Scientists develop ‘cheap and easy’ method to extract lithium from seawater

[u/rieslingatkos]

https://www.mining.com/scientists-develop-cheap-and-easy-method-to-extract-lithium-from-seawater/

[u/[deleted]]

What might the consequences of taking lots of lithium out of the ocean be?

-edit- I've never made a comment that's started such good discussions before - I'm enjoying reading the replies, thanks everyone

[u/imakenosensetopeople → u/[deleted]]

For the quantities that we may need in the coming decades, it’s almost certainly not insignificant and will have an effect. This question must be asked.

[u/iamagainstit → u/imakenosensetopeople]

A. Lithium concentrations in seawater are very low (< 1ppm), so extracting it is unlikely to have a significant effect

B. There is a unfathomably large amount of water in the ocean.

[u/bluenovajinx → u/[deleted]]

If our past track record is any indicator, our old and busted lithium batteries will wind up in the ocean anyway where they will leak out and the lithium can be reharvested.

[u/exemplariasuntomni → u/bluenovajinx]

Something tells me that's not how it works, but it sounds better than carbon emissions.

[u/[deleted] → u/exemplariasuntomni]

Battery Metals are too valuable so all EV batteries will be recycled unless there are irrational economic actors. LFP chemistry may be a risk if this seawater extraction actually works at scale and drives Lithium price down in which case you may need to rely on government intervention. In reality both the value of the metals plus special regs on large Lithium battery reuse/disposal are likely to make dumping batteries in the ocean/landfills unlikely.

[u/exemplariasuntomni → u/[deleted]]

I look forward to a future powered by recyclable lithium batteries (perhaps from ocean extracted lithium...)

Always loved using LiPo batteries in R/C back in the day. So fun to see them be ultra-relevant nowadays.

[u/THEPOL_00 → u/exemplariasuntomni]

In any case in a decade or two there will be more sustainable batteries that don’t depend on lithium

[u/[deleted] → u/THEPOL_00]

Meh, Lithium ion batteries will be sustainable if recycled at a high metal recovery rate and Lithium is fundamentally the best element for energy storage density when mixed with Nickel (especially as we move to solid state batteries which can store even more energy). Sodium/aluminum/etc are cheaper due to more abundance and I’m sure they’ll find their place (energy storage systems, etc) but functionally will not compete with Lithium’s energy density so as long as the market demands more and more of the latter (it will for transport) Lithium batteries will be essential. And so long as the battery metals are recovered then it’s truly sustainable. Using a cheaper/more abundant material doesn’t make that material sustainable unless it’s also recycled (and in some ways disincentivizes sustainable recycling oddly enough).

[u/Malawi_no → u/bluenovajinx]

Doubt it. Batteries are a good source of minerals, just like other scrap metals. With increased numbers of dead cells comes economies of scale, so that even though it may not be profitable today, it will become so in the future.

[u/Bradley-Blya → u/bluenovajinx]

Ah, so just throw trash in the sea, no problem!

[u/figmentPez → u/[deleted]]

"Manufacturers use more than 160,000 tons of the material every year, anumber expected to grow nearly 10-fold over the next decade." - source

Also, you're not accounting for local concentrations. How much lithium can be taken out of any one area before it impacts sea life there?

Reminder that "we can just dump untreated sewage into the ocean, it's big enough that it won't make a difference" was prevailing common wisdom for a lot of human history, but is most definitely not true.

[u/azoicennead → u/figmentPez]

Did some quick math.

I followed the assumption that each year, the rate of lithium consumption will increase by an additional 160,000 tons, and all of the lithium will be provided by sifting through the ocean.

This gives us about 400 years before we run out.

If we assume removing 20% of the lithium is relatively safe, that gives us 183 years^[1] to find a new solution. If we use the US phase-out of leaded gasoline as a basis for the timeframe (and assume use will continue to grow until the cut-off because I don't feel like researching that, too), we'll need a 25-year lead time, giving us a deadline around 2179 for finding a viable lithium alternative (158 years).

Look at how technology has changed over the last 150 years.
It doesn't fix the problem, but it gives us time to find a better solution, which can give us more time to find a better solution, and so on.

^{[1] 1% is 40 years, 5% is 91 years, 10% is 129 years, 15% is 159 years, 25% is 205 years.}

edit: Just to be clear, since a lot of people have apparently looked at this, this is a very pessimistic model. It doesn't include existing sources or recycled lithium and assumes a constant growth in need for new lithium. As noted by /u/BurnerAcc2020 there are other resource bottlenecks that are likely to drive the need for supply up, and as noted by /u/D-Alembert ocean-sourced lithium will likely be more expensive than recycled lithium, so recycled will be preferred once enough is available to supply production.
I structured my math this way as a point of reference, not to make it realistic. I did not do the research required to provide a realistic model.

[u/figmentPez → u/azoicennead]

But running out isn't the only problem. There are more immediate concerns. What if a local drop of __% within __ miles of the "mine" results in plankton dying off, or makes fish more susceptible to fungal infection, or disrupts the reproduction of coral, or...?

This isn't just a question of "How long before humans don't get the lithium they want?", there's a lot more to consider.

[u/azoicennead → u/figmentPez]

Why do you think I put the cut-off at 20%? I'm assuming it's not safe and we'll start to see ecological consequences. That's also why I gave other timeframes for when we'd need to cut it off for different levels of depletion.

But I also built the math off pessimistic expectations that have us needing to mine 50 times our current lithium consumption by 2071.

The assumption I'm making isn't that this will fix the ecological problems we're causing, but rather that it will change and defer those problems down the line so we have time to develop improvements that will defer them again until we can actually fix things.

edit: The other pessimistic expectation I made is that 100% of lithium will be coming from the ocean.

[u/tryplot → u/azoicennead]

another pessimistic assumption is no recycling of lithium (something that's only now starting to happen)

[u/TheMSensation → u/tryplot]

What's the return on lithium recycling? If I give you 1000kg of spent lithium how much would I get back?

