10 ms·

Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine

89 points by prostoalex 5y ago

danans 5y ago
Relatedly: University of California: Can the Salton Sea geothermal field prevent the coming lithium shortage?. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-geothermal-field-prevent-coming-lithium-shortage https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-g...
- pfdietz 5y ago
  I'd worry just a bit about mining there, because the Salton Buttes volcanoes have an estimated 1 in 800 chance of a catastrophic eruption each year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ChT1B1J4ZI&list=PLAQJmRWs6m3urg6N4lfVjjS4ji2ROxtDK&index=11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ChT1B1J4ZI&list=PLAQJmRWs6m...
shiftpgdn 5y ago
I can’t read the article but Texas has tens of thousands of brine water wells that were created while looking for oil. An improvement in lithium extraction from brine could result in a significant economic benefit for Texas.
- _aavaa_ 5y ago
  In case you wanted to, use uBlock and disable all 3rd party scripts. The article will load. EDIT: https://archive.is/BjQGm https://archive.is/BjQGm
- enchiridion 5y ago
  Maybe that’s partially why Tesla moved?
  - runnerup 5y ago
    Definitely not. Tesla is not in the lithium extraction business and even if they were there's not much point to being right next door.
    - vardump 5y ago
      Did Tesla give up their lithium extraction plans? https://electrek.co/2021/07/09/tesla-patent-reveals-elon-musk-table-salt-lithium-extraction-process/ https://electrek.co/2021/07/09/tesla-patent-reveals-elon-mus...
margalabargala 5y ago
> The actual evaporating is done mainly by heat delivered as sunlight. But much of this is wasted. [...] it warms water below a pond’s surface—which, not being in contact with the air, is thus unavailable for evaporation Wouldn't warming subsurface water warm the pond as a whole, which would both warm the surface layers through convection, as well as make it easier for that subsurface water to evaporate when it does make its way to the surface? Since warmer water evaporates more easily in general, it's not clear to me why adding thermal energy to the body of water you want to evaporate is wasted.
- _aavaa_ 5y ago
  I think what they're talking about is the following. If they could focus all of the energy on a very thin layer at the water's surface then most of it would go into evaporating the water rather than be transferred into the bulk. Sure, heating the bulk makes it easier to evaporate, but it doesn't help as much as concentrating it all on the surface
  - margalabargala 5y ago
    This makes sense, thanks.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    Non-evaporating water will also radiate heat back out into the environment, meaning that less of the heat warming the bulk of the water goes into the actual evaporation process.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    I would think that at the point of precipitation, heating the lithium and not the water would be a relatively large loss of efficiency. Minerals and plumbing can be bad news. There are systems for efficiently extracting water from brine via evaporation, but that requires a dilute brine to keep from gumming up. I do wonder though if there’s a hybrid system here where you install solar panels next to the ponds, use the input pipes to cool the solar panels, and use the power for something like final processing or drying.
iostream24 5y ago
Seawater-> extract the lithium as a useful byproduct from desalination plants https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provide-nearly-unlimited-amounts-critical-battery-material https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provi... https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawater-give-us-lithium-to-meet-our-battery-needs/99/i36 https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawat... https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/699652 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/699652
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Most desalination plants only concentrate the ocean salts a little. The more you concentrate them, the more energy you need to put in to get any more water out. I think the only time this would make economic sense is if there are laws in place saying brine may not be returned to the ocean (for environmental reasons). In that case, it would make sense to concentrate it further with reverse osmosis, and then use multi-stage flash to further concentrate the brine. After a few more steps, you could probably sell most of the resulting salts.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    But if you’re already going to extract from seawater, you might as well take whatever head state you can get.
    - Consultant32452 5y ago
      What is the process by which drinking water is extracted from seawater, and does that give you any savings at all with regards to a goal of extracting minerals?
      - colechristensen 5y ago
        You either boil it or force it through a semi-permiable membrane. In both methods you get two products: one one side pure water, on the other water with a higher concentration of non-water things as waste, most often just dumped back into the ocean. That waste stream is just a bit closer to the end product than taking from the sea directly.
atlantas 5y ago
Let's say we decided to go all-in on transforming the US to 100% renewable. Solar, wind and enough batteries to ensure continued power for times lacking sun/wind. For all homes, businesses, industry, transportation. Do we have enough lithium and other materials for that? And what is the environmental/carbon cost of extracting and refining it? I assume it would be net positive, but I don't know for sure, nor to what degree.
- danans 5y ago
  > University of California: Can the Salton Sea geothermal field prevent the coming lithium shortage?. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-geothermal-field-prevent-coming-lithium-shortage https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-g... We don't need to store every last kWh of power generated. A significant portion can be absorbed at time of generation by dispatching it to smart loads. Lithium is also not the only storage technology we have. Pumped hydro, chemical storage, and heat storage.
  - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
    They are a little more theoretical at this point but there is also compressed air and mechanical (concrete blocks lifted by a crane) storage as well.
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      concrete blocks are a really stupid battery. It's just a worse version of pumped hydro.
      - cure 5y ago
        It also has some significant advantages over hydro: can be built anywhere, requires a small fraction of the space, doesn't destroy vast landscapes by putting them under water.
        5y ago
rank0 5y ago
Genuine question: Are EVs and battery powered tech actually sustainable? Lithium is a finite resource which needs to be extracted from the earth via mining (or maybe this new evaporation technique). Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery. It feels like swapping one unsustainable resource for another. We already are struggling to meet demand for EVs despite making up a small portion of the worlds vehicle production.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Compare it to the amount of mining that has been done to extract oil and gas and you’ll find it to be quite small.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- connicpu 5y ago
  It sounds like there's enough lithium in all identified lithium resources to produce the batteries for 10.6 billion[1] Nissan Leafs. Enough for every human to have 1 low range car if the population plateaus around there, but that would still require perfect recycling and would leave no lithium to put batteries in anything else. Unless we start mining lithium from asteroids or something. [1]: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    Notice that the same page says that the Earth's crust contains 20 parts per million of lithium. That's more abundant than tin or lead, to name two rarer elements that are currently mined in much larger quantities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... Here's the USGS lithium report from 2010 that this Stanford web page got lithium reserve and resource numbers from: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/lithium/mcs-2010-lithi.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium... Here's the corresponding USGS lithium report from this year: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pd... See the tables "World Mine Production and Reserves" in these reports and following paragraphs. From the 2010 report to the current report, world lithium resources went up from 25.5 million tons to 89 million tons even as extraction rates rose from 18,000 tons per year to 100,000 tons per year. That alone brings us up to 37 billion Nissan Leafs. How can resources go up even as we're using lithium faster? It's because reserves and resources are determined by a combination of economics and technology. The Earth's crust contains 20 ppm of lithium now and 12 years ago (or a million years ago, for that matter). The geology doesn't change but the effort put into identifying potential sources of lithium and means of extracting and purifying lithium does change. Geologically speaking, the Earth has a lot of lithium. For as long as the USGS has been keeping records -- only a few decades, admittedly -- world lithium reserves have been increasing faster than they have been depleted, because the industrial demand that causes reserve depletion also spurs additional research to identify potential lithium sources and extraction processes. This Economist article is about such new processes.
redwoolf 5y ago
Somewhat off-topic: Why can't lithium (or other elements) be synthesized in a lab for production use?
- washadjeffmad 5y ago
  We haven't really mastered fusion to the point that we can just glue atoms together, let alone in a simple, cost efficient way.
- grzm 5y ago
  Because they're elements. They require nuclear reactions to create them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element#Origin_of_the_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element#Origin_of_the...
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Chemical elements are defined by the composition of their atomic nuclei. Specifically, the number of protons in the nucleus. This isn't something that can be changed chemically, you need nuclear reactions (it's called transmutation). These would be extremely uneconomical for recreating natural natural lithium, and the yield would be tiny.
akeck 5y ago
I highly recommend Molly Wood's "How We Survive" from Marketplace. It covers a number of topics related to electrification, lithium extraction, and climate. https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/ https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/
elil17 5y ago
I saw a talk from a company called Precient Technologies which uses microbes to remediate heavy metal from ore extraction process wastewater (e.g. the microbes are genetically engineered to “eat” and concentrate a particular target metal). What they have works really well for heavy metals right now and they floated they idea that their tech could be modified to work on lithium.
- FPGAhacker 5y ago
  What happens after they eat the metal? Are the microbes easier to filter out than the metal?
YaBomm 5y ago

