Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine
economist.com
economist.com
https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provi...
https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawat...
The more you concentrate them, the more energy you need to put in to get any more water out. I think the only time this would make economic sense is if there are laws in place saying brine may not be returned to the ocean (for environmental reasons). In that case, it would make sense to concentrate it further with reverse osmosis, and then use multi-stage flash to further concentrate the brine.
After a few more steps, you could probably sell most of the resulting salts.
In both methods you get two products: one one side pure water, on the other water with a higher concentration of non-water things as waste, most often just dumped back into the ocean.
That waste stream is just a bit closer to the end product than taking from the sea directly.
Are EVs and battery powered tech actually sustainable?
Lithium is a finite resource which needs to be extracted from the earth via mining (or maybe this new evaporation technique).
Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery. It feels like swapping one unsustainable resource for another. We already are struggling to meet demand for EVs despite making up a small portion of the worlds vehicle production.
There's a lot of misleading information out there on the Internet. Actually, searching led me to one of my old comments, which is still true ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15883035 ). The old link about ocean extraction died, so here's another one:
https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv...
The bottom line is that both the raw quantity and the prospective capital expenditures on lithium are way, way smaller than what we were looking at in terms of oil extraction. We're not running out of lithium, and we're not destroying the environment to get it.
I suspect oil industry PR could be behind all of this run-out-of-lithium hokum, which inevitably comprises articles based on "[presently] economically viable" resources and does not consider the actual availability of lithium in Earth's crusts and waters, which is much higher if you include low-grade ores that are not presently viable. It's obvious who benefits from this widespread misconception.
The simple fact is that if the price of lithium were to jump by a factor of 10, it still wouldn't affect the price of a Tesla that much.
Now, when we talk about grid-storage batteries, we might want really huge amounts of storage, and then sodium-sulfur / zinc-bromide / etc becomes relevant. But currently, grid-storage batteries are LiFePO4 simply because they're really cheap. That seems like a pretty good problem to have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
Here's the USGS lithium report from 2010 that this Stanford web page got lithium reserve and resource numbers from: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium...
Here's the corresponding USGS lithium report from this year: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pd...
See the tables "World Mine Production and Reserves" in these reports and following paragraphs.
From the 2010 report to the current report, world lithium resources went up from 25.5 million tons to 89 million tons even as extraction rates rose from 18,000 tons per year to 100,000 tons per year. That alone brings us up to 37 billion Nissan Leafs.
How can resources go up even as we're using lithium faster? It's because reserves and resources are determined by a combination of economics and technology. The Earth's crust contains 20 ppm of lithium now and 12 years ago (or a million years ago, for that matter). The geology doesn't change but the effort put into identifying potential sources of lithium and means of extracting and purifying lithium does change. Geologically speaking, the Earth has a lot of lithium. For as long as the USGS has been keeping records -- only a few decades, admittedly -- world lithium reserves have been increasing faster than they have been depleted, because the industrial demand that causes reserve depletion also spurs additional research to identify potential lithium sources and extraction processes. This Economist article is about such new processes.
Theoretical quantity - That would be the 20ppm as you said. Based on knowledge and estimates.
Identified reserves - How much of this stuff do we actually know about and is in a suffciently enough pooled location. This would be less than the 20ppm - how much less is a different question.
Technically available - How much of the known resource could we actually extract? It is ok if we know about it but if it is 10KM below a lake, could we get to it?
The most important stage after those three - Economic availability. Can we actually afford it and have people pay for it?
The argument from absurdity I use on this one is that there is effectively near infinite clean energy in the form of hydrogen in the sun. No one owns it - now go get it! The technical and economic scale ruins the argument a fair bit.
I'm not even arguing against lithium here, it seems to be more output restricted than resource limited. The two elements in batteries I worry about is Cobalt and Nickle - they could become the weakness. That said it does look like some folks are working on some neat alternatives in that space.
Problem is that until recently lithium was not a hugely in demand element. As a result not a lot was invested in finding the stuff. Now that it is important large investments will be made and a lot more is likely to be found. It’s a light element and is very abundant in the solar system.
So this means that after not really trying very hard we have already found enough to give every human an EV. That is encouraging. If we try a bit harder and find say 50% more we are good for a really long time.
Oil is an example of something we have tried really really hard to find. We’ve found a ton more than we thought we would.
The reason recycling lithium is so attractive is that 1) it is valuable because it is expensive to extract from the typically very low concentrations that exist in natural deposits. and 2) expended lithium batteries have orders of magnitude higher concentrations of it than exist in nature.