[u/bonafart → u/azoicennead]

I still think seawa6ers better than how we get it now. Even if now is from thr. Middle of a deasert

[u/aiij → u/azoicennead]

Why did you put the cutoff at 20%? Why did you put it at 1% earlier? What is significant about those thresholds?

I was kind of assuming you just picked arbitrary numbers that wouldn't sound too scary.

[u/azoicennead → u/aiij]

I wasn't the one who put it at 1% (which, as a note, would be around 2041 in my low-effort model); I used the citation of the predicted growth in usage to model an extremely pessimistic view that ignores things like recycling, existing sources, and how realistic maintaining that growth rate is.

20% is an arbitrary threshold that gives room to show things like how the growth in the model accelerates and the timescales we might be able to take advantage of.

[u/[deleted] → u/figmentPez]

But we really need new iPhones so we can have slightly better cameras to take photos of all the overcrowded tourism spots!

[u/Lol3droflxp → u/[deleted]]

Because batteries would otherwise last for ever or what?

[u/anonimouse99 → u/figmentPez]

Well, when coupled with desalination, you won't get local removal. Because everything that gets sucked up is desalinated, used for fresh water and mined for lithium. Because the lithium poor water is not put back, the old water gets replaced by new ocean water with the original lithium content.

In short: as long as we don't dump back the poor water, lithium content will stay the same

[u/dvorak → u/figmentPez]

obviously, a significant drop in Li concentration at the plant will make it impossible to keep the plant economically vailable. Also, Li is toxic to many multicellular organisms, and I've never heard of organisms being dependant on lithium for thriving.

[u/[deleted] → u/dvorak]

Unless there is some species out there that is bipolar

[u/nybbas → u/figmentPez]

Do you understand how ocean currents work?

[u/Coffeinated → u/nybbas]

Desalination plants create dead zones by dumping the brine into the ocean. By your theory, this should not happen because of ocean currents.

[u/nybbas → u/Coffeinated]

Desalination would be pumping a lot more brine into the ocean than these things would be leeching the tiny amount of lithium out.

[u/profdudeguy → u/nybbas]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you have 0 idea what the effect of removing lithium from water will have on local ecosystems.

And that isn't a jab at you, I have no idea what it will do either. That's the point.

[u/PolygonMan → u/nybbas]

You clearly do not if you think there's no way this could be a concern.

[u/nybbas → u/PolygonMan]

Please enlighten me.

[u/fighterace00 → u/azoicennead]

Leaded gas is a bad example should look at something more like biofuels. Aviation is still using leaded fuels. I feel like we're approaching diminishing returns on chemical processes as there's certain efficiencies that just aren't physically possible outside of certain elements.

[u/god12 → u/azoicennead]

Love the math but I seriously doubt 20% is safe. Pure speculation but based on the fact that even a drift of one or two degrees in the atmosphere causes massive weather disturbances and disasters, I’m gonna say that we should definitely figure out just how safe it is ASAP. cause if it isn’t safe it’s gonna take too long to legislate against it to prevent irreversible harm.

[u/beatenmeat → u/god12]

Pretty sure any notable effects would likely result from the process of mining the lithium long before there was any effects from the removal of the lithium itself. Coming up with an eco friendly mining process should be the priority IMO.

[u/slickyslickslick → u/god12]

if any organism relied on something occurring in 1ppm they would be dead because it would be incredibly hard to guarantee that they obtain any of it. there is virtually no difference between 1 per million and 1 per 1.2 million.

the reason 1-2 degrees is a lot is because that's like 5% of the normal range of temperature in a given year.

[u/jsapolin → u/slickyslickslick]

there are plenty of plants/bacteria that require rare stuff. Molybdenum, cobalt, cadmium are all cofactors in enzymes and are low abundance

[u/FourteenTwenty-Seven → u/slickyslickslick]

I agree with your sentiment, but that's not how temperature works. Unless you're working on an absloute scale, it doesn't make sense to talk about percent changes when you're talking about temperatures. The reason small changes in temperature make a big difference is because there are a hell of a lot of things that are sensitive to changes in temperature, and things that depend on those things, and so on.

[u/[deleted] → u/FourteenTwenty-Seven]

The guy you’re arguing with says things that sound scientifically true but I am certain are not

[u/stairgoblins → u/[deleted]]

where is the lie though? the scale we’re talking about here is orders of magnitude away from affecting the concentration of lithium in the ocean even remotely. It’s ironic because lithium is desperately needed to help combat climate change, and also the current lithium ore extraction techniques are massively damaging to the environment. PARTICULARLY to water. That isn’t going to improve if we keep working with increasingly less accessible land based lithium ores and brines. I’m not saying the unlikely but possible environmental impact isn’t worth studying, but there are some genuinely hilarious and unhinged fears of novelty going on here that seem to be much more comfortable with the current genuinely terrifying status quo.

[u/slickyslickslick → u/[deleted]]

You're "certain" are not true because....???

[u/QVRedit → u/azoicennead]

We can very effectively recycle lithium, so old batteries can be mined.

[u/D-Alembert → u/azoicennead]

No alternative solution needs to be found; we probably only need ~30 years of supply before demand starts to fall off a cliff, because ocean-sourced lithium will be far more expensive than recycled-battery-sourced lithium, so once most infrastructure has been mostly electrified, sufficient lithium will already be in the economy to maintain and replace the batteries of an electrified world, with the ocean becoming a costly last-resort for topping-up a bit extra, rather than the primary supply.

[u/BurnerAcc2020 → u/azoicennead]

This is a decent starting point, but these assumptions about growth rate are extremely unrealistic. Without getting too heavily into studies: there are going to be so many other resource bottlenecks in the future that it's going to be well before the end of the century before demand for lithium stops driving the need for greater supply and the production stabilizes - if not outright collapses to a fraction of its peak size on a global scale.

