8 ms·

To extract 1 kg from 0.2 ppm seawater, you need to process 5e6 kg of water. $5 of electricity at $0.09/kWh is 200 MJ, which is enough to pump that much water 4

by tlb 5y ago

To extract 1 kg from 0.2 ppm seawater, you need to process 5e6 kg of water. $5 of electricity at $0.09/kWh is 200 MJ, which is enough to pump that much water 40 m high, or push it through a membrane with 4 bar pressure drop. So you can't do very much to seawater at that price point. Like many "scientists develop cheap ___" headlines, it may just cover part of the process and not the whole operation.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago
If you can piggyback on desalinization of water, some of this process becomes 'free'. I wonder if we are wasting valuable brine as part of our established desalinization processes?
- muyuu 5y ago
  whoa I was making the exact same point simultaneously in a sibling comment
- redsummer 5y ago
  Isn’t Lithium an anti-depressant? If it’s extracted from drinking water, won’t you end up with miserable people?
  - beowulfey 5y ago
    OP you replied to was saying the remnant waste brine from desalination may contain valuable lithium.
  - swader999 5y ago
    Just pirates and fisherman would be affected but they are salty to begin with.
    - failwhaleshark 5y ago
      No we're not, you bloody idiot! Returns to mending nets and counting seagulls.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    No, lithium is a mood stabilizer. It is mainly used to treat manic episodes in bipolar disorders and is not a particularly effective treatment for major depression. I doubt drinking water contains anything close to therapeutic doses of lithium.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  They include selling the H and Cl gases also produced to bring the net cost down to $5.
  - devoutsalsa 5y ago
    It’d be cool if they could combine this with extraction of Uranium 235 for a more sustainable source of nuclear fuel. EDIT: For more context, nuclear power could be a great tool in reducing carbon emissions. I read somewhere that mining Uranium 235 from seawater at scale would cost roughy 2x to 3x what it costs to get the fuel from the ground at today's prices. I was trying to say that if we're going through all of the trouble to extract Lithium from seawater, it'd be cool if extracting Uranium at the same time made both processes more economical.
    - failwhaleshark 5y ago
      ?
      - _Microft 5y ago
        Seawater contains uranium among other things: "Seawater contains about 3.3 parts per billion of uranium by weight, approximately (3.3 µg/kg) or, 3.3 micrograms per liter of seawater.[6] The extraction of uranium from seawater has been considered as a means of obtaining the element.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Natural_occurrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Nat... (Mining uranium is as environmentally unfriendly as other mining operations, just do a web search for "uranium mining".)
        gus_massa 5y ago
        The trick here is to use a ceramic filter that have holes that are so small that only Lithium can pass through. Actually the only "molecules" smaller than Lithium are Hydrogen and Helium. Helium is not a problem because it's too easy to pull apart and Hydrogen (H+ and H2) are not problem because H2 is another of the products. (Actually^2 H+ is not isolated, it's combined with water in H3O+, but I guess the holes need some room for the water around the Li+ ions. The technical details are probably more complicated, but "small holes only allow H, He and Li to pass" is a good approximation.) But Uranium atoms are huge. They are bigger than most atoms, and I'm not sure if the common form in seawater is a combination of Uranium and Oxygen. A hole that big will allow most mineral to pass, so you will just get brine. Using it in the other direction with holes just smaller than Uranium is also not very useful, because you will get Uranium mixed with a lot of crap, many of the contamination are not isolated atoms (that are mostly smaller) but molecules that combine a few atoms are are bigger.
