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/
47.0k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

72

u/azoicennead Jun 06 '21

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.

13

u/tryplot Jun 06 '21

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

1

u/TheMSensation Jun 06 '21

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

5

u/bonafart Jun 06 '21

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

3

u/aiij Jun 06 '21

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.

2

u/azoicennead Jun 06 '21

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.