5 ms·
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
by 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 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.