In California, a little early stage company called Simbol Mining is borrowing technology from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to extract large amounts of lithium from geothermal wastewater off the Salton Sea on the San Andreas fault.

The technology, which pulls the lithium from silicates that would normally clog the machinery, is also partly driven by the heat from recycled wastewater- making the extraction process extremely energy and water efficient. That's a stark contrast to the traditional techniques- extracting the lithium from the soil or from large brine pools- which are more time consuming and water intensive.

Simbol is currently in the process of building a geothermal plant that's expected to produce about 1 ton of lithium per month. They're also not limiting their mineral production to lithium either, even expecting to find zinc and manganese as well (both are also used in manufacturing high-performance batteries for electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles).