
Lithium recovery tech from sea using dialysis with a Li-ionic superconductor - xoa
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011916414006560
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xoa
Research like this seems interesting in light of the increasing prominence of
lithium battery applications (such as the rapid payoff of Tesla's grid battery
response system in Australia). For now lithium is so cheap merely from natural
concentrations (particularly in the amounts needed for batteries vs other
components) that it's not even worth recycling. Standard mining may be able to
keep up with demand even as it dramatically scales. However, mines inherently
present environmental and geopolitical issues as well. As one of the most
common elements though hundreds of billions of tons of lithium exist in the
oceans (of course at low concentrations outside of hydrothermal vents), so
that would create effectively an ultimate ceiling on lithium pricing and
geopolitical posturing: if it ever became more costly (or more of a threat)
then oceanic extraction, any country in the world with coast (or allies with a
coast) would be able to go that way. If a combined plant could pull out other
dissolved ions as well and better amortize fixed costs that might also be a
boost.

Additionally if scalable extraction tech like this could be developed it'd
work well on our current concentrated brine sources too, and while more
expensive then natural evaporation it can work much, much faster. One of the
pricing issues with lithium on the current market isn't due to "running out"
but that the evaporation process takes 18-24 months and thus there is an
inherent significant lag time in demand/supply responses. Depending on the
cost, it might be worth it even for existing producers just to let them react
more quickly to fluctuations without having to deal with bigger buffers.