89 points by prostoalex 5y ago

Relatedly: University of California: Can the Salton Sea geothermal field prevent the coming lithium shortage?. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-geothermal-field-prevent-coming-lithium-shortage https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-g...

pfdietz 5y ago
I'd worry just a bit about mining there, because the Salton Buttes volcanoes have an estimated 1 in 800 chance of a catastrophic eruption each year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ChT1B1J4ZI&list=PLAQJmRWs6m3urg6N4lfVjjS4ji2ROxtDK&index=11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ChT1B1J4ZI&list=PLAQJmRWs6m...

shiftpgdn 5y ago

I can’t read the article but Texas has tens of thousands of brine water wells that were created while looking for oil. An improvement in lithium extraction from brine could result in a significant economic benefit for Texas.

_aavaa_ 5y ago
In case you wanted to, use uBlock and disable all 3rd party scripts. The article will load. EDIT: https://archive.is/BjQGm https://archive.is/BjQGm
enchiridion 5y ago
Maybe that’s partially why Tesla moved?
- runnerup 5y ago
  Definitely not. Tesla is not in the lithium extraction business and even if they were there's not much point to being right next door.
  - vardump 5y ago
    Did Tesla give up their lithium extraction plans? https://electrek.co/2021/07/09/tesla-patent-reveals-elon-musk-table-salt-lithium-extraction-process/ https://electrek.co/2021/07/09/tesla-patent-reveals-elon-mus...

margalabargala 5y ago

> The actual evaporating is done mainly by heat delivered as sunlight. But much of this is wasted. [...] it warms water below a pond’s surface—which, not being in contact with the air, is thus unavailable for evaporation Wouldn't warming subsurface water warm the pond as a whole, which would both warm the surface layers through convection, as well as make it easier for that subsurface water to evaporate when it does make its way to the surface? Since warmer water evaporates more easily in general, it's not clear to me why adding thermal energy to the body of water you want to evaporate is wasted.

_aavaa_ 5y ago
I think what they're talking about is the following. If they could focus all of the energy on a very thin layer at the water's surface then most of it would go into evaporating the water rather than be transferred into the bulk. Sure, heating the bulk makes it easier to evaporate, but it doesn't help as much as concentrating it all on the surface
- margalabargala 5y ago
  This makes sense, thanks.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Non-evaporating water will also radiate heat back out into the environment, meaning that less of the heat warming the bulk of the water goes into the actual evaporation process.
- hinkley 5y ago
  I would think that at the point of precipitation, heating the lithium and not the water would be a relatively large loss of efficiency. Minerals and plumbing can be bad news. There are systems for efficiently extracting water from brine via evaporation, but that requires a dilute brine to keep from gumming up. I do wonder though if there’s a hybrid system here where you install solar panels next to the ponds, use the input pipes to cool the solar panels, and use the power for something like final processing or drying.

iostream24 5y ago

Seawater-> extract the lithium as a useful byproduct from desalination plants https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provide-nearly-unlimited-amounts-critical-battery-material https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provi... https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawater-give-us-lithium-to-meet-our-battery-needs/99/i36 https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawat... https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/699652 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/699652

londons_explore 5y ago
Most desalination plants only concentrate the ocean salts a little. The more you concentrate them, the more energy you need to put in to get any more water out. I think the only time this would make economic sense is if there are laws in place saying brine may not be returned to the ocean (for environmental reasons). In that case, it would make sense to concentrate it further with reverse osmosis, and then use multi-stage flash to further concentrate the brine. After a few more steps, you could probably sell most of the resulting salts.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  But if you’re already going to extract from seawater, you might as well take whatever head state you can get.
  - Consultant32452 5y ago
    What is the process by which drinking water is extracted from seawater, and does that give you any savings at all with regards to a goal of extracting minerals?
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      You either boil it or force it through a semi-permiable membrane. In both methods you get two products: one one side pure water, on the other water with a higher concentration of non-water things as waste, most often just dumped back into the ocean. That waste stream is just a bit closer to the end product than taking from the sea directly.

atlantas 5y ago

Let's say we decided to go all-in on transforming the US to 100% renewable. Solar, wind and enough batteries to ensure continued power for times lacking sun/wind. For all homes, businesses, industry, transportation. Do we have enough lithium and other materials for that? And what is the environmental/carbon cost of extracting and refining it? I assume it would be net positive, but I don't know for sure, nor to what degree.

