[HN Gopher] Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine
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Two new ways of extracting lithium from brine
Author : prostoalex
Score : 71 points
Date : 2022-02-25 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| danans wrote:
| Relatedly:
|
| University of California: Can the Salton Sea geothermal field
| prevent the coming lithium shortage?.
|
| https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-g...
| akeck wrote:
| I highly recommend Molly Wood's "How We Survive" from
| Marketplace. It covers a number of topics related to
| electrification, lithium extraction, and climate.
|
| https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/
| redwoolf wrote:
| Somewhat off-topic: Why can't lithium (or other elements) be
| synthesized in a lab for production use?
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| We haven't really mastered fusion to the point that we can just
| glue atoms together, let alone in a simple, cost efficient way.
| grzm wrote:
| Because they're elements. They require nuclear reactions to
| create them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element#Origin_of_the...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Chemical elements are defined by the composition of their
| atomic nuclei. Specifically, the number of protons in the
| nucleus. This isn't something that can be changed chemically,
| you need nuclear reactions (it's called transmutation). These
| would be extremely uneconomical for recreating natural natural
| lithium, and the yield would be tiny.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > The actual evaporating is done mainly by heat delivered as
| sunlight. But much of this is wasted. [...] it warms water below
| a pond's surface--which, not being in contact with the air, is
| thus unavailable for evaporation
|
| 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.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| I think what they're talking about is the following.
|
| 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
| zdragnar wrote:
| Non-evaporating water will also radiate heat back out into
| the environment, meaning that less of the heat warming the
| bulk of the water goes into the actual evaporation process.
| margalabargala wrote:
| This makes sense, thanks.
| hinkley wrote:
| I would think that at the point of precipitation, heating the
| lithium and not the water would be a relatively large loss of
| efficiency.
|
| 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.
| elil17 wrote:
| I saw a talk from a company called Precient Technologies which
| uses microbes to remediate heavy metal from ore extraction
| process wastewater (e.g. the microbes are genetically engineered
| to "eat" and concentrate a particular target metal). What they
| have works really well for heavy metals right now and they
| floated they idea that their tech could be modified to work on
| lithium.
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| What happens after they eat the metal? Are the microbes easier
| to filter out than the metal?
| rank0 wrote:
| Genuine question:
|
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Compare it to the amount of mining that has been done to
| extract oil and gas and you'll find it to be quite small.
| connicpu wrote:
| It sounds like there's enough lithium in all identified lithium
| resources to produce the batteries for 10.6 billion[1] Nissan
| Leafs. Enough for every human to have 1 low range car if the
| population plateaus around there, but that would still require
| perfect recycling and would leave no lithium to put batteries
| in anything else. Unless we start mining lithium from asteroids
| or something.
|
| [1]: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
| [deleted]
| philipkglass wrote:
| Notice that the same page says that the Earth's crust
| contains 20 parts per million of lithium. That's more
| abundant than tin or lead, to name two rarer elements that
| are currently mined in much larger quantities:
|
| 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.
| NeoVeles wrote:
| There are four stages of identifying and use of a resource.
|
| 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.
| truted2 wrote:
| Think about the timescale that lithium has been a valuable
| resource. When the first oil wells were being drilled in
| Pennsylvania for lamp oil no one could fathom how oil
| exploration, extraction and processing techniques would evolve
| to mechanize an entire planet.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| probably nothing is sustainable at current world population.
| scythe wrote:
| >Surely there's not enough lithium for everything to be powered
| by battery.
|
| 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.
| CyberRage wrote:
| For the most part yes.
|
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Neither nickel nor cobalt are rare earth metals.
| s0rce wrote:
| As far as I know only certain Nickel metal hydride batteries
| use rare earth metals. Unless you just meant "rare" as in
| uncommon. Nickel isn't particularly rare and can be recycled
| from batteries.
| CyberRage wrote:
| Nickel is quite rare in the sense that the volume available
| for us on earth isn't as robust as something like iron or
| lithium, which are extremely abundant.
|
| 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.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| They are working on an Iron Silicon battery technology:
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/490344
|
| It doesn't quite stack up, but it's promising and the raw
| materials are two of the most abundant. So there's that.
| Melio wrote:
| We don't consume it we use it.
|
| 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.
| deutschewelle wrote:
| The problem isn't oil itself but rather the byproducts,
| namely CO2 that is the cause of global warming and there just
| isn't enough of an impact from switching from modern ICE to
| EVs, rather the biggest source of CO2 emissions are the
| countries people in the West are outsourcing to make cheap
| goods.
|
| 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.
| twoxproblematic wrote:
| cottager2 wrote:
| As a German citizen, you should be aware that your country
| just veto's sanctions on Russia so that they could keep the
| flow of natural gas coming. Your ex-Chancellor
| decommissioned your nuclear power plants so that you would
| buy more Russian gas, and he now is on the board of Gazprom
| and heads the company behind Nordstream 2. Also, petroleum
| cars are one of your biggest industries. Let he who is
| without sin cast the first stone.
| deutschewelle wrote:
| orangepurple wrote:
| Melio wrote:
| It happened due to reasons independent of CO2.
|
| Repeating this doesn't help the problem Germany is in
| right now. Independent of it Germany did push a lot into
| solar
| deutschewelle wrote:
| I never defended this it seems you have some other issue
| here
|
| which I care very little about
| birdyrooster wrote:
| You just spent paragraphs virtue signaling while turning
| up your nose at people less harmful than your own.
