Scientists develop ‘cheap and easy’ method to extract lithium from seawater
mining.com
mining.com
Lithium is a conflict resource. its scarce, its hard to mine, and as a result so far electric cars are a fanciful plaything for what i would consider "the rich." This paves the way for electric cars that a working class mom and dad can afford to get to and from work and the store. and of course electric trucks that have obscene amounts of torque means never "getting stuck" behind a slow truck ever again. it also means cleaner cities and hopefully cheaper trucking for over the road drivers and owner/operators.
Ive told my coworkers and apprentices this for as long as i can remember: expect to service elecric long-haul trucks in your lifetime. Learn the powertrain, the dynamics, the performance characteristics and keep pace with the technology as it evolves. Make it part of your expectation in the future, because the economic model of diesel is a last-ditch effort at best in the 21st century.
Not entirely on topic, but I'm curious whether their interest will shift to the electric Ford truck.
Electric, more reliable, easier to work on. With the same or better performance.
If the early adopters have a good experience, everyone else is going to follow.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzpNC2zMAys (dramatic, but there are plenty more of these kinds of videos)
That way both sides hate me.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/38291/this-2000-honda-insight-...
The Honda hybrid tech of that time is a lot easier to swap engines on. A Prius has the motors in the transmission, so it's harder to simply bolt a new engine on. You'd have to either drive the transaxle with your own control algorithms, or figure out another way to make it behave with a different engine. The Honda electric motor was on the engine crankshaft, and you could get the Insight with a manual transmission, so it's really just "bolt in the motor and go."
EDIT: Sorry, only watched the YouTube clip now -- OMG, seems that was the purpose! Sheesh, you think you're making an obviously absurd jokey take on something... America, you never (cease to) disappoint.
All Tesla's have cameras running on them nearly all the time. Any "disgruntled" driver who does any amount of various illegal things to them can easily be found and punished in the legal system. Quickest way to end the bullshit.
A reasonable judge might perhaps give the owner of the car a hefty fine for violating personal rights and order the vandal to pay for the damage. IANAL. Either way, I don't see it as a winning strategy to film anything in a public space in Germany, it will get you in trouble and will most likely not solve anything.
I think vandalism is the kind of thing that cannot be excused in adults. Certainly damaging anybody's car on purpose is something only a complete idiot would do.
I could be wrong. I don't know, but I've never heard of anybody bringing up this issue.
Beware of getting your information from youtube.
A large charging network is really only relevant to regular consumers, and even that is more of a psychological reassurance than a strict requirement given measured consumer behavior.
We need more nuclear power plants sequestering atmosphere carbon dioxide into liquid fuels. My job sites in rural counties lose power regularly in sunny calm wind conditions. I would be utterly helpless and stuck regularly if my vehicle strongly depended on the electrical grid.
Liquid fuels carry so much energy per liter I can store a massive amount of energy in a compact package. This is more important to me than pulling a 55 foot semi trailer filled to the brim with 18650s to have enough energy to tow. I cringe at the cost of lithium ion batteries to meet my energy requirements. God forbid those batteries freeze! Now my precious expensive batteries are destroyed.
We will see electric trucks in the near future on a very small subset of routes where reliable electrical connectivity is available.
For Ford, the most popular Truck, 50-60% of Trucks are F150 XL, or XLT, the XL is the base work truck, the XLT as the common features but not level of luxury of the Lariat, or Platinum Trucks.
You can't own medium or larger sized boat or trailer if you don't have a truck to pull it with without jumping through massive hoops like borrowing, renting one, or putting together a dangerous contraption on a vehicle not legally rated to pulling that weight.
Further, wouldn't this essentially solve the storage problem with renewables? If the tech were easily scalable / didn't rely on any scare materials, it would essentially be a type of battery that could be used in combination with existing fossil fuel plants (and nuclear of course) for baseline load.
Which, now that I think about it, would actually make any kind of green new deal much more politically viable. If the fossil fuel plants and gas stations get to keep running, it's that much fewer jobs we're axing and hoping to replace with better alternatives.
I call BS on that, of the many many many Truck owners I know maybe 10% have any interest in the Cybertruck... Of that 10% none of them use their truck for work or as an actual truck
The CyberTruck is targeting Late Gen X and Millennials the grew up with 80's and 90's movies with nostalgia, not a practical usable truck
Now the F150 Lightening that has about 60-70+% of the Truck Owners I know interested
Are we not already there in terms of car prices? In SF, a used nissan leaf can be had for from $10k-15k. New EVs aren't actually vastly different in price from new economy cars, especially if you take into account various credits.