- andi999 5y ago
  Interesting point. Lets do the numbers. Supposedly desalination is 86.55 million m3/day (https://iwa-network.org/desalination-past-present-future/ https://iwa-network.org/desalination-past-present-future/). 1m^3 is 10^3 kg. So 8610^9 kg desalinated water, I dont know the conversion rate, but lets say rougly 110^11kg water from sea pumped. Divided by 5e6 we have 2*10^4 kg/ day. 20 tons of lithum per day. Sounds a lot. That's roughly 8000 tons of lithium per year. Worldproduction is 80000 tons per year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-... So while not insignificant it doesnt seem a game-changer. (I might have miscalculated a factor of 10 somewhere, probably..)
muyuu 5y ago
that would be a non-issue in existing desalination plants sounds promising but papers tend to overpromise, so we'll see if it's viable - cheap and abundant lithium batteries would be a major breakthrough for renewables
- jokoon 5y ago
  It would be a breakthrough for vehicles, but not necessarily for the electrical network. Batteries still have a lifespan, their manufacture emits CO2, and they need to be disposable or to be recycled. Nuclear is still the best energy in terms of carbon.
  - Retric 5y ago
    The manufacturing process indirectly produces CO2 in the same way the staff driving to a nuclear power plant produces CO2. Aka it’s all indirect and could be replaced with EV and clean energy. Nuclear is a non starter from a cost perspective at this point. You get vastly more bang for the buck subsidizing battery backed up wind / solar which can actually load follow without becoming even more expensive.
    - jokoon 5y ago
      > indirectly produces CO2 in the same way the staff driving to a nuclear power plant The same way? Mining, processing, shipping, etc... There is a difference between "the same way" and an actual carbon accounting. Money doesn't matter, only carbon matters. Nuclear is a long term investment, it doesn't mean it's more expensive.
      - Retric 5y ago
        First, Nuclear is more than 10c/kWh unsubsidized at 90% capacity factor, which only gets worse as you try and scale up. France got into the 70% range and they had countries to export to. Nuclear is not even vaguely competitive even without energy storage involved. Just the fuel rod lifecycle alone costs almost as much per kWh as solar. 24/7/365 security is only the tip of the iceberg when you look into why Nuclear is so stupidly expensive. Maintenance for example takes up roughly 1 month per year of operation and you can’t send the guards home. Anyway, it’s the same in that their all indirectly producing CO2. In a full accounting all of those things that make nuclear expensive actually produce CO2 because construction equipment, mining to produce the parts to build a reactor, etc etc all produce CO2 in the current economy. In fact if you do the full breakdown for all activities related to Nuclear Reactor Construction, Operation, and Decommissioning their a very significant CO2 source in large part because all economic activity is and their really expensive. Regardless of how easy to draw arbitrary lines that ignore say CO2 emissions from workers daily commutes etc. The only way to move past that is to have serious energy storage that’s used for all equipment and thus very widespread adoption of cheap battery technology. At which point Nuclear costs become an even larger issue because cheap batteries tank the cost of battery backed up wind/solar. In the end far northern countries can make some use of Nuclear, but it’s a dead end technology without a significant role in actually solving climate change.
jokoon 5y ago
If you plug yourself to nearby nuclear plant, I guess it's possible to make electricity much cheaper, as long as you can plan your energy consumption.
- XorNot 5y ago
