In the mountains of northern Nevada, the fuel of the future lies in the shadow of the past. Sixteen million years ago, the area now called Thacker Pass was the site of a giant volcanic eruption … and volcanologist Tom Benson has been searching the world for places just like it.
He says an eruption here millions of years ago left behind the key to unlock the electric vehicle revolution.
It's called lithium, the lightest solid element on that chart most of us only periodically remember from high school chemistry. Rechargeable lithium ion batteries are what power our cell phones, computers, even toothbrushes, and are now the fuel for all those electric vehicles starting to roll off the assembly line.
Correspondent Ben Tracy asked, "What's the connection between volcanoes and lithium?"
"Pretty much all lithium comes from volcanoes," Benson said.
"In the coming years, when people are driving their electric cars down the road, there's a good chance the lithium in that battery will come from here?"
"Yes, that's the hope."
Benson works for Lithium Americas, a mining company that owns the rights to Thacker Pass, the largest known lithium deposit in the United States. The company expects to potentially extract 80,000 tons of lithium a year. That's enough to power about a million vehicles.
"It's really the blood in a battery," said Jonathan Evans, president of the company. "Without it the batteries won't work."
With automakers pledging to soon make most of their vehicles electric, lithium demand is expected to increase as much as tenfold in the next decade. Right now most of it is mined in Chile and Australia, and almost all of it is processed in China.
The United States has just one lithium producing mine, in southern Nevada, providing less than 2% of the world's supply.The Department of Energy has released a national blueprint for lithium batteries. It says relying on other countries creates a "strategic vulnerability" for the U.S. economy.
Allan Swan, the president of Panasonic Energy of North America, said, "We are right at the beginning of this journey, and therefore what's ahead of us is so huge."
Swan runs the largest lithium ion battery factory in the world, just outside Reno, Nevada. It produces two billion batteries each year. All of them are for just one electric car maker: Tesla.
The batteries are made on the Panasonic side of a massive facility known as the Tesla Gigafactory, and then robots, humming along to the theme from the "Super Mario Brothers" video game, drive them to the Tesla side, where they are put inside the cars.
"What do we as a country need to do, or what do companies need to do, to meet this new demand?" asked Tracy.
"We don't have a supply chain here in the U.S.," said Swan. "We have to work hard at that. If we get that right, we're going to rock in America, which will be really powerful."
"Are we going to see more battery factories like this all over the country?"
"Yeah, fundamentally yes. I mean, it's not even touching the bottom of the barrel at this point. So, it's a long way to go."
Those factories will need a lot of lithium, which is why J.B. Straubel, the CEO of Redwood Materials, and a former Tesla executive, said all those lithium batteries need to be recycled.
"The sheer number of batteries and the sheer number of vehicles, is massive," he said. "If there is no scaling ahead of time and no solution ready, it could become a big challenge."
Trucks arrive at his Carson City warehouse every day, loaded with boxes of old batteries, from electric cars to power tools. His company is partnering with Ford to help turn old batteries into new ones. Ford just announced plans to build two massive battery manufacturing plants in the U.S.