To me, it seems like the main reason electric cars are relatively uncommon is not because the sticker price is too high, but rather because of factors like home charging (requires dedicated parking & possibly an expensive charger installed), fear of needing a second car _anyway_ for longer trips (partly due to awful charging infrastructure / range issues), and relatively few of them existing on the used market.
https://electrek.co/2020/05/11/tesla-model-x-extreme-mileage...
One way you can try to estimate what the real maintenance cost is in the first X years is to look at what automakers set aside for warranties. In that case, (the last I looked), Tesla seemed in the middle of the pack vis-a-vis major ICE makers. But then you have the 20-X years of service, and the dirty secret is that those years are also paid for by new owners except they pay those repairs forward as depreciation when they sell. So then you look at depreciation curves, to see if Tesla is holding up much better than ICE vehicles due to lower expected maintenance costs and there, too, Tesla appears to be right in line with other major producers. So bottom line, I can't find any evidence for the thesis that getting rid of all these components will significantly reduce lifetime maintenance costs, while the battery costs remain a big unknown.
Now part of this is just not having enough data. In 20 years, we'll have a lot more data, and then maybe the warranty policies and depreciation curves will look very different. But this goes back to my point which is why isn't Tesla insuring the buyers against this risk by selling massive 20 year waranties to stand behind these claims of long service life and very low maintenance costs? Why leave people searching for anecdata in a new car whose service costs they don't have the data to estimate?
For most people a car is a major portion of their net-worth and they tend to be conservative in making this purchase. Sure, for high income buyers, they can afford to take risks but most buyers can't. So why doesn't Tesla do more to insure prospective buyers against this risk? It seems like such a no brainer, and yet many companies insist on pushing risk onto the customer. This isn't just an issue with Tesla, but I see it in many industries, where the producer is the one who has the survivorship data, they benefit from the law of large numbers, and they have financial backing, they are in a position to sell insurance, and people would buy the insurance, but the insurance just isn't being offerred, and if it is offered, it's on absolutely terrible terms, rather than as something to remove purchase frictions.
But if you think Tesla is averse to taking on risk, how much more risk-averse would the customers take on? Tesla has the law of large numbers and technical data available to them. They are in a position to arbitrage that and get (expected) free money by selling long term insurance to buyers for whom the insurance is a lot more valuable than what it costs Tesla, so why wouldn't they do that?
If indeed the EVs are so much more durable and have such lower maintenance costs but are surrounded by a cloud of doubt, why not remove that cloud? Even if Tesla doesn't ramp up production faster, the increased demand would allow them to command a higher price until production was ramped up.
So if indeed the market is wrong and depreciation curves are too steep, Tesla can arbitrage that. Why they don't should raise some questions, at least it does to me.
In Europe, on a modern (diesel but gasoline wouldn't be much different) car, lubricated with semi-synthetic oil that would be 1 oil change at around 30,000 km or at the most two (first one at 15,000 and second one at 45,000, or similar).
As a side note, it depends, but "no maintenance" unlike many people think, is not such a good idea, overall, I'll try to explain myself.
Many years ago, fully synthetic oils came out, they were awfully expensive but guaranteed something like 80,000 km on diesel and 120,000 km on gasoline without any change, you only had to refill to level and change (at double the normal interval, usually 15,000 or 20,000 km x 2= 30,000 or 40,000 km the oil filter).
And, people with older cars might remember this, lamps burned out much more often than modern leds, non-electronic distributors needed maintenance, as well as carburetors and spark plugs (or on diesel pumps/injectors), and to this you add the (normal for mineral oil) 10,000-15,000 km oil change.
This meant that every three to six months your car was normally put for one day in the hands of a professional that - besides doing these maintenance chores - tested your car, made sure that brakes and suspensions were in an efficient condition, could notice and repair minor leaks, loose bolts/parts, could (much better than what you normally can do) "feel" if anything in wheels, suspensions, steering wheels (and its servo)was fine, etc.
The adoption of fully synthetic oil meant that the car, unless you found yourself an issue/defect, was seen/tested by a professional mechanic once every 1 1/2 to 2 years, and this was not a good thing, for the overall "heath" (and safety) of the car.
Lubricating oils have changed a lot in the last 30-40 years, as well as materials used in the engine construction.
The differences between mineral oils and semi-synthetic or fully synthetic oils is huge, modern oils are simply not comparable.
A related old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14969605
The manufacturer is the one that knows (obviously) the most about the engine so you should stick to the recommended type of oil and recommended oil change interval, doing it more often than that is simply a waste.
If the battery degradation makes the car unfit to your needs, it's a bit weird because it would mean you were on the limit, but anyway it's more economic to sell the car as it is and buy another car. Someone will enjoy the old battery.
