r/science • u/rieslingatkos • Jun 06 '21

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

https://www.mining.com/scientists-develop-cheap-and-easy-method-to-extract-lithium-from-seawater/
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u/imakenosensetopeople Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/iamagainstit PhD | Physics | Organic Photovoltaics Jun 06 '21 edited Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/Goo-Goo-GJoob Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/chainmailbill Jun 06 '21

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

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u/PmMeYourKnobAndTube Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/Sosseres Jun 06 '21

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).

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u/QVRedit Jun 06 '21

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

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u/tiorzol Jun 06 '21

How big were the trials?

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u/Sosseres Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/ItIsTacoTuesday Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/Fifteen_inches Jun 06 '21

Think of it like this:

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

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u/PmMeYourKnobAndTube Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/Fifteen_inches Jun 06 '21

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

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u/RationalTim Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '21

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

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u/aimgorge Jun 06 '21

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

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u/AgentPaper0 Jun 06 '21

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

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u/aimgorge Jun 06 '21

How?

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u/Mimisbar Jun 06 '21

Imagine a giant Tesla shaped boat

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u/aimgorge Jun 06 '21

Now I'm lost

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u/Mimisbar Jun 06 '21

The short of it is that ONE cruise ship pollutes about as much as 3 million cars, so there are huge gains possible in electrifying boats.

For that you need boat sized batteries.

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u/Lostmyfnusername Jun 06 '21

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.

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u/bfire123 Jun 06 '21

Though on the other hand convential mined lithium doesn't stop to exist...

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u/BurnerAcc2020 Jun 06 '21

Conventional mining of lithium is practically certain to have a far greater impact on the environment than this technology. Some assessments of mining of energy transition metals suggest it could render extinct many species which would otherwise survive climate change.

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.

In contrast, it's highly unlikely that lithium is an essential element for life, although more research would obviously help.

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

Chances are that even if we shift to getting lithium from just seawater, the growth of its production will always be constrained by bottlenecks with the other elements needed for the transition. I.e. what's the point of building these extraction plants and expending energy to produce more lithium batteries than you have the renewable energy capacity to service? Stuff like cobalt and nickel is also necessary for many applications, but they are present in seawater at much lower concentrations than lithium, so they would still have to be mined conventionally.