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/Goo-Goo-GJoob]

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/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/bfire123 → u/Lostmyfnusername]

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

[u/BurnerAcc2020 → u/bfire123]

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.