There's nore lithium in the ocean than anywhere else, it just isn't concentrated.
I wonder if there's an opportunity for a combined seawater desalinisation and lithium extraction plant, if they could have complementary processes.
I wonder if there's an opportunity for a combined seawater desalinisation and lithium extraction plant, if they could have complementary processes.
The primary problem is hypocrisy. Environmentalists don't want a metal harvested from their backyard, but require it be harvested elsewhere at equal environmental impact. The options are clear: be content with atmospheric carbon, trade atmospheric carbon for water polluting metal extraction, or stop using electricity.
Trying to blame some private individuals for the system failure we have lived through is pretty weird.
It's a compromise. It's replacing one evil with another. It's more a matter of where you draw the line; I for example am in favor of nuclear energy because the waste product, while extremely dangerous for tens of thousands of years, is in a neat and relatively compact package, instead of blown out into the atmosphere.
But I digress; the only real solution is population and economic decrease. That's unlikely to happen unless something catastrophic happens, but that is the only way without replacing one bad thing with another.
That hasn't been a major issue for a number of years. It only takes a few years on average to 'break even' on energy in vs energy out [1].
Here is a detailed timeline over the case of Exxon and their actions in relation to climate change: https://exxonknew.org/timeline/
It sounded specific, so I thought they were referencing something that actually happened.
I'm less interested in a generalized "the 'carbon lobby' is bad" conversation - nobody is going to disagree with you.
Of course, this all implies that vast swathes of uninhabital desert aren't ecosystems worth saving, which I suppose is the point of the article.
Personally, I think that the root of the issue is overpopulation. None of this would matter so much with fewer people and moving millions of them from the Third to the First World ain't gonna help any.
It's on the order of a billion.
I'm in the Mojave and it's far from uninhabitable. I've never seen a barren wasteland desert of infinite sand dunes like they show in the movies, not in the USA. It might exist here, but I don't know where.
My experience in the Mojave has been one of diverse and abundant life. According to the elderly folks around here there used to be Tortoises everywhere as recently as the 1980s, but all the automotive traffic has practically wiped them out.
We still need to practice restraint and consider consequences in the desert.
> Drilling opponents also acknowledge that the burden of producing lithium should not just fall on nations with less restrictive health and safety regulations and environmental safeguards.
> "It's a tricky question," said Lisa Belenky, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. "We shouldn't export the sacrifices to Bolivia and Argentina, for example, which have massive lithium mines. ... We also think that Panamint Valley is not the right place for it."
Relevant citation from the page:
> This approach leverages desalination waste streams rather than virgin seawater. This is because seawater desalination plants typically leverage RO, which produces both a purified water stream and a reject stream consisting of a concentrated brine solution. Reject streams are typically discharged to the sea, however, it is possible to recover lithium and other materials from the RO reject brine. This is typically accomplished via a multistep process involving the sequential application of chemical reactants to adsorb, desorb, and crystallize the lithium (or other desired constituents) in the brine. The precipitated salt is then filtered and the brine discharged.