  There's no real need though with this: anything where the product is not on-demand electrical power can and should be able to be run off of intermittent solar or wind power. Amortized over a year, letting the plant shut down because it's cloudy a few days should be fine.
fridif 5y ago
The idea is that when the cheap lithium is no longer available, this becomes the only viable alternative. I remember in 2005 my earth science teacher told me "shale in north dakota will never be viable with all this saudi oil lying around"
_Microft 5y ago
They discuss this on pages 3 to 5 of the paper if you want to read up on this. Here is an excerpt: "Based on these data, we estimated the total electricity required to enrich 1 kg lithium from seawater to 9000 ppm in five stages to be 76.34 kWh. Simultaneously, 0.87 kg H_2 and 31.12 kg Cl_2 were collected from the cathode and the anode, respectively. Taking the US electricity price of US$ 0.065 per kWh into consideration, the total electricity cost for this process is approximately US$ 5.0. In addition, based on the 2020 prices of hydrogen and Cl_2 (i.e., US$ 2.5–8.0 per kg and US$ 0.15 per kg, respectively), the side-product value is approximately US$ 6.9–11.7, which can well compensate for the total energy cost. It should also be noted that the current Cl_2 utilisation capacity in the chlor-alkali industry is ~ 80 Mtons/year. Even in the case where all the world lithium capacity is produced from our extraction process, the amount of Cl_2 produced will be 3 Mtons, and so will have very little effect on the total market", from https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354b https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...
- LB232323 5y ago
  So it's both efficient and the electricity cost is covered by the profitablity of the side products. Pretty amazing innovation, certainly a more sustainable solution than overthrowing the Bolivian government and murdering Native protestors. To think that an entire mineral mining industry could be replaced by processing seawater is revolutionary.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Do you remember this guy, Kanzius, who showed that you can burn saltwater when pumping it with radio waves? Yet, the citation trail seems dead because scientists assumed that he was a crank claiming he got more power out than he put in. No, he just demonstrated a really neat approach to electrodeless hydrolysis. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:text=Kanzius'%20concept%20is%20simple%3A%20expose,for%20a%20cure%20for%20cancer https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:t....
    - qayxc 5y ago
nabla9 5y ago
In other words lithium from the seawater adds 0.5% into the battery price. (Assuming lithium battery cost is USD 100/kWh and 100 g of Lithium metal (not LCE) per kWh)
einpoklum 5y ago
IIAN, 5,000 tons of water is 5,000 cubic meters' worth, right? Wouldn't this process also quickly reduce the local concentration of Lithium in the water surrounding the processing station? Making sustained operations difficult?
- bigfudge 5y ago
  The sea is big, pipes can be long
- nkrisc 5y ago
  In 1891 Chicago built a water intake four miles offshore in Lake Michigan, with pipes under the lakebed. I bet we could do a lot better than that, over 100 years later. Likewise between the tide and currents you might have sufficient mixing if new seawater.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    If I'm in a bay, maybe not so much. Anyway, like you said - "maybe".
    - nkrisc 5y ago
      Yeah I’m sure every location is totally unique in terms of currents and such, and would have to be investigated individually at any proposed site.
- heartbreak 5y ago
  We could repurpose offshore oil rigs.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    It's still not clear that the mixing will be faster than the flow through the Lithium extractor, if that extractor needs 5000 m^3 / Kg of output, and wants to get to, oh, 1000 Kg / day.