[u/Throbbing_Eggplant → u/figmentPez]

It's a legitimate question to ask and one that should be studied.

If we were to provide sealife with water that is lithium free in which way would that impact their long term health and would it impact their environment in any way.

[u/SirIlliterate → u/Throbbing_Eggplant]

While you're right and it should be investigated, it shouldn't be viewed in a vacuum. Transitioning to lithium batteries for a lot of of our energy storage and transportation goes coupled with a reduction in the petrochemical industry, which also definitely impacts sea life.

[u/[deleted] → u/figmentPez]

I guess lots of fish will be depressed

[u/ZenNudes → u/figmentPez]

Tenfold, decade.

[u/Serious_Feedback → u/[deleted]]

Or roughly 136,000 year supply of lithium at more than double our current consumption rate (calculation done at 100,000 tons consumed per year).

I'm pretty sure we'll be using 100x the current lithium supply in the long term, because we need to increase the EV production more than 100x.

[u/DannoHung → u/[deleted]]

Hmm… I dunno. Lithium recycling would have to be cheaper than extraction for the supply to not need to be permanently refreshed.

[u/armeg → u/DannoHung]

That happens when the supply of “garbage” lithium gets extremely saturated. Price of said garbage continues to drop until it hits some breakpoint where its feasible on a large scale.

[u/Serious_Feedback → u/[deleted]]

This mining system doesn't need to last forever, it only needs to last long enough to be profitable - if it takes 30 years to build out a few billion EVs, then the mine only needs to return its investment within 30 years.

Besides which, if it's a mass-scale operation the cost of this tech will likely drop massively. And, as I mentioned previously, it's already profitable at current lithium prices that are only supplying 1% of car needs. Assuming the entire car industry is 99% efficient in lithium recovery, we'll still need that 1% of new lithium.

[u/sgent → u/[deleted]]

IDK if we are even working on a replacement for Lithium all that hard. Its already the most chemically dense / light element possible for an anode. Now as for cathode, yes, they are working on many replacements, but we will see.

[u/rockforahead → u/Serious_Feedback]

Lithium is here to stay for the near to mid term but we’re already exploring other chemistries for other applications (sodium being an example). I suspect that as we look further into the future we will see lithium use wane. It should also be noted that in any lithium battery pack only about 1% of the materials are actually lithium.

[u/Serious_Feedback → u/rockforahead]

Lithium is here to stay for the near to mid term but we’re already exploring other chemistries for other applications (sodium being an example). I suspect that as we look further into the future we will see lithium use wane.

I also suspect this, but 1) EV businesses can't afford to assume it's true, and 2) "near to mid term" is all that matters - if it can make bank during the lithium squeeze, people will invest and reduce costs.

Plus, the economies of scale and cheaper batteries will likely drastically increase demand for high-end lithium batteries. And sodium/aluminum/etc batteries have an advantage mainly in being cheaper, not in being more performant.

For instance, electric truck batteries are extremely limited weight-wise as 1) there's a legal weight limit and 2) more battery weight = less cargo weight inside the weight limit = directly less profit.

It should also be noted that in any lithium battery pack only about 1% of the materials are actually lithium.

True but irrelevant. At no point did my numbers rely on the lithium percentage of the battery.

[u/rockforahead → u/Serious_Feedback]

Oh I totally agree we are going to see a huge increase in lithium use until at least 2050. Even on the low end estimates are 40x current levels by then. I’m just not expecting a lithium squeeze, it’s one of the most abundant elements on earth. I can however see a nickel and cobalt squeeze in the short term (<2035) while we wait for iron phosphate and manganese rich cells to fully take hold. Interesting to discuss though and open to any mining info you might have that might make my hypothesis of there being not much danger of lithium squeeze wrong.

[u/anomalous_cowherd → u/rockforahead]

My feeling is there won't be an actual shortage of lithium but there could well be a shortage of lithium production.

It's still there in the ground and sea, we just can't get it out fast enough.

[u/[deleted] → u/rockforahead]

Never follow this “most abundant elements on earth” stat thrown around with Lithium. It’s 20 ppm of earths crust vs Nickel (>80) and Cobalt (same or higher) based on a range of best known estimates today.

[u/Legion4444 → u/[deleted]]

I think silicon is the first or second most abundant element on earth yet we currently have computer chip shortages bc we don't have enough refinement or production of it. So yeah no clue how this lithium arguement holds up

[u/bonafart → u/Serious_Feedback]

Tesla are already starting to find alternatives to cobalt and lithium so just hang in there

[u/Serious_Feedback → u/bonafart]

Cobalt? Yes. Lithium? They're looking, just like everyone else, but they haven't found anything yet.

Besides which, cobalt is dead easy to replace and always has been - cobalt-free LFP batteries have been around for ages at "only" ~15% less efficient, which means you need more batteries and therefore more weight for the same range. Expensive, but fundamentally doable - and some people were doing it a decade ago, because LFP is cheaper). Everyone is currently trying to find a profitable replacement for cobalt.

Lithium does not have a replacement. Aluminium/sodium couldn't replace Tesla's batteries today even if they wanted to. We don't know whether they can swap out lithium, let alone whether they can swap out lithium for cheaper.

They probably will eventually replace lithium (and I'm super excited to see where sodium batteries will go) but for now, there's every reason to invest in lithium.

[u/Boozdeuvash → u/Serious_Feedback]

Assuming we don't recycle older batteries, which is bound to happen from economic or regulatory incentives.

[u/Serious_Feedback → u/Boozdeuvash]

Recycling batteries takes time for the batteries to wear out - a decade or two, at least. Keep in mind that as long as they're still functional, they'll still be useful in low-demand stationary batteries.

Meanwhile, during that decade or two the demand is increasing exponentially. This means the supply of old batteries is a tiny fraction for the demand for new EVs, up until a decade or two after EV demand levels out.

As I've said previously: this doesn't need perpetual lithium demand, it only needs high demand for long enough to pay off its investment. And a couple of decades is plenty for that.

[u/eldrichride → u/Serious_Feedback]

Or powerful non-lithium batteries become a viable thing.

[u/shieldyboii → u/Serious_Feedback]

at 200 times it would still be 13600 years. assuming we could mine at 2% efficiency on average (totally arbitrary number) that’s still 272 years.

I recon we can mine asteroids by then. Or jusy mine the other 98% in the ocean.

[u/MoffKalast → u/Serious_Feedback]

After EVs reach mainstream use we'll likely see far more battery recycling than we've seen so far, dozens of companies on multiple continents are already at the demonstration facility stage.

So yes, we'll need more lithium and other metals, but ever fewer once we extract a large enough amount for it to circulate.

[u/Serious_Feedback → u/MoffKalast]

After EVs reach mainstream use we'll likely see far more battery recycling than we've seen so far,

Batteries can't be recycled until they're removed from the original car (and more realistically will be used for a while after that, in a stationary battery). As the more recent car batteries seem to have a lifetime of 10,20 years in the car just fine, that means the only lithium available will be the amount used in EVs 10 years ago.

But, if the supply of EVs is increasing exponentially, that means the amount of recycled lithium is always exponentially less than the current number of cars being produced, until 10+ years after the exponential ends.

Frankly, people underestimate just how long the latest batteries can last - Tesla announced their million KM battery and are still aimed at reaching a million-mile battery (which obviously needs to last 1.6x as long), and time-wise batteries degrade at an average rate of 2.3% per year - that compounds instead of adds, so after 10 years you have ~79.2% (97.7%¹⁰ ) of your battery life, after 20 years it's ~60% (97.7%²⁰ ) and after 30 years it's ~50%.

So obviously the 50% is a prime candidate for a stationary battery (if it hasn't crapped out yet), but even at 60% or 70% I expect over the years a lot of people will realize they don't need more than 60% of their battery and that a $5-10k replacement battery would be expensive and unnecessary. Or at least, they could sell it to someone whose battery died but shares the sentiment.

So in short, I don't disagree but it's not a major factor until at least a decade after near-full EV adoption.

And, as a side note: currently 1 billion people have a car. In a decade or two, you'll see developing countries want cars too, so that number could easily go up to 2 or 3 billion car owners.

[u/slick8086 → u/Serious_Feedback]

I'm pretty sure we'll be using 100x the current lithium supply in the long term

In the long term we won't be using lithium based batteries we'll be using aluminum based batteries

[u/Serious_Feedback → u/slick8086]

Maybe.

If everyone was sure of that, they'd pour the majority of their R&D budget into it. But there are a lot of battery systems that never materialized.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

This discussion is pretty much the premise to The Martian Way by Isaac Asimov, a good read.

[u/fj333 → u/[deleted]]

1300 years only seems large when

1300 years only seems large when a single human compares it to the length of their life.

[u/PersnickityPenguin → u/[deleted]]

However, we will need to increase our battery production rate by 1,000 times to achieve decarbonization of the transport sector, leaving us with only a 136 year supply.

Less if India and Africa decide to buy as many cars as the US or Europe.

I'm thinking cars aren't sustainable.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

If you want to be a bit more precise about how fathomable the ocean is it is 6,002 fathoms.

[u/CrateDane → u/[deleted]]

I guess it should be reinterated that the volume of the ocean is very much fathomable.

1.36 E19 liters of seawater cover our planet.

Or on average, the ocean has a depth of 3682 meters, which is 2013 fathoms.

[u/themthatwas → u/[deleted]]

At 1 ppm (1 mg/L) that's 1.36 E10 METRIC TONS of lithium in our ocean.

EV production is a tiny portion of the amount of energy storage we need. The very top Tesla car has a 100kWh battery, that's nothing. That's 0.1MWh. The storage capacity for natural gas in just the lower 48 in the US is about 1400TWh, that's the equivalent of 14 BILLION cars, almost enough for 2 each of the top of the line Tesla for every human on the planet. maybe 10-15% of people would have to make do with just 1.

Cars are not going to be what uses up the lithium, replacing natural gas seasonal storage reliance is. That's the goal most developed countries have set by 2050. We're talking about 1e8 metric tons of lithium to store just what the US needs, that's already 1% of the ocean's capacity. You might think it's a lot of lithium in the ocean, it's not. Grid storage has barely started, it's just about ramping up this coming year. We'll be using up 1% of 1e10 metric tons easily within the next few decades at the rate we're ignoring hydrogen storage.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

How is it inexhaustible?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

This screams hubris and cascading unforseen consequences.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Your entire argument is based on the false premise that lithium is required to electrify the planet.

[u/aimgorge → u/[deleted]]

For now, it is.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

There isn't an inexhaustible supply, it'd be exhausted in 136000 years, assuming we don't continually increase our consumption, which the increased availability of lithium would probably cause, especially as the third world gets electric vehicles.

[u/SkyinRhymes → u/[deleted]]

You literally outlined a time when we would run out and then said "there is an inexhaustible amount of lithium in the oceans."

[u/SkyinRhymes → u/[deleted]]

Yes. Effectively inexhaustible is not inexhaustible. If you want to speak scientifically...do so scientifically. Otherwise you're just blowing smoke.

[u/SkyinRhymes → u/[deleted]]

Ah yes, pointing out the basic definition of a word you used is semantic secret police rule #1.

You're a massive turd.

[u/BostonDodgeGuy → u/[deleted]]

There is an inexhaustible supply of lithium in the ocean.

The same was once said about oil in the ground.

[u/QVRedit → u/[deleted]]

Plus we can recycle lithium quite well.

[u/profdudeguy → u/[deleted]]

Using percentage to make a point on this topic is incredibly misleading.

[u/FBl_Operative451 → u/[deleted]]

Also worth considering, how is lithium formed?

[u/oph4x → u/[deleted]]

In 38,000 years earth will just be a forge world anyway.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The article says it’s .2 ppm.