Engine replacement rates will probably be historically higher than battery replacement within standard car lifetimes. It's possibly that a battery car will last longer than an ICE due to less moving parts, but even then I think long-lived EV cars will be relegated to city car duties with reduced ranges.
Batteries usually degrade rather than catastrophically fail (exempting the dramatic but rare battery fire which I believe happen less than ICE fires).
Not everybody wants to buy a new phone every couple years, and not everybody agrees what a standard car lifetime is.
I'm not sure that it's possible to exclude it from the "economy car" category.
There is a different, but it's not so huge. A new nissan leaf starts at ~$25k new, after the federal tax credit. It might be slightly less if you get a state-level credit as well.
$15k vs $25k is in the same ballpark.
I disagree.
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-now-the-average-pr...
If you want to speak of conflict minerals for EVs, cobalt is WAY more problematic, since it is far more rare and mined mostly in the DRC, where we know child labor and starvation pay is given for the work that allows EV cathodes their precious Co.
https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2020/03/lithium...
It could be more than just that too, the Monroe doctrine is alive and well. All South American anti-imperialists get attacked by the US.
https://twitter.com/panoparker/status/1318157559266762752?s=...
But I've seen people claim this before - I'm curious if there is a source this keeps coming from?
I think this individual tweet is the sole evidence cited for Musk's supposed support, and that seems a long bow to draw from it (an equally sinciere reading would be that it is Musk's take on the history of coups in South America),
What makes a lot more sense is that the US doesn't want China to gain a reliable and possibly even prosperous ally on the South American mainland. While Bolivia will not meaningfully affect the global supply of lithium, the demand for lithium will absolutely affect the economic future of Bolivia, and could even make it a regional power. With the Second Cold War increasingly going global, every square on the chessboard counts.
However, the evidence for US involvement in the overthrow of Morales so far consists of a strongly worded letter from OAS, while the fact that Morales actually lost a referendum asking if he should be allowed to run for a fourth term suggests that there was significant internal opposition to his reelection. But Elon Musk made a tasteless joke on Twitter, so that confirms it.
The fascists that staged the coup had long been supported by the US, the OAS is merely one small part of the imperialist apparatus. And Elon Musk doesn’t need to be in on it to recognise he would benefit.
Morales was anti-US influence, pro-coca. The right wingers and Evangelicals were against him, and Morales was socialist... basically fits the profile of exactly the type of leader the CIA would try to depose.
Having mineral resources its kind of a curse:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268790/countries-with-th...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/amnesty-internat...
If you've ever read old car advertisements, they would say the exact same thing about old supercars that would lose a drag race against a Toyota Corolla.
In reality speed and torque is an arms race among most road users. For a short while whoever has the nicest car has the ability to rapidly outrun anyone else, but that advantage diminishes as the technology gets cheaper and more common. In 20 years a modern Tesla will not be considered fast at all.
Certainly not enough to help keep alive the market for diesel pickup trucks.
NB: turboprop aircraft also consume jet fuel.
[1] http://download.aopa.org/hr/Report_on_General_Aviation_Trend...
Page 5 for instance lists rotorcraft. But page 5 is confusing to me; has the categories 'single engine', 'multi-engine', 'turboprop', 'turbojet', 'rotorcraft', etc. Are aircraft being double-counted in these categories? Is a single-engine turboprop plane counted twice, in both the turboprop and single-engine categories? Is a Bell 206, a multi-engine turboshaft helicopter, counted as multi-engine, rotorcraft... and also turbojet/turboprop? There is no category on this page for turboshaft aircraft. Maybe the nature of these classifications is clear to a pilot, but they aren't to me.
Page 7 breaks down total operations into the categories jet/piston/turboprop, and seems to have piston operations as about 1/3rd of the total. 1/3rd is a far cry from 1/9 ratio suggested by 209 million gallons of avgas vs 1.8 billion gallons of jet fuel. Here is my suspicion: that difference comes from turboshaft helicopters. Typical turboshaft helicopters burn many more gallons of fuel per hour than other forms of GA aircraft.
Also a nitpick: GP mentioned amateur pilots, but many general aviation pilots are doing it professionally. I would wager most helicopter-hours are probably being flown by professional pilots. For instance, all the helicopters being flown for news stations and police departments have professional pilots and fall under general aviation.
A turboprop engine will cost millions of dollars in purchase cost and maintenance cost over its lifetime just like other jet engines will.
At that price point, consumables for an internal combustion engine start to be a significant fraction of the vehicle cost.
Lithium batteries are hardly only a plaything for the rich.
China is far from majority-EV quantitatively, and at least four doublings (8 years) from a 50% share in new vehicles temporally.
That's actually excellent progress. But it's nowhere near your claim.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1050111/china-electric-c...
Though yes, the thought occurred after I'd posted.
