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Lithium recovery tech from sea using dialysis with a Li-ionic superconductor
- xoa 8y agoResearch like this seems interesting in light of the increasing prominence of lithium battery applications (such as the rapid payoff of Tesla's grid battery response system in Australia). For now lithium is so cheap merely from natural concentrations (particularly in the amounts needed for batteries vs other components) that it's not even worth recycling. Standard mining may be able to keep up with demand even as it dramatically scales. However, mines inherently present environmental and geopolitical issues as well. As one of the most common elements though hundreds of billions of tons of lithium exist in the oceans (of course at low concentrations outside of hydrothermal vents), so that would create effectively an ultimate ceiling on lithium pricing and geopolitical posturing: if it ever became more costly (or more of a threat) then oceanic extraction, any country in the world with coast (or allies with a coast) would be able to go that way. If a combined plant could pull out other dissolved ions as well and better amortize fixed costs that might also be a boost. Additionally if scalable extraction tech like this could be developed it'd work well on our current concentrated brine sources too, and while more expensive then natural evaporation it can work much, much faster. One of the pricing issues with lithium on the current market isn't due to "running out" but that the evaporation process takes 18-24 months and thus there is an inherent significant lag time in demand/supply responses. Depending on the cost, it might be worth it even for existing producers just to let them react more quickly to fluctuations without having to deal with bigger buffers.