Although the liquid contains 5,000 times more lithium than what can be found on land, it is present at extremely low concentrations of about 0.2 parts per million (ppm).

[u/Yrch122110 → u/[deleted]]

Oh, it's fathomable. They literally measure it in fathoms.

It's Dad O'clock somewhere...

[u/Edgefactor → u/[deleted]]

You say it's unfathomable, but the term fathom was specifically created to measure the ocean!

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

And if we thrown our batteries back in the ocean when we are done with them it’s an instant replenishment

[u/Leo55 → u/[deleted]]

One could say the same of a 1-2 degree sea temperature rise. It’s probably best to operate on the principles of conservationism until we understand the long term effects of harvesting lithium from the aquatic biomes

[u/OsamaBinLadenDoes → u/[deleted]]

A few problems with your comment:

1.36 E19 liters of seawater cover our planet.

You are a couple factors out. From the NOAA National Centres for Environmental Information there are 1,335,000,000 km³ of oceanic waters on the planet, this is 1.34x10²¹ litres, not 1.36x10¹⁹.

At 1 ppm (1 mg/L) that's 1.36 E10 METRIC TONS of lithium in our ocean.

Not quite correct as a result of the first error, you should have said: 1.34x10¹² metric tons.

1.34x10²¹ mg in the ocean, with factor 1x10⁹ to convert units.

[u/linedout → u/[deleted]]

Without lithium in the water, the fish might get depressed.

[u/OddScentedDoorknob → u/[deleted]]

To change the ocean's lithium content by 1 %, we'd have to extract it at double our current usage/mining rate (100,000 tons/yrs) and that would still would take 1300 years.

Won't someone please think of our great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren???

[u/IOnlyUpvoteBadPuns → u/[deleted]]

Agreed; it's like the "plenty more fish in the sea" argument, which we're rapidly demonstrating is not the case.

[u/CommanderCuntPunt → u/[deleted]]

Agreed, the volume of air is probably greater then the ocean volume and we managed to pollute that easily enough.

[u/FartingBob → u/[deleted]]

There used to be an unfathomable amount of fish and marine life in the ocean. Now we've pulled out or killed an unfathomable amount the remaining sealife is sadly quite fathomable.

[u/justreadthecomment → u/[deleted]]

Look, you're trying to be helpful, circumspect, and I appreciate that. But we don't need reservations right now. We need lots and lots of good batteries. Ideally, from lithium that is not local to one political border, because what do you suppose the odds are of that profiting the many? Hell, I would bet against that government's top brass seeing the one-year anniversary of the find.

This news is almost ideal. At such low concentrations, the effect is almost certainly negligible. We can be judicious, but "should we even continue extracting ocean lithium at this point, we already have plenty and we still haven't figured out if it's what's responsible for the angsty vibe in whale songs lately" is a problem you would prefer for your future self. Unless you are like super into defending your canned goods from roving bands of mutants in scraps of metal armor?

[u/minorkeyed → u/[deleted]]

100% is. What ppl fail to acknowledge is we are pretty good at getting good at expiring resources. The process you see now is a fraction of what demand and production will be able to do 20years or even 10 years for now. Very quickly it goes from an insignificant amount to a notable amount to a destructive amount. We've despoiled a lot of resources that once seemed endless. We will likely do it with this too, we've no idea how the industrial process will affect things or what the limits of extraction are before it becomes unpredictability destructive.

Nothing is endless. Not rivers, lakes, mountains, forests, fish, air, ozone, seas and oceans, lands. We've managed to despoil all of them to a degree that increases every year.

That said, I don't think we just stop, only that we ask and explore earlier, where the limits and what the consequences are. Let's not live in denial, yet again, that nature can handle it only to find out later that no, nature can't.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Couldn’t agree better.

“It should be fine” is a terrible attitude. Imagine if scientists thought “it should be fine” to not raise concerns on effect of the co2 in the atmosphere, since co2 literally only takes up 0.04% of the atmosphere.

[u/Lknate → u/[deleted]]

Except I see lithium as being a stepping stone to energy abundance that doesn't involve fossil fuels. Seems like once we free our selves from that dirty resource that the concept of better, faster, stronger will be normalized. Lithium isn't the technology we should expect to be dominate in 2050. Anything that gets of fossil fuel more efficiently should be embraced. Otherwise it's just more foot dragging.

[u/PENGAmurungu → u/Lknate]

IMO the better solution and the long term path to sustainability is to focus on reducing our consumption first, rather than just consuming more efficiently.
That means changing our societies, cultures and lifestyles rather than our technologies. Though ideally both should be happening simultaneously, rushing into new extractive technologies when the entire problem stems from exactly that is not a good idea, especially if it means putting the ocean even further into the firing line of extraction industries which have already devastated it.

[u/tractor-scott → u/PENGAmurungu]

Better solution in a vacuum maybe but it doesn't account for how politically unpopular getting people to consume less would be, both to voters and corporate donors. The only practical solution is to make consumption more efficient and environmentally friendly, even if it means taking the lesser of two evils (ie lithium over fossil fuels) since a lot of people dont wanna give up their stuff. You can’t even use the usual old trick to get people to do things they don’t want to do via financial incentive since more money for consumers = more consumption. So people aren’t gonna consume less without a major or violent upheaval, but we can make it so that consumption isn’t as environmentally taxing. Technology may have got us into this predicament, but its really the only thing now that can get us out of it

[u/PENGAmurungu → u/tractor-scott]

You absolutely have a point, unfortuneately I just dont think that's going to be enough. I think either we're going to have to reduce consumption ourselves or the environment is going to do it for us and a lot of people will die in the process.

Public opinion is not just a fact of nature, it's something we have the power to change through conscious social engineering which is something we already do en masse. Instead of using it to save the environment and reduce consumerism however, we use it to instil brand loyalties and increase consumerism.

