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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
by 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 agoFrom 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 agoPeople have seemed pretty willing to remove over a billion tons of oil from the ground…
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoUsing 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 agoLithium 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 agoTesla 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 agoKazakhstan is worlds largest exporter of potassium
- taneq 5y agoIs this a real fact or just something from Borat?
- pfdietz 5y agoPotassium 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]