by tlb 5y ago

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

If you can piggyback on desalinization of water, some of this process becomes 'free'. I wonder if we are wasting valuable brine as part of our established desalinization processes?

muyuu 5y ago
whoa I was making the exact same point simultaneously in a sibling comment
redsummer 5y ago
Isn’t Lithium an anti-depressant? If it’s extracted from drinking water, won’t you end up with miserable people?
- beowulfey 5y ago
  OP you replied to was saying the remnant waste brine from desalination may contain valuable lithium.
- swader999 5y ago
  Just pirates and fisherman would be affected but they are salty to begin with.
  - failwhaleshark 5y ago
    No we're not, you bloody idiot! Returns to mending nets and counting seagulls.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  No, lithium is a mood stabilizer. It is mainly used to treat manic episodes in bipolar disorders and is not a particularly effective treatment for major depression. I doubt drinking water contains anything close to therapeutic doses of lithium.
ncmncm 5y ago
They include selling the H and Cl gases also produced to bring the net cost down to $5.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  It’d be cool if they could combine this with extraction of Uranium 235 for a more sustainable source of nuclear fuel. EDIT: For more context, nuclear power could be a great tool in reducing carbon emissions. I read somewhere that mining Uranium 235 from seawater at scale would cost roughy 2x to 3x what it costs to get the fuel from the ground at today's prices. I was trying to say that if we're going through all of the trouble to extract Lithium from seawater, it'd be cool if extracting Uranium at the same time made both processes more economical.
  - failwhaleshark 5y ago
    ?
    - _Microft 5y ago
      Seawater contains uranium among other things: "Seawater contains about 3.3 parts per billion of uranium by weight, approximately (3.3 µg/kg) or, 3.3 micrograms per liter of seawater.[6] The extraction of uranium from seawater has been considered as a means of obtaining the element.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Natural_occurrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Nat... (Mining uranium is as environmentally unfriendly as other mining operations, just do a web search for "uranium mining".)
      - gus_massa 5y ago
        The trick here is to use a ceramic filter that have holes that are so small that only Lithium can pass through. Actually the only "molecules" smaller than Lithium are Hydrogen and Helium. Helium is not a problem because it's too easy to pull apart and Hydrogen (H+ and H2) are not problem because H2 is another of the products. (Actually^2 H+ is not isolated, it's combined with water in H3O+, but I guess the holes need some room for the water around the Li+ ions. The technical details are probably more complicated, but "small holes only allow H, He and Li to pass" is a good approximation.) But Uranium atoms are huge. They are bigger than most atoms, and I'm not sure if the common form in seawater is a combination of Uranium and Oxygen. A hole that big will allow most mineral to pass, so you will just get brine. Using it in the other direction with holes just smaller than Uranium is also not very useful, because you will get Uranium mixed with a lot of crap, many of the contamination are not isolated atoms (that are mostly smaller) but molecules that combine a few atoms are are bigger.
andi999 5y ago
Interesting point. Lets do the numbers. Supposedly desalination is 86.55 million m3/day (https://iwa-network.org/desalination-past-present-future/ https://iwa-network.org/desalination-past-present-future/). 1m^3 is 10^3 kg. So 8610^9 kg desalinated water, I dont know the conversion rate, but lets say rougly 110^11kg water from sea pumped. Divided by 5e6 we have 2*10^4 kg/ day. 20 tons of lithum per day. Sounds a lot. That's roughly 8000 tons of lithium per year. Worldproduction is 80000 tons per year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-... So while not insignificant it doesnt seem a game-changer. (I might have miscalculated a factor of 10 somewhere, probably..)

muyuu 5y ago

that would be a non-issue in existing desalination plants sounds promising but papers tend to overpromise, so we'll see if it's viable - cheap and abundant lithium batteries would be a major breakthrough for renewables

jokoon 5y ago
It would be a breakthrough for vehicles, but not necessarily for the electrical network. Batteries still have a lifespan, their manufacture emits CO2, and they need to be disposable or to be recycled. Nuclear is still the best energy in terms of carbon.
- Retric 5y ago
  The manufacturing process indirectly produces CO2 in the same way the staff driving to a nuclear power plant produces CO2. Aka it’s all indirect and could be replaced with EV and clean energy. Nuclear is a non starter from a cost perspective at this point. You get vastly more bang for the buck subsidizing battery backed up wind / solar which can actually load follow without becoming even more expensive.
  - jokoon 5y ago
    > indirectly produces CO2 in the same way the staff driving to a nuclear power plant The same way? Mining, processing, shipping, etc... There is a difference between "the same way" and an actual carbon accounting. Money doesn't matter, only carbon matters. Nuclear is a long term investment, it doesn't mean it's more expensive.
    - Retric 5y ago
      First, Nuclear is more than 10c/kWh unsubsidized at 90% capacity factor, which only gets worse as you try and scale up. France got into the 70% range and they had countries to export to. Nuclear is not even vaguely competitive even without energy storage involved. Just the fuel rod lifecycle alone costs almost as much per kWh as solar. 24/7/365 security is only the tip of the iceberg when you look into why Nuclear is so stupidly expensive. Maintenance for example takes up roughly 1 month per year of operation and you can’t send the guards home. Anyway, it’s the same in that their all indirectly producing CO2. In a full accounting all of those things that make nuclear expensive actually produce CO2 because construction equipment, mining to produce the parts to build a reactor, etc etc all produce CO2 in the current economy. In fact if you do the full breakdown for all activities related to Nuclear Reactor Construction, Operation, and Decommissioning their a very significant CO2 source in large part because all economic activity is and their really expensive. Regardless of how easy to draw arbitrary lines that ignore say CO2 emissions from workers daily commutes etc. The only way to move past that is to have serious energy storage that’s used for all equipment and thus very widespread adoption of cheap battery technology. At which point Nuclear costs become an even larger issue because cheap batteries tank the cost of battery backed up wind/solar. In the end far northern countries can make some use of Nuclear, but it’s a dead end technology without a significant role in actually solving climate change.

