all my main social media apps (Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc) blocked on my phone, so whenever I’m in between sets at the gym I’m scrolling LinkedIn, which was how I first came across Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) earlier this month when they announced their SPAC.

CTR is an energy and critical minerals company developing an integrated geothermal power and lithium extraction project at the Salton Sea in Southern California. For the uninitiated, geothermal energy works by drilling down to an underground reservoir (usually several thousand feet deep) that has been superheated by magma, and then pumping it up so that the steam from the water can be used to spin a turbine and generate electricity.

CTR is fascinating because they also use that superheated water in its own way. The water (called brine) is full of dissolved lithium and other valuable minerals, so instead of just generating power and pumping the water back down, they run it through a filtration step that pulls the lithium out first. It's kind of a loop - the Earth heats the brine, the heat is used to make electricity and the brine carries lithium that can be extracted, and then when that's done the spent brine goes back underground to be heated up by the Earth again.

This hybrid approach allows CTR to attack two crucial problems at once - generating reliable power for a grid that desperately needs it, and producing lithium domestically as onshoring battery production becomes increasingly important.

They’re able to do this because The Salton Sea sits on one of the hottest geothermal fields in the US, right on top of the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. The brine underground is around 300°C and has unusually high concentrations of dissolved lithium, and there are already 11 geothermal plants operating in the area, so the basic infrastructure for pumping and handling this stuff has existed for 40 years.

By contrast, most of the world’s lithium comes from processes that are either slow or destructive. About a quarter of the world’s lithium comes from Chile, where it is processed by pumping brine into massive open-air evaporation ponds and then leaving it there for 12-18 months as the water evaporates and the lithium is left behind. Australia produces 47% of the world’s lithium, and they do it by blasting rock out of open-pit mines and cooking it at over 1000 celsius with sulfuric acid. Both of these approaches recover maybe half of the lithium in the brine; CTR is able to recover 95-97% and extract it in hours.

The project isn't without challenges. Direct lithium extraction at this scale has never been doing commercially in the US before, and The Salton Sea brine is notoriously corrosive. As the rine cools and loses pressure as it comes up to the surface, dissolved minerals start precipitating out and forming deposits inside pipes and equipment. This clogs up the pipes in the system and the deposits can eat through equipment and materials in the facility.

CTR has spent over $60 million on R&D to figure out how to handle these issues since its founding in 2014 by Rod Colwell. After a decade in intensive research mode, they broke ground on the first phase of their facility (called Hell’s Kitchen) in January 2025, with GM and Stellantis signed on as lithium offtake partners. They're targeting geothermal power production in 2026 and lithium output by early 2027, and recently announced a $4.7 billion SPAC deal to go public and unlock further funding for construction.

While they're not the only ones attempting this model (Vulcan Energy is building a similar integrated project in Germany's Upper Rhine Valley, and two other companies at the Salton Sea are working on lithium extraction from existing geothermal plants), CTR is the furthest along in building a purpose-designed integrated facility from scratch in the US. Their full buildout plan is ambitious: up to 650 MW of baseload power and 100,000 metric tons of lithium per year, plus a separate behind-the-meter power business selling geothermal electricity directly to data centers.

It feels pretty obvious to me that we’re going to need some massive energy infrastructure project if we’re going to be able to properly Reindustrialize America, so CTR is going to be an interesting one to follow over the next year or two. Energy is also a universe in and of itself, so there’s a ton more to explore here.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week for issue #2 (I have no idea what its going to be about yet).