7 ms·

Geothermal Plants Could Unlock Vast Supplies of Lithium in the American West

110 points by RafelMri 5y ago

aaron695 5y ago
zeristor 5y ago
Great article, this is from TheConversation, it is attributed at the bottom of the article but ideally this would like to that since there’s no tracking, and it’s the original: https://theconversation.com/how-a-few-geothermal-plants-could-solve-americas-lithium-supply-crunch-and-boost-the-ev-battery-industry-179465 https://theconversation.com/how-a-few-geothermal-plants-coul...
zeristor 5y ago
A few points, mention is made of producing $5Bn of Lithium, I imagine the price could drop quite a bit, which could be a good thing. Elon is casting around for Lithium I suppose he doesn’t have the bandwidth to Elon another industry. As mentioned Manganese, Zinc are also useful products. Potassium was glossed over I thought one of Russian invasion issues was that Ukraine was a large exporter of Potassium. But for each anion there’s a cation. If the carbonates are removed will that leave sulphates, and chlorides for the other metals? Will the removal cause issues since a more dilute brine would I assume leach out more minerals. Finally water, water, water. This is California with an ongoing drought. Is next to the Salton sea flooded by a broken canal a 100 years ago. I take it the geothermal plant uses water from the aquifer.
- patall 5y ago
  From what has been said about other such projects in europe, you do not take much salt or water out of the system. Instead, you pump the same amount of material down again in a closed circle, also reducing the amount of energy you have to spend to pump up the hot-water in the first place. When extracting lithium, you would substitute either the lithium itself or the lithium salt (depending on exact process). Afterall, you do not want to remove thousands of tons of material from hundereds of meters deep without knowing what kind of consequences (i.e earth quakes) that may have.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    People have seemed pretty willing to remove over a billion tons of oil from the ground…
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      Using aquifer water often causes issues too: https://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/changes/anthropogenic/subside/ https://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/changes/anthropogenic/subsi...
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Lithium mining itself uses a LOT of water. It is weird to see the article talking about how geothermal is all we need to enable lithium mining when these areas have significant issues with water usage already.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Tesla did file a patent for some new way of extracting lithium from clay and bought an american lithium producer. (Seperately, one of their execs started a battery recycling firm with a similar mission of providing battery chemicals)
- bob2222 5y ago
  Kazakhstan is worlds largest exporter of potassium
  - taneq 5y ago
    Is this a real fact or just something from Borat?
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Potassium resources are a concern if you're talking about fertilizer, where it has to be extremely cheap. For technical use in batteries cost would not be a concern. Potassium is about 4000x more abundant in seawater than is lithium, btw.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
keithnz 5y ago
In New Zealand there is this company https://geo40.com/ https://geo40.com/ it is trying to develop this technology. Interesting stuff, though ultimately it feels like we need an alternative battery tech not based on lithium. But next 10-20 years seems like it is going to be big for batteries.
fareesh 5y ago
Is there enough lithium on the planet to move everyone entirely over to electric cars, and still keep up with the demand for phones, tablets, drones, etc?
- neals 5y ago
  Interesting question. If you look it up, you'll find that estimates grow each year, probably because we're increasing our search for it? This article* talks about enough for 3 billion EV's, depleting supply in 2100-something. * https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/09/15/how-long-will-the-lithium-supply-last/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/09/15/how-long-will-the-lit...
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Mostly because we're looking at new ways of extracting it. Most well known is the Tesla parent for extracting from mud. Most well known because Tesla, but there are lots of other companies looking at different extraction methods. Lithium price has gone up a lot because demand is growing faster than the mines and plants that extract it. That 80 million tonne figure was based on low prices -- at high prices a lot more reservess become viable and we have a lot more.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    If Lithium scarcity becomes a significant problem, there will be plenty of economic incentives for recycling. There are already multiple competing companies offering ~95% recycling of lithium ion battery materials. Also, batteries more suited to grid-scale operation like iron-flow are already in commercial use and will likely replace a fair bit of the large-scale lithium ion battery market.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  There are 230 billion tonnes of Lithium in sea water, and it constitutes .002 percent pf the Earth's crust. It is very common, and widely available in economically viable concentrations. The concerns are building new mines and extraction plants fast enough to meet during demand, and the environmental damage from doing so. There are no concerns about running out.
panick21_ 5y ago
This is still far off. If you want to look at realistic lithium extraction in the US, look at Thacker Pass. That is much closer to being an actual reality. Nobody has yet made Geothermal Brines a reality and nobody has even really managed commercial DLE. The reality is all lithium in the world today comes from conventional brine project that use natural evaporation or it comes from Spodumene rock. We will scale those things first in order to increase lithium production. Lithium industry is difficult, its very hard for these operations to be profitable. And the California is specially difficult. But this is very much a very, very real problem. Lithium will be a huge cost even in LFP batteries as you can't take it out. We already know that not enough new lithium mines are coming online for coming demand. And high oil price made it even worse. We do actually seriously need to move to other types of battery chemistries as well. The most promising by far is Sodium batteries and CATL (big dog of batteries) is commercializing it. It has far, far less supply issues and it will be dense enough to make standard cars practical. There are lots of other ideas but the reality is, its absurdly hard to get even a tiny innovation in the cathode into actual cars and takes 5+ years. Doing it with a totally new chemistry is even more difficult.
- jjcm 5y ago
  You seem well informed here. Do you have any sources you’d recommend to stay on top of battery tech news?
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    I would say by far the best on just lithium is: https://www.globallithium.net/podcast https://www.globallithium.net/podcast The host has decades of experience in lithium and has interviews with many of those lithium companies. He is certainty opinionated but he is informed. On battery in general, and partly on lithium: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/vid... Many others but information is kind of all over the place. But I'm not in that industry, more a general interest in batteries.
- samatman 5y ago
  The Goodenough battery is truly the best case of nominative determinism in history. No one is going to want to drive on sodium batteries, which are merely good, rather than good enough. We're talking about the weight of a Tesla with the range of a Leaf, as a best case scenario. As for lithium, there are absolutely enormous amounts of it in highly available form, in the parts of the world where brine evaporated relatively recently. The Great Basin has a lot of those. When you say lithium extraction is difficult to do profitably, this is just a way of saying the supply/demand curve yields cheap lithium in 2022. We're in no danger of supply issues at the right price, no one who wants to buy some lithium is coming up short, and no such future is at all likely in this century.
freemint 5y ago
Something similar is done in Germany. https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/zero-carbon-lithium-project-upper-rhine-valley-germany/ https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/zero-carbon-lithi...
shkkmo 5y ago
I find it strange that the article talks only about supplying power for lithium planets with no mention of the massive amounts of water that lithium mining operations use. This seems like a pretty significant hurdle in the SW where surface water is scarce and the aquifers are already dropping significantly. Edit: Here's one Nevada lithium mine that is facing challenges due to water issues. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/wikieup-lithium-mine-big-sandy-hualapai-tribe-ranchers-water-hawkstone-11561652 https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/wikieup-lithium-mine-bi...
StopDarkPattern 5y ago
Lithium will be extracted from salt water on a massive production scale
meatsauce 5y ago
I'm sure the present admin will kill it so we're forced to buy (among other things) lithium from despots and dictators.