Per capita car ownership might help tease that out (along with sales of car substitutes).
US car ownership is 804 vehicles per 1,000. In China it's 204 vehicles/1,000 pop.
Wikipedia's Transport in China page could use some updating, but also fails to support OP's claims:
Again, your original claim doesn't stand to any evidence I've found.
You've presented none yourself.
Maybe this process could be a way to deal with brine from seawater desalination [1] by at least removing lithium ions from the waste water. Since the ion concentration in the waste water is higher than in seawater, it should theoretically make the lithium separation process easier, shouldn't it?
Another thing: combining this with cheap solar power and seawater lithium mining might be a part of a possible solution for a post-oil industry in the Gulf States? They did the tests on Red Sea seawater which has a higher salinity than most other seawater but apparantly the eastern Mediterranean matches or even surpasses that [2].
[0] "It is also noted that the total concentration of other salts after the first stage is less than 500 ppm, which implies that after lithium harvest, the remaining water can be treated as freshwater. Hence, the process also has a potential to integrate with seawater desalination to further enhance its economic viability", from page 5, (PDF) https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...
[1] I am not linking to a particular article but this is what I am talking about: https://www.google.de/search?q=toxic+brine+seawater+drinking...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity#/media/File:WOA09_sea...
And then again the fresh water produced along with the brine will end up back in mostly the same surrounding after it gets used, so it's not like we're producing saltier and saltier water over time?
So aside from the increased salinity at the specific location where the brine is returned to the sea, is there another issue? Am I missing something that makes all this a large scale problem?
We had Bechtel design us a desalination/RO system for a biofuel startup I worked with and to prevent the dead zone, you need a massive system of buried pipes in the ocean. Iirc, it was the most expensive part of the entire design since you need to output it over something like a square kilometer and you need to mix in fresh seawater at several points to dilute the effluent before you release it. So in addition to the CapEx of a construction project in a horribly hostile environment, you have permanent energy consumption even past the filters.
And of course, since it’s coastal, there are tons of regulations and government bodies interested in making sure you don’t cut corners.
The way we discuss technical solutions is woefully inadequate. Everything is still presented as a miracle-cure for our problems. We should have a more mature understanding of how these things are constructed and maintained.
One piece of poop in the forest—nature.
A sewer pipe discharging a river of poop from an entire city into a forest—a toxic waste dump.
The entire surface of the sea is evaporating fresh water and the resulting brine is slinging constantly. It’s not creating a dead zone because it’s distributed. A river of brine in the oceans would be like a toxic cloud of ammonia that kills anything it touches…until it mixes sufficiently.
We kind of figured it out 150+ years ago:
But even then, if the ends of your system are in 50’ deep ocean, the water column is such that the top ~10% sees really good mixing and exchange due to wind and wave action but the rest really doesn’t. It’s rare that there are strong currents near enough coastlines to take advantage of.
I would argue that those countries that are cleaner have the moral authority to lead the way to a cleaner planet.
Countries should totally put pressure on others, but individual environmentalists putting pressure on their local countries makes sense.
Unfortunately, the US itself needs to beinfluenced into being environmentally conscious
Candidate 1: No. It's junk science.
Candidate 2: Two words: Condor attack. Don't want that. Got to say no.
...
Candidate 5: Enviro-mite!
Oh, if they are producing fresh water as well then isn't this good as desalination is already needed in some area's. So the studies upon the brine they output would be useful to measure any impact. Which would be localised - how localised and impacting is really the question here and for that we can look at existing drinking water from sea water production.
The real solution will be to:
"Make salt magnetic and pull it out of the water, in real-time, with electro-magnets."
https://audio.kryon.com/en/What's%20Wrong%20Today.mp3 (start the audio at 18:20, for the gist and some more details)
"Make oxygen magnetic and then just pull it out of water to produce hydrogen"
I too like to fantasize. :-)
> "Unconfigured Simplecast Domain You are seeing this page because your website is not configured properly."
Liquid oxygen is paramagnetic and it is attracted to a magnet.
https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae493.cfm
Disclaimer: Sorry if that was what you were alluding to... the person on the GP's audio clip was too annoying for me to waste time listening to it.
And yeah, cringe podcast :-/
I wonder if the process can work for other more valuable substances. Uranium from seawater has been done for a while now. This process might make it cheaper than mining. The world could change if every country with access to the sea can start extracting such things.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/05/13/ev-ran...
$5 of electricity at $0.09/kWh is 200 MJ, which is enough to pump that much water 40 m high, or push it through a membrane with 4 bar pressure drop.
So you can't do very much to seawater at that price point. Like many "scientists develop cheap ___" headlines, it may just cover part of the process and not the whole operation.
I wonder if we are wasting valuable brine as part of our established desalinization processes?