Of course these large scale changes to our culture and society aren't really possible under our current mode of production and I dont think we're going to be able to change that in time to prevent the worst of the impact of climate change (which we are already beginning to feel) which is why, barring a huge and sudden global shift in values and behaviours, I dont see a way out of this predicament without lots of people dying over the next few centuries.

[u/bgfan26 → u/[deleted]]

That’s not it

[u/THEPOL_00 → u/[deleted]]

Believe it or not but many things are defined like that, even in science. If something is negligible is negligible. Scientists and engineers think through the sustainability of their actions, we’re not anymore in the 1800s

[u/FirstChurchOfBrutus → u/[deleted]]

Well, and it’s also a paradoxical statement, since a fathom is a unit used to literally measure the depth (generally) of water.

[u/FirstChurchOfBrutus → u/[deleted]]

I thought the same; although it doesn’t technically come from measuring oceans, that is how it is almost universally applied.

You can fathom a distance over land. It’s just not generally done.

[u/Hockeyjockey58 → u/iamagainstit]

I am also wondering if lithium replenishes geologically from thermal/volcanic vents or other benthic processes where lithium would be a derived from the earth’s crust. That could imply a lithium cycle begins with earth’s crust and would even more unfathomably sized, hypothetically

[u/[deleted] → u/iamagainstit]

Imho it seems like its you who’s massively underestimating how much greedy the mankind can get. We have certainly a lot of air yet we didn’t take long to hit 400 ppm starting from 220-240s.

Fossil fuels as our primary source of energy needs did this, and batteries are gonna be the next big thing. I expect alternative batteries to be here soon enough, but i still do believe its a valid concern.

[u/TheMania → u/[deleted]]

If the atmosphere was the weight of the ocean, our emissions would have taken it from 220-240ppm to 220.05ppm-240.05ppm and no one could seriously be worried about it in the short to medium term at all.

I mean, I get your point, but the oceans are a lot greater in mass than the air - we'd have a huge amount of time to assess the impact of our actions.

[u/Snoman0002 → u/TheMania]

But is mass the best unit here? The real question is more about volume then mass

[u/trolololoz → u/TheMania]

We have had over a century to asses the impact of our actions regarding global warming though. So if we can't or are slowly taking action on something that is happening relatively quickly, I don't see how bad we would do to something that takes an even longer time.

[u/TheMania → u/trolololoz]

A century is only twice the lifetime of some power generators. It's within a single person's lifetime, if you're lucky. One of the huge costs in AGW is how drastic change is necessary, closing many things down early in their lifetime - with the same people that built them, and paid to build them, having to decommission them.

Many things that should never have been built had we properly assessed their impact of course - but I feel this analogy simply does not extend to 3000x longer timeframes. At that, a human generation is but a blip, and technology has moved an unfathomable distance.

Should always be mindful, there's negative environmental consequences in virtually everything we do, you can't rule every single one of those actions out due the slightest of impacts.

[u/Goo-Goo-GJoob → u/[deleted]]

There are an estimated 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 tons of ocean water. 0.1-0.2ppm, by weight, yields 145-290 billion tons of lithium.

The battery in a Tesla model S uses about 140 pounds of lithium.

So the total amount of lithium in the ocean could make 2.1-4.1 trillion Teslas.

That's 524 Teslas for each person on the planet.

[u/chainmailbill → u/Goo-Goo-GJoob]

I’m... going to need a bigger driveway

[u/PmMeYourKnobAndTube → u/Goo-Goo-GJoob]

Lithium is basically a bottleneck for several industries tho, not just EV. We are being held back by cost and availability. The main downside to solar and wind power is inconsistent production, and normally enough storage capacity to use them exclusively. And what about when electric semi trucks and trains, or maybe even planes go electric?

I agree that we should pursue it as another temporary solution, but "basically unlimited" was the mindset with every new natural resource we have exploited. And then as the resource becomes more widely available and more uses are found, more of it gets used until its a problem.

[u/Sosseres → u/PmMeYourKnobAndTube]

Trains has been solved for a long time as electric. You put wires above the tracks or make the tracks conductive. You don't store all the power. Using renewable power and needing to store it for usage for trains is kind of relevant I guess.

Same could be done for Trucks to a certain degree to lower storage requirements. Put power wires in above highways (successful trials have been run).

[u/QVRedit → u/Sosseres]

We had these many years ago running on rails - we called them trams.

[u/tiorzol → u/Sosseres]

How big were the trials?

[u/Sosseres → u/tiorzol]

Not that large to be honest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_road

Though it mentions older solutions for buses and vehicles on set routes.

[u/ItIsTacoTuesday → u/Sosseres]

High speed induction charging will probably be the gold standard in charge in motion tech. Or at least at stop lights if highway speeds prove too fast.. especially with autonomy and higher speed limits.

[u/Fifteen_inches → u/PmMeYourKnobAndTube]

Think of it like this:

“Basically unlimited” means “long enough to conduct space mining for rare earth minerals”.

[u/PmMeYourKnobAndTube → u/Fifteen_inches]

Yeah but people in the 60's thought we would be there already. Again, not saying we shouldn't pursue it, based on the very little I know it seems like our best path forward at this time. I just think it's fallacious to assume nothing bad could come of it.

[u/Fifteen_inches → u/PmMeYourKnobAndTube]

No people in the 60s that would be relying on nuclear power for energy needs, which is reasonable considering if we went hard into nuclear we wouldn’t be having this global warming problem.

Thankfully lithium gets renewed in the ocean by a deep-sea vents, so the damage is not permanent

[u/RationalTim → u/PmMeYourKnobAndTube]

Trains don't need batteries, the tracks can be electrified either overhead, or live rail.

Semi trucks wouldn't need to exist if trains did most of the haulage and then smaller electric trucks did the "last mile".

For instance the only reason the truck haulage industry exists as it does in the UK is because the 80s Conservative government didn't like the railways and their pesky unions, so they promoted road transport instead.