danans 5y ago
> University of California: Can the Salton Sea geothermal field prevent the coming lithium shortage?. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-geothermal-field-prevent-coming-lithium-shortage https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-g... We don't need to store every last kWh of power generated. A significant portion can be absorbed at time of generation by dispatching it to smart loads. Lithium is also not the only storage technology we have. Pumped hydro, chemical storage, and heat storage.
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
  They are a little more theoretical at this point but there is also compressed air and mechanical (concrete blocks lifted by a crane) storage as well.
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    concrete blocks are a really stupid battery. It's just a worse version of pumped hydro.
    - cure 5y ago
      It also has some significant advantages over hydro: can be built anywhere, requires a small fraction of the space, doesn't destroy vast landscapes by putting them under water.
      - 5y ago

rank0 5y ago

Genuine question: Are EVs and battery powered tech actually sustainable? Lithium is a finite resource which needs to be extracted from the earth via mining (or maybe this new evaporation technique). Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery. It feels like swapping one unsustainable resource for another. We already are struggling to meet demand for EVs despite making up a small portion of the worlds vehicle production.

jeffbee 5y ago
Compare it to the amount of mining that has been done to extract oil and gas and you’ll find it to be quite small.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
connicpu 5y ago
It sounds like there's enough lithium in all identified lithium resources to produce the batteries for 10.6 billion[1] Nissan Leafs. Enough for every human to have 1 low range car if the population plateaus around there, but that would still require perfect recycling and would leave no lithium to put batteries in anything else. Unless we start mining lithium from asteroids or something. [1]: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- philipkglass 5y ago
  Notice that the same page says that the Earth's crust contains 20 parts per million of lithium. That's more abundant than tin or lead, to name two rarer elements that are currently mined in much larger quantities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... Here's the USGS lithium report from 2010 that this Stanford web page got lithium reserve and resource numbers from: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/lithium/mcs-2010-lithi.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium... Here's the corresponding USGS lithium report from this year: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pd... See the tables "World Mine Production and Reserves" in these reports and following paragraphs. From the 2010 report to the current report, world lithium resources went up from 25.5 million tons to 89 million tons even as extraction rates rose from 18,000 tons per year to 100,000 tons per year. That alone brings us up to 37 billion Nissan Leafs. How can resources go up even as we're using lithium faster? It's because reserves and resources are determined by a combination of economics and technology. The Earth's crust contains 20 ppm of lithium now and 12 years ago (or a million years ago, for that matter). The geology doesn't change but the effort put into identifying potential sources of lithium and means of extracting and purifying lithium does change. Geologically speaking, the Earth has a lot of lithium. For as long as the USGS has been keeping records -- only a few decades, admittedly -- world lithium reserves have been increasing faster than they have been depleted, because the industrial demand that causes reserve depletion also spurs additional research to identify potential lithium sources and extraction processes. This Economist article is about such new processes.

redwoolf 5y ago

Somewhat off-topic: Why can't lithium (or other elements) be synthesized in a lab for production use?

washadjeffmad 5y ago
We haven't really mastered fusion to the point that we can just glue atoms together, let alone in a simple, cost efficient way.
grzm 5y ago
Because they're elements. They require nuclear reactions to create them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element#Origin_of_the_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element#Origin_of_the...
HPsquared 5y ago
Chemical elements are defined by the composition of their atomic nuclei. Specifically, the number of protons in the nucleus. This isn't something that can be changed chemically, you need nuclear reactions (it's called transmutation). These would be extremely uneconomical for recreating natural natural lithium, and the yield would be tiny.

akeck 5y ago

I highly recommend Molly Wood's "How We Survive" from Marketplace. It covers a number of topics related to electrification, lithium extraction, and climate. https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/ https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/

elil17 5y ago

I saw a talk from a company called Precient Technologies which uses microbes to remediate heavy metal from ore extraction process wastewater (e.g. the microbes are genetically engineered to “eat” and concentrate a particular target metal). What they have works really well for heavy metals right now and they floated they idea that their tech could be modified to work on lithium.

FPGAhacker 5y ago
What happens after they eat the metal? Are the microbes easier to filter out than the metal?

YaBomm 5y ago