Returns to mending nets and counting seagulls.
I doubt drinking water contains anything close to therapeutic doses of lithium.
EDIT: For more context, nuclear power could be a great tool in reducing carbon emissions. I read somewhere that mining Uranium 235 from seawater at scale would cost roughy 2x to 3x what it costs to get the fuel from the ground at today's prices. I was trying to say that if we're going through all of the trouble to extract Lithium from seawater, it'd be cool if extracting Uranium at the same time made both processes more economical.
"Seawater contains about 3.3 parts per billion of uranium by weight, approximately (3.3 µg/kg) or, 3.3 micrograms per liter of seawater.[6] The extraction of uranium from seawater has been considered as a means of obtaining the element.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Nat...
(Mining uranium is as environmentally unfriendly as other mining operations, just do a web search for "uranium mining".)
Actually the only "molecules" smaller than Lithium are Hydrogen and Helium. Helium is not a problem because it's too easy to pull apart and Hydrogen (H+ and H2) are not problem because H2 is another of the products.
(Actually^2 H+ is not isolated, it's combined with water in H3O+, but I guess the holes need some room for the water around the Li+ ions. The technical details are probably more complicated, but "small holes only allow H, He and Li to pass" is a good approximation.)
But Uranium atoms are huge. They are bigger than most atoms, and I'm not sure if the common form in seawater is a combination of Uranium and Oxygen. A hole that big will allow most mineral to pass, so you will just get brine. Using it in the other direction with holes just smaller than Uranium is also not very useful, because you will get Uranium mixed with a lot of crap, many of the contamination are not isolated atoms (that are mostly smaller) but molecules that combine a few atoms are are bigger.
And heavy. Some gravitational fractionation should do it.
Yes, I know all about the externalities of uranium mining as a portion of my extended family who lived in a particular house around the Four Corners/Durango area all died within a matter of years from horrible cancers due to contaminated drinking water.
https://www.ewg.org/research/170-million-us-drink-radioactiv...
sounds promising but papers tend to overpromise, so we'll see if it's viable - cheap and abundant lithium batteries would be a major breakthrough for renewables
Batteries still have a lifespan, their manufacture emits CO2, and they need to be disposable or to be recycled.
Nuclear is still the best energy in terms of carbon.
Nuclear is a non starter from a cost perspective at this point. You get vastly more bang for the buck subsidizing battery backed up wind / solar which can actually load follow without becoming even more expensive.
The same way? Mining, processing, shipping, etc... There is a difference between "the same way" and an actual carbon accounting.
Money doesn't matter, only carbon matters. Nuclear is a long term investment, it doesn't mean it's more expensive.
Anyway, it’s the same in that their all indirectly producing CO2. In a full accounting all of those things that make nuclear expensive actually produce CO2 because construction equipment, mining to produce the parts to build a reactor, etc etc all produce CO2 in the current economy.
In fact if you do the full breakdown for all activities related to Nuclear Reactor Construction, Operation, and Decommissioning their a very significant CO2 source in large part because all economic activity is and their really expensive. Regardless of how easy to draw arbitrary lines that ignore say CO2 emissions from workers daily commutes etc.
The only way to move past that is to have serious energy storage that’s used for all equipment and thus very widespread adoption of cheap battery technology. At which point Nuclear costs become an even larger issue because cheap batteries tank the cost of battery backed up wind/solar. In the end far northern countries can make some use of Nuclear, but it’s a dead end technology without a significant role in actually solving climate change.
As with pretty much any energy source, (including wind, solar, gas..) nuclear tends to get cheaper the more you build. You can look up FOAK vs NOAK and note the curves. Not sure what you're referring to re difficulty of increasing %share?
How are you measuring "fuel rod lifecycle"? And how does that possibly comparable to "$/kWh solar"?
Here's [0] a good source for some facts. You should note that accounting for the whole lifecycle of mining/processing/operating/defueling/decommissioning, nuclear is ~1/4 of the emissions of solar. And this is only considering electricity; we still have 2-3x the kwh to source for our heating requirements. You're suggesting we get that all sorted with solar & wind too?
0 - https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the...
More importantly nuclear very specifically gets more expensive as you ramp up the percentage of grid energy your supplying. For a simple fact check look at the capacity factor of French nuclear reactors, for example:
France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chooz_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Capacity factor 70.6% and around 700 full-time workers
USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Nuclear_Generating_St...
Capacity Factor: 87.70% (lifetime)
Lower capacity factors directly translate into higher costs as you still need to pay for the building and security guards etc, you just don’t generate as much energy from identical infrastructure.
PS: If you don’t want to do the leg work just compare national averages around 2000-2005 and then realize France needed to import and export a lot of electricity because they simply couldn’t afford to operate in isolation at 70+% nuclear generation.