| Clearly you care enough to keep coming back you glutton
| for punishment :P
| zardo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think people are reading this, perhaps incorrectly, as
| you considering Germany and yourself to be on the outside
| of this phenomenon, rather than a part of it.
| cottager2 wrote:
| I was responding to this:
|
| > 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.
|
| Start by boycotting all German goods.
| Melio wrote:
| I have not stated my opinion on lithium production only the
| difference to oil.
|
| 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.
| deutschewelle wrote:
| Good response I will concede that lithium seems our best
| bet given the current situation but I think ICE cars
| still have lot of room for CO2 reduction. While we are on
| topic of cars, I would slap additional environmental tax
| for old classic cars or straight piped V8, V10, V12. One
| does not need so many cylinders to get from point A to B.
| Melio wrote:
| You know idle games?
|
| 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?
| bluGill wrote:
| For ICE we are chasing the final 0.1% improvements. There
| are a few of them left, but each round eliminates more
| from the future things to find. Even if they all work
| out, total we are looking at most a couple percent
| improvement.
|
| 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.
| deutschewelle wrote:
| 80% is the theoretical limit and we are struggling to get
| past 30% but I forsee dramatic economic incentives to
| increase this a lot higher. Doing so might raise costs of
| production however
| another wrote:
| David Roberts and Canary have some worthwhile articles on this
| question
|
| https://www.canarymedia.com/minerals-and-clean-energy-a-seri...
|
| looking at lithium along with other relevant minerals.
| [deleted]
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| there is lots of alternative battery tech in research right now
| for the very reason you propose
| iostream24 wrote:
| Seawater-> extract the lithium as a useful byproduct from
| desalination plants
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provi...
|
| https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawat...
|
| https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/699652
| londons_explore wrote:
| Most desalination plants only concentrate the ocean salts a
| little.
|
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| But if you're already going to extract from seawater, you
| might as well take whatever head state you can get.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| What is the process by which drinking water is extracted
| from seawater, and does that give you any savings at all
| with regards to a goal of extracting minerals?
| HPsquared wrote:
| If it's unlawful to discharge brine to the ocean (that is,
| concentrated seawater), it'd still probably be more
| economical to just dilute it before discharge (they probably
| already do this).
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| I can't read the article but Texas has tens of thousands of brine
| water wells that were created while looking for oil. An
| improvement in lithium extraction from brine could result in a
| significant economic benefit for Texas.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| In case you wanted to, use uBlock and disable all 3rd party
| scripts. The article will load.
|
| EDIT: https://archive.is/BjQGm
| enchiridion wrote:
| Maybe that's partially why Tesla moved?
| runnerup wrote:
| Definitely not. Tesla is not in the lithium extraction
| business and even if they were there's not much point to
| being right next door.
| YaBomm wrote:
| atlantas wrote:
| Let's say we decided to go all-in on transforming the US to 100%
| renewable. Solar, wind and enough batteries to ensure continued
| power for times lacking sun/wind. For all homes, businesses,
| industry, transportation.
|
| 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.
| danans wrote:
| > University of California: Can the Salton Sea geothermal field
| prevent the coming lithium shortage?.
| https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-g...
|
| 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.
| jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote:
| They are a little more theoretical at this point but there is
| also compressed air and mechanical (concrete blocks lifted by
| a crane) storage as well.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| concrete blocks are a really stupid battery. It's just a
| worse version of pumped hydro.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Does that include this kind of design:
| https://www.siemensgamesa.com/en-
| int/newsroom/2019/06/190612...
|
| > " _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 750degC. 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._ "
| zardo wrote:
| Thermal storage of various sorts looks pretty reasonable.
| I think it's constructing towers or digging holes to
| store gravitational potential energy that's being
| dismissed.
| cure wrote:
| It also has some significant advantages over hydro: can
| be built _anywhere_ , requires a small fraction of the
| space, doesn't destroy vast landscapes by putting them
| under water.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| concrete only is 2x more dense. To get the same amount of
| storage as pumped hydro, that means you need to use at
| least half as much space. If you see a cute design for
| lifting concrete that isn't about the same size as a
| lake, it's a scam.
| jl6 wrote:
| Maybe concrete lifting facilities _would_ be about the
| same size as a lake if you built thousands of them (one
| per small town?) and added all that mass up?
| danans wrote:
| You would pretty quickly lose any economies of scale if
| you had to replicate the motor/generator, hoisting
| mechanism, etc across thousands of lower capacity
| facilities. The whole idea behind concrete blocks is that
| the storage medium is common, cheap, and easy to scale
| up, but that ignores significant other challenges.
| jeffbee wrote:
| We don't really need lithium for large-scale storage at all.
| The advantages of lithium batteries in terms of density are
| important for transport but irrelevant in fixed operation.
| Also, the round-trip efficiency of the storage isn't terribly
| important if you can arrange for an abundance of carbon-
| neutral input, which we can. So grid-scale decarbonization
| isn't really dependent on lithium, because it could use other
| kinds of batteries like iron-air or whatever.
| CyberRage wrote:
| Yes! just that need to start mining massive amount of it.
|
| But there are batteries that don't rely on lithium and many
| other alternative technologies.
| nine_k wrote:
| There are several chemistries that are good for stationary
| batteries.
|
| 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.
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