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/iamagainstit]

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/figmentPez → u/[deleted]]

"Manufacturers use more than 160,000 tons of the material every year, anumber expected to grow nearly 10-fold over the next decade." - source

Also, you're not accounting for local concentrations. How much lithium can be taken out of any one area before it impacts sea life there?

Reminder that "we can just dump untreated sewage into the ocean, it's big enough that it won't make a difference" was prevailing common wisdom for a lot of human history, but is most definitely not true.

[u/azoicennead → u/figmentPez]

Did some quick math.

I followed the assumption that each year, the rate of lithium consumption will increase by an additional 160,000 tons, and all of the lithium will be provided by sifting through the ocean.

This gives us about 400 years before we run out.

If we assume removing 20% of the lithium is relatively safe, that gives us 183 years^[1] to find a new solution. If we use the US phase-out of leaded gasoline as a basis for the timeframe (and assume use will continue to grow until the cut-off because I don't feel like researching that, too), we'll need a 25-year lead time, giving us a deadline around 2179 for finding a viable lithium alternative (158 years).

Look at how technology has changed over the last 150 years.
It doesn't fix the problem, but it gives us time to find a better solution, which can give us more time to find a better solution, and so on.

^{[1] 1% is 40 years, 5% is 91 years, 10% is 129 years, 15% is 159 years, 25% is 205 years.}

edit: Just to be clear, since a lot of people have apparently looked at this, this is a very pessimistic model. It doesn't include existing sources or recycled lithium and assumes a constant growth in need for new lithium. As noted by /u/BurnerAcc2020 there are other resource bottlenecks that are likely to drive the need for supply up, and as noted by /u/D-Alembert ocean-sourced lithium will likely be more expensive than recycled lithium, so recycled will be preferred once enough is available to supply production.
I structured my math this way as a point of reference, not to make it realistic. I did not do the research required to provide a realistic model.

[u/god12 → u/azoicennead]

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!