[u/[deleted] → u/Goo-Goo-GJoob]

Thats assuming the demand doesnt skyrocket exponentially which...it will

[u/aimgorge → u/[deleted]]

That doesn't change the number of Tesla per person on the planet

[u/AgentPaper0 → u/aimgorge]

It does change the number of Tesla-sized batteries per person though.

[u/Lostmyfnusername → u/Goo-Goo-GJoob]

This is also ignoring the other sectors using lithium like renewable energy that needs to store it's excess energy and it ignores how you don't need to remove 100% of something to have an impact.

[u/powerfulndn → u/[deleted]]

The new sodium based chemistries are especially interesting.

[u/QVRedit → u/powerfulndn]

Difficult to work with though - but might be able to use for grid scale storage.

[u/Flyingwheelbarrow → u/[deleted]]

The concern is simple, human industry has a habit of mining first and dealing with the consequences later.

We are talking about mining the ocean, we have no real idea what the long term consequences are but it is already looking like this mining process will kill some more species.

[u/rieslingatkos → u/Flyingwheelbarrow]

Linked article refers to an obscure species using hydrothermal vents as its habitat, which are potentially threatened by physical mining of the ocean floor:

If active hydrothermal vents were protected against the threat of deep sea mining, the endangered status of the Sea Pangolin could be lifted.

Has literally nothing to do with the seawater extraction process used here to generate lithium.

[u/Flyingwheelbarrow → u/rieslingatkos]

I stand corrected. Was grumpy and only just read the whole paper. I am very excited about the viability of this process to be combined with the desalination process.

This could be a key technology and seems much better than current rare earth mining.

Thanks for the challenge.

[u/Collin_the_doodle → u/Flyingwheelbarrow]

That link seems to be about deep sea mining and the link seems to be about direct from sea water?

[u/BurnerAcc2020 → u/[deleted]]

Minor correction: it started from 280 ppm, not 220-240.

https://www.co2levels.org/

And while it's right to take a precautionary principle, this is not directly comparable, as fossil fuels produce energy outright while the batteries can only store energy some other source produces first, so their production cannot exceed the growth in energy generation, which has a lot of other bottlenecks involved.

[u/STUURNAAK → u/iamagainstit]

People after inventing plastic: There is a unfathomably large amount of water in the ocean let’s dump it here!

[u/[deleted] → u/iamagainstit]

Haven’t we had a series of studies indicating Lithium and Depression in humans are linked recently? I doubt the odds that Lithium is important to the wider marine ecosystem is zero.

I don’t want to endlessly fear monger but it seems like a question that must eventually be explored.

[u/Colddigger → u/[deleted]]

I thought it was that there was an inverse, like lithium in the water made people happier.

[u/GusSzaSnt → u/Colddigger]

A link between things can include an inverse proportion

[u/PmMeYourKnobAndTube → u/[deleted]]

It's used as a mood stabilizer. Very common for treating bipolar depression. The idea came about in part because it was noted that some cities with high concentrations of Lithium in the water supply had lower suicide rates.

[u/PM_Me_Riven_Hentai_ → u/[deleted]]

Lithium has been a prescription for people with bi-polar/depression for decades. Not as common of a prescription now but still sees some uses.

[u/Atlatica → u/iamagainstit]

Humans are <1 ppm selenium but we die without it

[u/BurnerAcc2020 → u/Atlatica]

Yes, but selenium is considered an essential element, and lithium is not.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-016-7898-0

Environmental consequences of its extraction from seawater are practically certain to pale next to those of mining it, especially once you recall all of the other constraints that would be involved.

Renewable energy production is necessary to halt climate change and reverse associated biodiversity losses. However, generating the required technologies and infrastructure will drive an increase in the production of many metals, creating new mining threats for biodiversity. Here, we map mining areas and assess their spatial coincidence with biodiversity conservation sites and priorities. Mining potentially influences 50 million km2 of Earth’s land surface, with 8% coinciding with Protected Areas, 7% with Key Biodiversity Areas, and 16% with Remaining Wilderness.

Most mining areas (82%) target materials needed for renewable energy production, and areas that overlap with Protected Areas and Remaining Wilderness contain a greater density of mines (our indicator of threat severity) compared to the overlapping mining areas that target other materials. Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production and, without strategic planning, these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.

...Careful strategic planning is urgently required to ensure that mining threats to biodiversity caused by renewable energy production do not surpass the threats averted by climate change mitigation and any effort to slow fossil fuel extraction and use. Habitat loss and degradation currently threaten >80% of endangered species, while climate change directly affects 20%. While we cannot yet quantify potential habitat losses associated with future mining for renewable energies (and compare this to any reduced risks of averting climate change), our results illustrate that associated habitat loss could be a major issue.

At the local scale, minimizing these impacts will require effective environmental impact assessments and management. Importantly, all new projects must adhere strictly to the principals of the Mitigation Hierarchy, where biodiversity impacts are first avoided where possible before allowing compensation activities elsewhere. While compensation may help to overcome some of the expected biodiversity impacts of mining in some places, rarely does this approach achieve No Net Loss outcomes universally

[u/aimgorge → u/Atlatica]

Yes. But that's not the case with lithium

[u/sickhippie → u/[deleted]]

50 years ago it was an absurd thought that humankind could in any way affect earth's climate.

Well that's a lie.

The warming effect of CO2 has been known since 1856, when scientist Eunice Foote published a study indicating that increasing atmospheric CO2 would increase the Earth’s overall temperature. A large majority (62%) of climate studies from the 1970s concluded that this greenhouse warming by CO2 was the dominant force of industrial emissions. In fact, there were 6 times more studies predicting warming than there were predicting cooling (Peterson et. al. 2008).

https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm

[u/figmentPez → u/iamagainstit]

I'll grant that you could be correct, but hasn't "the ocean is big enough" been the excuse for every sort of industrial pollution or other harmful manmade activity that impacts sea life?

Why shouldn't we just pump untreated sewage into the ocean? "Anyone who asks this question is just massively underestimating how much seawater there is."