110 points by RafelMri 5y ago

Great article, this is from TheConversation, it is attributed at the bottom of the article but ideally this would like to that since there’s no tracking, and it’s the original: https://theconversation.com/how-a-few-geothermal-plants-could-solve-americas-lithium-supply-crunch-and-boost-the-ev-battery-industry-179465 https://theconversation.com/how-a-few-geothermal-plants-coul...

zeristor 5y ago

A few points, mention is made of producing $5Bn of Lithium, I imagine the price could drop quite a bit, which could be a good thing. Elon is casting around for Lithium I suppose he doesn’t have the bandwidth to Elon another industry. As mentioned Manganese, Zinc are also useful products. Potassium was glossed over I thought one of Russian invasion issues was that Ukraine was a large exporter of Potassium. But for each anion there’s a cation. If the carbonates are removed will that leave sulphates, and chlorides for the other metals? Will the removal cause issues since a more dilute brine would I assume leach out more minerals. Finally water, water, water. This is California with an ongoing drought. Is next to the Salton sea flooded by a broken canal a 100 years ago. I take it the geothermal plant uses water from the aquifer.

patall 5y ago
From what has been said about other such projects in europe, you do not take much salt or water out of the system. Instead, you pump the same amount of material down again in a closed circle, also reducing the amount of energy you have to spend to pump up the hot-water in the first place. When extracting lithium, you would substitute either the lithium itself or the lithium salt (depending on exact process). Afterall, you do not want to remove thousands of tons of material from hundereds of meters deep without knowing what kind of consequences (i.e earth quakes) that may have.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  People have seemed pretty willing to remove over a billion tons of oil from the ground…
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Using aquifer water often causes issues too: https://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/changes/anthropogenic/subside/ https://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/changes/anthropogenic/subsi...
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Lithium mining itself uses a LOT of water. It is weird to see the article talking about how geothermal is all we need to enable lithium mining when these areas have significant issues with water usage already.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Tesla did file a patent for some new way of extracting lithium from clay and bought an american lithium producer. (Seperately, one of their execs started a battery recycling firm with a similar mission of providing battery chemicals)
bob2222 5y ago
Kazakhstan is worlds largest exporter of potassium
- taneq 5y ago
  Is this a real fact or just something from Borat?
pfdietz 5y ago
Potassium resources are a concern if you're talking about fertilizer, where it has to be extremely cheap. For technical use in batteries cost would not be a concern. Potassium is about 4000x more abundant in seawater than is lithium, btw.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

keithnz 5y ago

In New Zealand there is this company https://geo40.com/ https://geo40.com/ it is trying to develop this technology. Interesting stuff, though ultimately it feels like we need an alternative battery tech not based on lithium. But next 10-20 years seems like it is going to be big for batteries.

