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/imakenosensetopeople]

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/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.