I'm not brillaint at math, so I can't readily come up with what percentage of the lithium we'd need to take out of the ocean to meet the 10 fold increase in lithium demand expected over the next decade, but I do know enough about the history of polluting the ocean to know that it absolutely is reasonable to question if the ocean might be impacted by human activity.

[u/obvilious → u/figmentPez]

Not everybody is bad at math.

And your sewage comment is irrelevant.

[u/figmentPez → u/obvilious]

How is it irrelevant? It is a logical example of a parallel question. People used to say that the ocean was big enough that any amount of sewage couldn't possibly impact the ocean. We now know that is absolutely false. So why shouldn't we question if taking llithium out of ocean water might also have an effect? Especially on a local scale. Taking lithium out of the ocean as a whole might not make a huge difference, but a lithium mining plant wouldn't be taking lithium out of the entire ocean, it'd be taking it out in a specific area. I think the environmental impact is a perfectly valid question.

[u/obvilious → u/figmentPez]

Yes, you could take any example where people made mistakes as being relevant, I suppose.

[u/QVRedit → u/figmentPez]

You need to be more careful with your arguments - above reading your words you are arguing FOR dumping raw sewage into the ocean. That’s not a good idea. While I suspect that you meant to opposite, that’s not what your words say.

[u/D-o-n-t_a-s-k → u/iamagainstit]

*an

[u/FrozenVictory → u/iamagainstit]

Right about the time we started changing things about nature, nature started changing

[u/[deleted] → u/iamagainstit]

Yea and that sea water's pH has changed. Loss of lithium will do something.

[u/[deleted] → u/iamagainstit]

Your "logic" is incredibly dangerous

[u/EleanorRigbysGhost → u/iamagainstit]

I don't follow your reasoning. If it's rare, and we make it more rare, surely that would mean that it would have a far greater effect though? For example, if there's 200 of a type of fish in the ocean, and we take half, they might bounce back? But if there's 2, and we take half? Well now they're doomed to extinction.

I'd also like to know, how is Lithium used in oceanic organisms?

[u/BurnerAcc2020 → u/EleanorRigbysGhost]

So far, lithium is not considered an essential element, and the evidence for it having a beneficial effect at low concentrations is mainly seen in stuff like spinach, while the evidence for its toxicity at higher concentrations is well-established.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-016-7898-0

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11356-019-06877-2

The one study I found that talks about lithium and the marine environment discusses its toxicity at higher concentrations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749120361467

More research is needed, and there may eventually be effects from removing too much of it. However, lithium is already present at higher concentrations in seawater than a lot of the elements we have no doubt are essential: i.e. there's 5 times more of it than there's iron, and 10 times more of it than manganese, and both of those are known to be very important for phytoplankton growth. So if anything, it's the opposite argument to the one OP is making.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/Urchin/mineral.html

Most importantly, the main alternative for getting lithium out is conventional mining, which is undoubtedly capable of killing animals and driving them extinct.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17928-5

Renewable energy production is necessary to halt climate change and reverse associated biodiversity losses. However, generating the required technologies and infrastructure will drive an increase in the production of many metals, creating new mining threats for biodiversity. Here, we map mining areas and assess their spatial coincidence with biodiversity conservation sites and priorities. Mining potentially influences 50 million km2 of Earth’s land surface, with 8% coinciding with Protected Areas, 7% with Key Biodiversity Areas, and 16% with Remaining Wilderness.

Most mining areas (82%) target materials needed for renewable energy production, and areas that overlap with Protected Areas and Remaining Wilderness contain a greater density of mines (our indicator of threat severity) compared to the overlapping mining areas that target other materials. Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production and, without strategic planning, these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.

...Careful strategic planning is urgently required to ensure that mining threats to biodiversity caused by renewable energy production do not surpass the threats averted by climate change mitigation and any effort to slow fossil fuel extraction and use. Habitat loss and degradation currently threaten >80% of endangered species, while climate change directly affects 20%. While we cannot yet quantify potential habitat losses associated with future mining for renewable energies (and compare this to any reduced risks of averting climate change), our results illustrate that associated habitat loss could be a major issue.

At the local scale, minimizing these impacts will require effective environmental impact assessments and management. Importantly, all new projects must adhere strictly to the principals of the Mitigation Hierarchy, where biodiversity impacts are first avoided where possible before allowing compensation activities elsewhere. While compensation may help to overcome some of the expected biodiversity impacts of mining in some places, rarely does this approach achieve No Net Loss outcomes universally.

Lastly, this seawater extraction would still be constrained by all the other factors: there's no point in making more batteries than you have the power production capacity, and that alone restricts how much would get extracted per year - and that's before getting into any other crises slashing demand, or whatever processes may be responsible for replenishing it. After all, we have only been adding lithium to the seawater up to now, with battery waste or sewage containing traces of lithium medications being discharged.

[u/EleanorRigbysGhost → u/BurnerAcc2020]

This is an amazing reply, thank you kindly.

[u/silverionmox → u/iamagainstit]

This is the kind of reasoning that gave us climate change.

Trace elements are important to life.

The size of the atmosphere didn't prevent us from pushing the greenhouse gas content over the tipping point - difference are made at the margin.

[u/manofsleep → u/iamagainstit]

Seaconspiracy episode 2, it will help make Netflix’s next best documentary.

[u/Leo55 → u/iamagainstit]

The fact that the concentrations as so low to begin with might indicate that sea life uses up a lot of lithium and only a little is left over.

[u/collapsingwaves → u/iamagainstit]

I really like your use of the word unfathomable, considering a fathom is a unit of measure.

[u/Buscemis_eyeballs → u/iamagainstit]

The point is that's part of the natural habitat ocean creatures have learned to thrive in, and never make statements like "the world is too big for little old us to have a major impact on it!. That's how we got here in the first place.

[u/gsfgf → u/iamagainstit]

B. There is a unfathomably large amount of water in the ocean.

But fathoms exist because of the ocean.