fareesh 5y ago

Is there enough lithium on the planet to move everyone entirely over to electric cars, and still keep up with the demand for phones, tablets, drones, etc?

neals 5y ago
Interesting question. If you look it up, you'll find that estimates grow each year, probably because we're increasing our search for it? This article* talks about enough for 3 billion EV's, depleting supply in 2100-something. * https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/09/15/how-long-will-the-lithium-supply-last/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/09/15/how-long-will-the-lit...
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Mostly because we're looking at new ways of extracting it. Most well known is the Tesla parent for extracting from mud. Most well known because Tesla, but there are lots of other companies looking at different extraction methods. Lithium price has gone up a lot because demand is growing faster than the mines and plants that extract it. That 80 million tonne figure was based on low prices -- at high prices a lot more reservess become viable and we have a lot more.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  If Lithium scarcity becomes a significant problem, there will be plenty of economic incentives for recycling. There are already multiple competing companies offering ~95% recycling of lithium ion battery materials. Also, batteries more suited to grid-scale operation like iron-flow are already in commercial use and will likely replace a fair bit of the large-scale lithium ion battery market.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
There are 230 billion tonnes of Lithium in sea water, and it constitutes .002 percent pf the Earth's crust. It is very common, and widely available in economically viable concentrations. The concerns are building new mines and extraction plants fast enough to meet during demand, and the environmental damage from doing so. There are no concerns about running out.

panick21_ 5y ago

This is still far off. If you want to look at realistic lithium extraction in the US, look at Thacker Pass. That is much closer to being an actual reality. Nobody has yet made Geothermal Brines a reality and nobody has even really managed commercial DLE. The reality is all lithium in the world today comes from conventional brine project that use natural evaporation or it comes from Spodumene rock. We will scale those things first in order to increase lithium production. Lithium industry is difficult, its very hard for these operations to be profitable. And the California is specially difficult. But this is very much a very, very real problem. Lithium will be a huge cost even in LFP batteries as you can't take it out. We already know that not enough new lithium mines are coming online for coming demand. And high oil price made it even worse. We do actually seriously need to move to other types of battery chemistries as well. The most promising by far is Sodium batteries and CATL (big dog of batteries) is commercializing it. It has far, far less supply issues and it will be dense enough to make standard cars practical. There are lots of other ideas but the reality is, its absurdly hard to get even a tiny innovation in the cathode into actual cars and takes 5+ years. Doing it with a totally new chemistry is even more difficult.

jjcm 5y ago
You seem well informed here. Do you have any sources you’d recommend to stay on top of battery tech news?
- panick21_ 5y ago
  I would say by far the best on just lithium is: https://www.globallithium.net/podcast https://www.globallithium.net/podcast The host has decades of experience in lithium and has interviews with many of those lithium companies. He is certainty opinionated but he is informed. On battery in general, and partly on lithium: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/vid... Many others but information is kind of all over the place. But I'm not in that industry, more a general interest in batteries.
samatman 5y ago
The Goodenough battery is truly the best case of nominative determinism in history. No one is going to want to drive on sodium batteries, which are merely good, rather than good enough. We're talking about the weight of a Tesla with the range of a Leaf, as a best case scenario. As for lithium, there are absolutely enormous amounts of it in highly available form, in the parts of the world where brine evaporated relatively recently. The Great Basin has a lot of those. When you say lithium extraction is difficult to do profitably, this is just a way of saying the supply/demand curve yields cheap lithium in 2022. We're in no danger of supply issues at the right price, no one who wants to buy some lithium is coming up short, and no such future is at all likely in this century.

freemint 5y ago

Something similar is done in Germany. https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/zero-carbon-lithium-project-upper-rhine-valley-germany/ https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/zero-carbon-lithi...

shkkmo 5y ago

I find it strange that the article talks only about supplying power for lithium planets with no mention of the massive amounts of water that lithium mining operations use. This seems like a pretty significant hurdle in the SW where surface water is scarce and the aquifers are already dropping significantly. Edit: Here's one Nevada lithium mine that is facing challenges due to water issues. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/wikieup-lithium-mine-big-sandy-hualapai-tribe-ranchers-water-hawkstone-11561652 https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/wikieup-lithium-mine-bi...

StopDarkPattern 5y ago

Lithium will be extracted from salt water on a massive production scale

meatsauce 5y ago

I'm sure the present admin will kill it so we're forced to buy (among other things) lithium from despots and dictators.