"A 50% increase in lithium prices would for instance increase the battery pack price of a nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) 811 battery by less than 4%." [1]
Nevertheless, together with improvements in (low-cobalt) battery chemistry, this sounds like an important piece of the puzzle.
[1] https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...
Amortized over a year, letting the plant shut down because it's cloudy a few days should be fine.
I remember in 2005 my earth science teacher told me "shale in north dakota will never be viable with all this saudi oil lying around"
"Based on these data, we estimated the total electricity required to enrich 1 kg lithium from seawater to 9000 ppm in five stages to be 76.34 kWh. Simultaneously, 0.87 kg H_2 and 31.12 kg Cl_2 were collected from the cathode and the anode, respectively. Taking the US electricity price of US$ 0.065 per kWh into consideration, the total electricity cost for this process is approximately US$ 5.0. In addition, based on the 2020 prices of hydrogen and Cl_2 (i.e., US$ 2.5–8.0 per kg and US$ 0.15 per kg, respectively), the side-product value is approximately US$ 6.9–11.7, which can well compensate for the total energy cost. It should also be noted that the current Cl_2 utilisation capacity in the chlor-alkali industry is ~ 80 Mtons/year. Even in the case where all the world lithium capacity is produced from our extraction process, the amount of Cl_2 produced will be 3 Mtons, and so will have very little effect on the total market", from https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...
Pretty amazing innovation, certainly a more sustainable solution than overthrowing the Bolivian government and murdering Native protestors.
To think that an entire mineral mining industry could be replaced by processing seawater is revolutionary.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:t....
https://sci-hub.do/10.1179/143307508/270875
Edit: it's a bit of a strange paper with a lot of talk about unrelated things (imo) but there seems to be this unexpected effect which might make it worthwhile to investigate it independently from what one thinks of this paper. The setup seems to be simple and cheap enough that there should not be huge obstacles to get easy and fast results.
I expect it will first be studied by YouTubers like "the plasma channel".
From a practical point of view, It looks like an interesting demo, but I don't think it has too many applications. I only can imagine that it may be useful as a sterilization process, whatever virus or bacteria that is in the solution will be extremely unhappy with so much H2 and O2 around. The flame and the small risk of an explosion is a problem.
From a theoretical point of view, it's easy to model isolated small molecules. Big molecules or combination of molecules is exponentially more difficult, like in ~exp(5*N) where N is the number of atoms and 5 is an oversimplification. There are some approximations that reduce it to a polynomial time like ~(5N)^12 or ~(5N)^9 less if you use more approximations. And with more approximations you can calculate it in linear time that is very useful for biochemistry that are interested in big molecules. Anyway, most of these methods assume that atoms don't move, or don't move too much, or use a lot of simplifications.
Simulation water at the molecular level is a nightmare. You need to simulate many molecules, each one moving around, that form bounds between them that are not stable enough to simulate like a fixed length, but stable enough to be ignored. And now you need to add a strong electromagnetic field to the mix, and the nightmare is upgraded to the Freddy Krueger level.
I'd want to know how the Hydrolysis effect varies as a function of EM frequency and salt composition. Hypothetically, different EM frequencies could produce resonance effects in water. Basically, I'm curious how the flame might grow bigger at different EM frequencies.
If anyone has any access to EM equipment like this, I'd definitely pay $1000 to catalyze. Seriously! I haven't been this curious about a physics phenomena since I learned about sonoluminescent bubble implosions "Mysterious Glowing Bubbles". Seriously. https://www.newswise.com/articles/mysterious-glowing-bubbles
RIP Dr. Apfel, he was a big influence on me.
I know Alan McGaughey at CMU does water modeling at a molecular level, pretty cool stuff: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HmNtygkAAAAJ&hl=en
"Effects of different parameters on the efficiency of electrode-less water splitting", sounds like an acceptable topic for a bachelor thesis for example ;)
It's just that most papers pretend that the result has some practical or theoretical application, and I think it's difficult to get one.
If I was looking for something to research, I wouldn't pick this one. It's not strange enough to compensate for how hard it is to understand it. (But then, I wonder how I the photoelectric emission fits on that dimension...)
That seems reasonable and yet unfortunate. It seems like the kind of experiment that a scientist would try to undertake out of sheer curiosity.
This should work without the RF stage using electrodes coated with glass, and using AC to drive it at high frequency.
(Rex Research is mostly crackpottery. But not all of it. The tricky bit is sorting the horse from the horseshit, eh?)
(Assuming lithium battery cost is USD 100/kWh and 100 g of Lithium metal (not LCE) per kWh)
Wouldn't this process also quickly reduce the local concentration of Lithium in the water surrounding the processing station? Making sustained operations difficult?