You'd be a fool to dump it in a landfill. For reference, lead, which is far less valuable is also typically recycled from the batteries in scrapped cars. Depleted lead batteries are valuable enough that they are not dumped in landfills. The current price is about 74$/kg, up lately by about 7x from 10$. A 73kwh Tesla battery would contain about 63 kilos of lithium. That's about 5000$ or more than a lot of second hand cars. Even at 10$, we're still talking well over 700$. A depleted lead battery would be closer to 5$. Those are recycled as well.
Regardless, there's a lot of lithium out there in nature. More than enough. There is no shortage just scaling challenges. Technical improvements like described in the article make it cheaper and less energy intensive to extract lithium. As you note, there's huge demand for EVs and that will keep prices for lithium high for some time to come. Companies working on extraction and recycling technology, have a lot of growth opportunities. They are super hot from an investor perspective and there are multiple very well funded companies working in this space already.
Long term, that makes lithium super sustainable. Short term, it just means we'll expend a lot of energy (increasingly of the renewable type) and water to get it. But compare that to extracting oil and turning it into petrol. That too is expensive and 100% of it is expended. Recycling burned gasoline/diesel is not a thing. That's not sustainable at all.
Yes, but once concentrated it is extremely recyclable. It doesn't flow, or corrode, or leave the battery. So when the cell's life is over the lithium is still there, "extractable" with vastly higher efficiencies than seen by raw production.
> Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery.
There is for everything we'd want to put a battery in today. It's not an uncommon element at all, it's just a hard one to concentrate because (owing to the fact that it's very soluble) geology has done a poor job of concentrating it for us. There is more lithium in the earth's crust than there is lead or tungsten or tin, yet those metals are minable from "veins" where with lithium we have to get it out of the oceans (or out of salt deposits that are ancient dried oceans).
There are also emerging technologies for extracting lithium from brine as a byproduct of geothermal power plants. American Public Media had produced a podcast series ("This is How We Survive") that included several episodes about this technology, and some of the patent drama that had gone with trying to control the tech.
It is true that many batteries today use rare earth metals like Nickel or Cobalt but there are plenty of good alternatives that don't.
Companies start using chemistries like LFP which relies mostly on iron, which is low cost and abundant.
There are development when it comes to Sodium-ion based batteries which should be very scalable and cheap.
There are magnesium-based chemistries that hold a lot of potential as well.
As for recycling, it should prove financial for some batteries as the materials can cover the recycling cost.
Also Nickel is highly concentrated in set regions which also causes problems.
Nickel & Cobalt are the most expensive metals in NCA/NMC batteries which are very common today.
Peridotite, a mantle-derived ultramafic rock that's widely available around the world, can be 0.1-0.3% nickel. This rock has been considered for CO2 sequestration, as it has large amounts of olivine, which is one of the most easily weathered silicates for mineral carbonation. One concern of mineral carbonation is all the nickel that could be released.
Although Li-ion batteries are named over lithium, they require quite a small amount of it compared to other materials. the bulk of the battery is the Cathode.
Of course, Anodes are of extreme importance as well but Graphite\Silicon are more manageable than Nickel for example.
Anodes are more of an enabler for other things. for instance, anode almost solely dictates the charging rate of the battery. very important parameter for sure.
It doesn't quite stack up, but it's promising and the raw materials are two of the most abundant. So there's that.
A Tesla Model 3 with the smallest pack size is 54kWh which is the equivalent of just under 1100 MacBook Air batteries.
In 2017 the global demand for laptops was 161,600,000 units.
Tesla shipped over 900,000 vehicles in 2021 which is the equivalent of 990,000,000 Macbook Airs.
So if laptop demand remained static, in the span of 5 years our annual demand for lithium still saw a six fold increase.
I'm willing to bet it's closer to 10x or 20x increase in demand for lithium. Did we have that much production capacity open up in the same time frame?
You have batteries that do not use lithium at all.
The battery market is going to see several different technologies for different use cases.
There's also other interesting investments in air breathing cathode batteries.
https://www.canarymedia.com/minerals-and-clean-energy-a-seri...
looking at lithium along with other relevant minerals.
That description fits every material apart from wood and dirt.
This makes a huge difference to oil.
You burn oil away.
You can recycle lithium (which is currently not happening) and reuse it.
You can also use the accumulator in a less efficient way until you even need to recycle. Like stationary scenarios if it's already useless for EVs.
It appears the CO2 emission standards can be achieved overnight simply by boycotting of all goods produce in countries where there is zero qualms about CO2 emissions, namely coal based power plants, which Western allied nations are more than happy to sell and point the finger at the said country they are exploiting.
