Categories: Energy Stocks
Topics: Lithium Stocks

These Three Empty Parking Lots Will Make Investors Millions

I just flew 2000 miles (and drove another 1200) to look at three empty parking lots.

If this sounds like a monumental waste of time, I assure you, it was some of the most important research I’ve done this year. 

Times are moving fast — so fast, in fact, that what today are a few open acres surrounded by chain-link fences can be millionaire-making worksites by 2025. 

Parking Lot #1 — Casa Grande, Arizona

The first thing you notice when you drive up is the massive hole in the ground that’s a half mile across and plunges into the windy depths below. But the hole is not why I’m here. Instead, I’m interested in the unassuming pile of rock next to it. From the parking lot, it doesn’t look like much. Just another man-made slope in a mining site. But as I explored in detail, I discovered that this “pile” is actually a 233-million-pound mountain that’s over a hundred feet high and stretches across several square miles. This pile was built in the 70s, and at the time was considered nothing but waste rock. The miners knew that this rock contained a significant amount of copper, but because the quality of the rock was so low, they considered it impossible to recover. 

Times have changed. So quickly, in fact, that this “waste rock” copper is now considered the “Holy Grail” of a new kind of mining industry. Instead of sending the rock off to be crushed or refined in the smelter (which continue to be impossible recovery methods for this type of rock), it’s now possible to use an advanced leaching solution that can pierce the chalky, crumbly rock and pull out the valuable copper.

This first parking lot is the future site of what’s known as a leach pad, a place where rock can be dumped, sprayed with a leaching solution that can pull out up to 72% of the copper stuck inside. It’s a complete gamechanger for the copper industry, which is currently seeing record-breaking highs thanks to its essential place in electronics, the rapidly growing EV industry, and the rebuilding of the US power grid. In 10,000 years, copper has never been more needed than right now.

This first parking lot is the test site for commercial-grade leaching technologies, and from its discoveries will flow a new generation of American copper. (You can read my free report here about the future of copper leaching.)

Parking Lot #2 — Salton Sea, California

I was prepared for the Salton Sea to be hell on earth. Everything I’d read was grim: an evaporating body of water, poisoned by pesticides and man-made chemicals. And then on the south shore it gets even worse, mother nature bubbles angrily two miles below the ground, shooting up spurts of scalding volcanic brine to the ground’s surface every time she’s in a bad mood... which is every single day. The brine literally bubbles out of the ground in steaming cones called “mud pots.” Cloaked in the stink of sulfur from the netherworld, you’d think that this is a place devoid of habitability, much less fortune-building opportunities. But the opposite is true. Most of the Salton Sea’s horrors are masked by irrigated farming, which carries a hard-luck charm, and that acrid, sulfuric brine holds two things that America desperately needs: energy and lithium. The first is the reason that made this trip possible — for 42 years, the heat of the brine has been turned into energy by California’s oldest and largest geothermal plant, which generates 55 megawatts and was the blueprint for more than a dozen other plants in the area. The second is the unlocking of the volcanic brine’s true potential. While extremely poisonous and pushing 600 degrees at this site (one of the hottest in the Salton Sea), it also contains almost every single element on the periodic table. But of greatest importance to my visit: lithium, which is the most abundant and most recoverable.

Parking lot #2, which covers a full 40 acres, is the future site of a lithium recovery facility that will pull off the brine as a byproduct of the geothermal plant. It represents the largest advance in lithium production the world has ever seen and holds the possibility of turning the Salton Sea into America’s #1 lithium site. I won’t blame you for thinking this a speculative reach into fantasy. But I assure you, it’s very real. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom visited this and other plants just weeks ago. And Ford just secured a deal with this company for its lithium — even though, as I said, it remains just a parking lot. 

They hope to be providing Ford with lithium by the end of 2025. Aggressive, bold, but given this company’s track record for expertise, they’ll likely be the leader of an entirely new method of capturing lithium. 

(While this is a fast-moving private firm that’s not available to investors, lithium’s potential is so enormous that it’s got a lot to offer to everyone. Our resource expert Nick Hodge has a lithium package that benefits from this same spike in demand — and you don’t need to wait until 2025 to see it deliver. The first-mover advantage is happening now, and Nick is showing the way to investors who are ready to see gains.)

Parking Lot #3 — Phoenix, Arizona

There was a time when nobody thought that Elon Musk would be able to produce one electric car, much less the millions he’s making now. And while his mercurial personality has continued to frustrate predictable outcomes, this point remains constant: Elon’s focus on electric-based energy. He has cars, heat pumps, and most recently... grid-scale batteries. They’ve been used in the aftermath of the Puerto Rico hurricane, in blackouts, and in rigid testing. But one of the most significant uses of Elon’s grid-scale batteries has yet to be built.

I visited parking lot #3, in the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert, Arizona, where the partnership with a company called Plus Power will lead to a full-scale backup to one of Phoenix’s most vulnerable substations. This small plot will soon be full of batteries that can supply the missing megawatts that bedevil today’s overstressed power grids.

They’re also proving useful as the “missing link” between new renewable energy technologies and the existing power grid, solving the problem of the multi-year permit backlog for a grid connection. In short, grid-scale batteries are going to play an increasingly important role in the future of the power grid. (And they’re also one more reason why lithium demand is up so high.)

Today’s empty parking lots will soon hold tomorrow’s energy technologies — as investors, this is the time to make our move.

John Carl
Editor, Daily Profit Cycle