Likewise between the tide and currents you might have sufficient mixing if new seawater.
Anyway, like you said - "maybe".
The authors write "a preliminary economic analysis shows that the process can be made profitable when coupled with the chlor-alkali industry." So they apparently want to run this off of the reject stream from a plant that extracts chlorine and sodium hydroxide from brine. Running this downstream of a chlor-alkali plant means somebody else already has a brine source and a way to get rid of all the rejected brine. This sort of thing is common. A lot of rare mineral extraction is done as part of a process that extracts a less-rare mineral.
Profitability is going to turn on all the usual problems with membrane systems - how long does the membrane last, how often does it have to be backwashed, what parts in the system corrode, and similar routine engineering problems. That's usually the hard part.
[1] https://www.samcotech.com/is-it-possible-to-extract-lithium-...
https://www.miningweekly.com/article/over-40-minerals-and-me...
Last year, researchers at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency’s Rokkasho Fusion Institute revealed that they had developed a new way of extracting lithium from seawater. This involves dialysis. It employs a dialysis cell containing a membrane made from a superconducting material. Lithium is the only ion in the seawater that can pass through the membrane. It moves from the negative electrode side of the cell to the positive electrode side. They reported that the system displayed good energy efficiency and that it would be easy to scale it up. However, they also cautioned that the process is years away from being commercialized.
Superconductor material classes include chemical elements (e.g. mercury or lead), alloys (such as niobium–titanium, germanium–niobium, and niobium nitride), ceramics (YBCO and magnesium diboride), superconducting pnictides (like fluorine-doped LaOFeAs) or organic superconductors (fullerenes and carbon nanotubes; though perhaps these examples should be included among the chemical elements, as they are composed entirely of carbon).[12][13]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001191641... (Open Access)
At the same time by this method lithium it can become available almost for all countries on the planet (minus 45 that do not have sea).
Collateral damage is justifiable unless you are not that damage isn't it?
Better reasoning could begin with the question: would I leave my comfortable home, go there, and live there in community where water is contaminated by lithium mining sludge. Would I drink that water every day? Is there anyone who is suffering so I could enjoy comfortable life?
Instead it should concentrate people thinking power to solve those other issues in mining industry of metals as gold, copper, lead, nickel, iron, cadmium...
Also going outside and seeing that it is beautiful kind of sounds as ostrich way of dealing with problems buy turning on the blind eye concentrating to things in local vicinity, convincing yourself that all is good and we should move on.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/28/990867075/californias-white-g...
I believe there’s a few startups rushing to get there first.
Just kidding, of course.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/throwing-car-batteries-into-t...
"The world's oceans contain an estimated 180 billion tons of lithium"
"Lithium mines produced an estimated global total of 82,000 metric tons of lithium in 2020"
You are completely off scale. The oceans contain 1.34e+21 L. Humanity uses 1.38e+17J annually. If we take ~10J to move 1Kg 1m up. That means if we spend all our energy on moving sea water, we can move 0.00001% of the ocean up by 1 meter per year.
Any novel ecosystem is close to shore, from those ecosystems most are already damaged by other means.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-21/french-nu...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/01/jellyfish-clog...
[3]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hinkley-poin...
Have an option to start extracting lithium from the ocean (which Portugal has LOTS of) would be really cool, but I doubt anyone would put a finger on it without have proper studies on the environmental impact.
They built technology to separate lithium from brine that has high concentrations of it. Their short term plan is to test this in Bolivia where lithium is currently being mined by evaporating water in basins (using the sun). This takes huge amounts of water and a lot of time. This would potentially be a lot more efficient. The same company is also working on solid state batteries.
Doing the same with sea water would just require pumping a lot of water, I imagine. If you are desalinating that, you'd end up with a brine with relatively high concentrations of salt, lithium, etc. Same for hydrogen production. So, not the worst idea to do something productive with that brine (as opposed to dumping it back in the sea).
Yes if you run electrodes in water you get Oxygen and Hydrogen at the respective electrodes. Add salt as you get in seawater and you get Hydrogen and Chlorine.
Is the demand for Chlorine that high?
[EDIT ADD] YES, it is and thank you for the replies, the epoxy one I had no idea (never even thought about it even).
The kind of false joy you are talking about has been my constant pain for like 25years.
You just have to understand that « scientific paper hyped up in mainstream media » != « new technology entering the market ».
Not a chemist so I'm just trying to see if I grokked it. If I did, then this is remarkably simple!
That’s a generalization, not everyone visits reddit.
Come now, let's not be obtuse. People naturally behave differently in different social contexts, a thing that is totally normal and expected.