But imagine telling virtue signaling West coast individual who believes he/she has superior moral values while happily consuming products produced in Authoritarian states under the threat of violence and exploitation of children that they need to trade their comfort for a greater collective.
If a society can't even come to agreements over wearing masks, there's zero chance such society can cut back on our reliance on the Petrodollar because doing so would put them on the same level of discomfort as other developing nations.
Leave it to third world countries to fix it while happily consuming and fueling the product of CO2 emissions and reminding them what a shthole country they live in.
This is my observation as a German looking into the West's mindset, its riddled with hypocrisy and self-contradictory ethic system aimed at distracting its citizens from the truth that their comforts are at the cost to this planet and rest of humanity.
We enjoy what we have because others could not have it and there is zero chance individualistic societies can reverse its mindless competition for vanity consumption.
And yes it's the co2 but the co2 is always the issue when we talk about climate change.
If we get ecopolitical: I think lithium itself is right now much better to extract from earth then oil as it will help to transition away from fossil fuels and I'm not blind to the fact that my existence creates struggles for other humans.
Like when you have level 1 unlocked and lvlq creates a lot of money and you are at the point to continue to buy more and more expensive upgrades for lvl 1 or to save up to start to invest in lvl2.
If the market can just do what it does with ice cars and in parallel work on ev I would totally agree. We could do much more with ice.
But we know that there is a huge necessary investment curve for ev. When is the right time to stop investing money time and brain time for ice and start putting it in EV?
I believe they are not independent.
Funny enough I think old companies are getting more frightened then ever afer Tesla, apple, Sony, Amazon are investing into ev development.
Independent of this, ice to ev transition takes already relatively long in Germany and similar countries. This will take even more time in countries with less GDP.
Do we have the time to wait?
The same applies (maybe worse) to electric motors, but the efficiency of electric motors is substantially better.
there is a fair amount of work yet to be done with Batteries, but even there we know theoretical limits and are closing in on them. (Ask a chemist what they are). if you want to make a contribution to cars battery technology is currently where there is the most room for a big improvement.
Note, I have no idea what the costs for any of the above is. It maybe that ICE investments are still more cost effective. I doubt it, but I don't know. Not matter what improvements will be expensive.
Wouldn't warming subsurface water warm the pond as a whole, which would both warm the surface layers through convection, as well as make it easier for that subsurface water to evaporate when it does make its way to the surface? Since warmer water evaporates more easily in general, it's not clear to me why adding thermal energy to the body of water you want to evaporate is wasted.
If they could focus all of the energy on a very thin layer at the water's surface then most of it would go into evaporating the water rather than be transferred into the bulk.
Sure, heating the bulk makes it easier to evaporate, but it doesn't help as much as concentrating it all on the surface
Minerals and plumbing can be bad news. There are systems for efficiently extracting water from brine via evaporation, but that requires a dilute brine to keep from gumming up.
I do wonder though if there’s a hybrid system here where you install solar panels next to the ponds, use the input pipes to cool the solar panels, and use the power for something like final processing or drying.
University of California: Can the Salton Sea geothermal field prevent the coming lithium shortage?.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-g...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ChT1B1J4ZI&list=PLAQJmRWs6m...
EDIT: https://archive.is/BjQGm
https://electrek.co/2021/07/09/tesla-patent-reveals-elon-mus...
Do we have enough lithium and other materials for that? And what is the environmental/carbon cost of extracting and refining it? I assume it would be net positive, but I don't know for sure, nor to what degree.
We don't need to store every last kWh of power generated. A significant portion can be absorbed at time of generation by dispatching it to smart loads.
Lithium is also not the only storage technology we have. Pumped hydro, chemical storage, and heat storage.
> "The heat storage facility, which was ceremonially opened today in Hamburg-Altenwerder, contains around 1,000 tonnes of volcanic rock as an energy storage medium. It is fed with electrical energy converted into hot air by means of a resistance heater and a blower that heats the rock to 750°C. When demand peaks, ETES uses a steam turbine for the re-electrification of the stored energy. The ETES pilot plant can thus store up to 130 MWh of thermal energy for a week. In addition, the storage capacity of the system remains constant throughout the charging cycles."
Lithium is interesting because it allows to produce lightweight batteries, usable in mobile phones, flying drones, and cars. For immobile land batteries, and even for larger sea ships, using batteries that weigh 2x is not a problem. Especially if they cost less per kWh stored.
But there are batteries that don't rely on lithium and many other alternative technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element#Origin_of_the...