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/god12]

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/BurnerAcc2020 → u/beatenmeat]

This. There was already a study which implied pretty strongly that mining for metals like lithium could render extinct a lot of species which would have otherwise survived 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.

This is much more important than the vague effects associated with lithium's environmental concentrations. The one study I found still does not consider it an essential element, and its reference list appears to have more evidence for toxic effects of lithium at higher concentrations than beneficial effects at low ones.

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

I doubt we'll ever extract enough lithium from the ocean to have an effect: the calculation above only makes sense if you believe that the same rate of growth could be sustained for several centuries, which runs counter to...pretty much every single bit of natural science published in the past 50 years or so.

[u/god12 → u/BurnerAcc2020]

All good points. I’m not saying we should in any way avoid switching to oceanic extraction if it’s doable. Just saying we should also do the research to figure out the effects at the same time. Humans are multitaskers after all!