For instance, consider how you'd behave in a professional situation, vs when drinking with your friends, vs when catching up with your grandmother.
Having different standards in different online communities seems no different.
In other words, there appears to be no reason why HN and Reddit folks should behave differently when on the opposite platform. These behavior differences are artificial and ad hoc (i.e. 'we want to keep HN free from obtuse memes.. because we said so!')
The site rules would be a pretty obvious reason why people should and do act differently here vs Reddit.
I like that HN is a learning resource. I like that I can read perspectives from people in many different fields and across the various economic classes. I also like reddit - I like the memes, the in-group culture (when it's funny), the bots, the one-liners, what have you. But I don't want humor and generalizations to dominate HN comments; I want educational content to float to the top so that authors are rewarded for sharing their perspective. I can find funny takes on HN headlines on reddit already.
If they get chemical grade lithium without extra steps, it might well be cheaper than "mining"
The oceans are just so much bigger than we can easily conceptualize. So very much bigger.
Yes, so big in fact that at one time we didn't think that little 'ol mankind could alter it, just like the rest of the planet. What does raising the ocean temp by a measly 1-2 degrees do to thousands of different plants and animals in the sea? Did we know that 100 years ago? These very large complex systems aren't as immune to small changes as we once thought and often cascade into other systems.
Just 2% of that would be enough to create storage capable of holding a year's worth of the world's electricity consumption.
I've seen a video of how smartphone batteries are made, it's pretty advanced...
I do not know the current price of lithium, because most previous information sources, like the metal exchanges, no longer make their data public.
Nevertheless, a few years ago lithium was around $66 per kg.
So $5 would be just about 7.5% of the price per kg, but there are a lot of other costs, like replacing from time to time the expensive LLTO ceramic membrane and the very expensive Pt-Ru coated cathode and also many other operational costs and the amortization of the investment.
For reversible batteries, the conversion of lithium phosphate to another lithium salt might be enough, but for applications that need metallic lithium, like primary batteries or Li-Al alloys, the lithium phosphate must be converted into lithium chloride or other suitable salt and the metallic lithium must be extracted by electrolysis, with additional, higher, costs for electric energy.
However, the method described is sound and there are also useful byproducts to ensure or increase the profit.
The method is not new, but the major achievement is finding a suitable material for the selective membrane, which passes lithium but blocks the much more abundant sodium & potassium.
Unlike many such announcements, this appears to have good chances to eventually be used for lithium extraction.
The Pt-Ru is just a catalyst, no? Maybe it gets contaminated but it would hopefully be recycled. Might even go up in value over time rather than be consumed.
Don’t get me wrong; I really want this to work, but until the extraction plant gets built and is producing at scale, I won’t hold my breath.
Do they even like lithium? Maybe we're doing them a favor.
"Effects of battery manufacturing on electric vehicle life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions" https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...
"Analysis of the climate impact of lithium-ion batteries and how to measure it" https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publicat...
"Climate explained: the environmental footprint of electric versus fossil cars" https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-the-environmen...
https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-the-environmen...
says
So on the basis of recent studies, fossil-fueled cars generally emit more than electric cars in all phases of a life cycle.
and https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publicat...
says
Overall, electric vehicles typically have much lower life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than a typical car in Europe, even when assuming relatively high battery manufacturing emissions.
The first link does not appear to directly compare internal combustion vehicles against battery electric vehicles.
"On the other hand will the total CO2 footprint from battery production increase in unprecedented pace and to an enormous scale. If the value from GREET 2018 is used (73kg CO2e/kWh) the industry will go from 12 million tonnes CO2 equivalents to 106 million tonnes which is equal to almost two thirds of GHG emissions from aviation in Europe . Even if this contributes to a decrease of direct fossil fuel emissions, through the 30 replacement of ICEVs to EVs, it will be a large source of CO2 emissions "
> An entry-level Honda Civic, which we believe is a more appropriate comparison, would improve the ICE fuel efficiency by 20%.
Someone shopping for a Tesla model 3 isn’t also in the market for a base-model civic. The primary market they’ve been eating is bmw and Audi. And the author has to know that because it’s published monthly and he’s at least pretending to have done some research.
When you link to a blog making obvious bad-faith assumptions, the rest of the message is rather irrelevant and people are going to let you know.
Its just that with information I looked at so far, for ex. the fact batteries do not seem to last more than 130,000 Km and the expansion of lithium mining it looks like the jury is still out of EVs really are helping reducing overall carbon footprint. If you look at some of the studies you will seen depending on the data there a reduction only of 10% maybe 15% and according to other sources its basically flat. I would love to be proven wrong, as clearly we are facing a climate change emergency.Plus hydrogen as a solution does not seem to be around the corner. Producing hydrogen also has its challenges.