jokoon 5y ago

If you plug yourself to nearby nuclear plant, I guess it's possible to make electricity much cheaper, as long as you can plan your energy consumption.

XorNot 5y ago
There's no real need though with this: anything where the product is not on-demand electrical power can and should be able to be run off of intermittent solar or wind power. Amortized over a year, letting the plant shut down because it's cloudy a few days should be fine.

fridif 5y ago

The idea is that when the cheap lithium is no longer available, this becomes the only viable alternative. I remember in 2005 my earth science teacher told me "shale in north dakota will never be viable with all this saudi oil lying around"

_Microft 5y ago

They discuss this on pages 3 to 5 of the paper if you want to read up on this. Here is an excerpt: "Based on these data, we estimated the total electricity required to enrich 1 kg lithium from seawater to 9000 ppm in five stages to be 76.34 kWh. Simultaneously, 0.87 kg H_2 and 31.12 kg Cl_2 were collected from the cathode and the anode, respectively. Taking the US electricity price of US$ 0.065 per kWh into consideration, the total electricity cost for this process is approximately US$ 5.0. In addition, based on the 2020 prices of hydrogen and Cl_2 (i.e., US$ 2.5–8.0 per kg and US$ 0.15 per kg, respectively), the side-product value is approximately US$ 6.9–11.7, which can well compensate for the total energy cost. It should also be noted that the current Cl_2 utilisation capacity in the chlor-alkali industry is ~ 80 Mtons/year. Even in the case where all the world lithium capacity is produced from our extraction process, the amount of Cl_2 produced will be 3 Mtons, and so will have very little effect on the total market", from https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354b https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...

LB232323 5y ago
So it's both efficient and the electricity cost is covered by the profitablity of the side products. Pretty amazing innovation, certainly a more sustainable solution than overthrowing the Bolivian government and murdering Native protestors. To think that an entire mineral mining industry could be replaced by processing seawater is revolutionary.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Do you remember this guy, Kanzius, who showed that you can burn saltwater when pumping it with radio waves? Yet, the citation trail seems dead because scientists assumed that he was a crank claiming he got more power out than he put in. No, he just demonstrated a really neat approach to electrodeless hydrolysis. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:text=Kanzius'%20concept%20is%20simple%3A%20expose,for%20a%20cure%20for%20cancer https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:t....
  - qayxc 5y ago

nabla9 5y ago

In other words lithium from the seawater adds 0.5% into the battery price. (Assuming lithium battery cost is USD 100/kWh and 100 g of Lithium metal (not LCE) per kWh)

einpoklum 5y ago

IIAN, 5,000 tons of water is 5,000 cubic meters' worth, right? Wouldn't this process also quickly reduce the local concentration of Lithium in the water surrounding the processing station? Making sustained operations difficult?

bigfudge 5y ago
The sea is big, pipes can be long
nkrisc 5y ago
In 1891 Chicago built a water intake four miles offshore in Lake Michigan, with pipes under the lakebed. I bet we could do a lot better than that, over 100 years later. Likewise between the tide and currents you might have sufficient mixing if new seawater.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  If I'm in a bay, maybe not so much. Anyway, like you said - "maybe".
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    Yeah I’m sure every location is totally unique in terms of currents and such, and would have to be investigated individually at any proposed site.
heartbreak 5y ago
We could repurpose offshore oil rigs.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  It's still not clear that the mixing will be faster than the flow through the Lithium extractor, if that extractor needs 5000 m^3 / Kg of output, and wants to get to, oh, 1000 Kg / day.