3 ms·

I know nothing about what it'd take to extract elements from seawater, but I've heard people say similar things about gold and uranium. I wonder if the economi

I know nothing about what it'd take to extract elements from seawater, but I've heard people say similar things about gold and uranium. I wonder if the economics for "mining" seawater become more favorable if you try to extract multiple types at once, maybe in a pipeline. Extract the uranium, then the gold, then the lithium, etc.

newsclues 6y ago
Perhaps with desalination can produce other materials besides drinking water?
- yardie 6y ago
  Desalination is extremely energy intensive to get potable water. If you're using RO extraction it's 10:1. 90-95% of water is returned back to the sea. That little bit of potable water is just the bonus of compressing saltwater into saltwater.
  - newsclues 6y ago
    Yes, but there are desalination plants being constructed at great cost to provide drinking water, so why not get the available minerals etc at the same time...
Robotbeat 6y ago
Lithium and uranium are basically the only two things that could be worth extracting from ocean water besides salt itself. It’s not crazy expensive to do it. And you save a bunch of money by using the brine left over from desalination. But you can find naturally occurring brines with higher lithium concentration, so why bother with ocean water? ...in other words, lithium is plentiful, and the cheapest is from places like South America where it is extracted from brines similar to how sea salt is extracted, so the process is cheap, too (which is why we don’t really do hard rock mining of lithium any more... sea salt like evaporation ponds are just much cheaper). (Another interesting source is the brines from geothermal power stations... there are some at power stations I California that are rich in lithium and there are efforts to extract it... two birds and one stone. Example: https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1066 https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1066 )

newsclues 6y ago

Perhaps with desalination can produce other materials besides drinking water?

yardie 6y ago
Desalination is extremely energy intensive to get potable water. If you're using RO extraction it's 10:1. 90-95% of water is returned back to the sea. That little bit of potable water is just the bonus of compressing saltwater into saltwater.
- newsclues 6y ago
  Yes, but there are desalination plants being constructed at great cost to provide drinking water, so why not get the available minerals etc at the same time...

Robotbeat 6y ago

Lithium and uranium are basically the only two things that could be worth extracting from ocean water besides salt itself. It’s not crazy expensive to do it. And you save a bunch of money by using the brine left over from desalination. But you can find naturally occurring brines with higher lithium concentration, so why bother with ocean water? ...in other words, lithium is plentiful, and the cheapest is from places like South America where it is extracted from brines similar to how sea salt is extracted, so the process is cheap, too (which is why we don’t really do hard rock mining of lithium any more... sea salt like evaporation ponds are just much cheaper). (Another interesting source is the brines from geothermal power stations... there are some at power stations I California that are rich in lithium and there are efforts to extract it... two birds and one stone. Example: https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1066 https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1066 )