Geothermal Plants Could Unlock Vast Supplies of Lithium in the American West

https://singularityhub.com/2022/03/23/how-geothermal-plants-could-solve-americas-lithium-supply-crunch-boost-ev-battery-industry/

by RafelMri • 4 years ago

110 55 4 years ago

singularityhub.com

zeristor2• 4 years ago

Great article, this is from TheConversation, it is attributed at the bottom of the article but ideally this would like to that since there’s no tracking, and it’s the original:

https://theconversation.com/how-a-few-geothermal-plants-coul...

zeristor2• 4 years ago

A few points, mention is made of producing $5Bn of Lithium, I imagine the price could drop quite a bit, which could be a good thing.

Elon is casting around for Lithium I suppose he doesn’t have the bandwidth to Elon another industry.

As mentioned Manganese, Zinc are also useful products.

Potassium was glossed over I thought one of Russian invasion issues was that Ukraine was a large exporter of Potassium.

But for each anion there’s a cation. If the carbonates are removed will that leave sulphates, and chlorides for the other metals?

Will the removal cause issues since a more dilute brine would I assume leach out more minerals.

Finally water, water, water. This is California with an ongoing drought. Is next to the Salton sea flooded by a broken canal a 100 years ago.

I take it the geothermal plant uses water from the aquifer.

patall• 4 years ago

From what has been said about other such projects in europe, you do not take much salt or water out of the system. Instead, you pump the same amount of material down again in a closed circle, also reducing the amount of energy you have to spend to pump up the hot-water in the first place. When extracting lithium, you would substitute either the lithium itself or the lithium salt (depending on exact process). Afterall, you do not want to remove thousands of tons of material from hundereds of meters deep without knowing what kind of consequences (i.e earth quakes) that may have.

sokoloff• 4 years ago

People have seemed pretty willing to remove over a billion tons of oil from the ground…

shkkmo2• 4 years ago

Lithium mining itself uses a LOT of water. It is weird to see the article talking about how geothermal is all we need to enable lithium mining when these areas have significant issues with water usage already.

ZeroGravitas2• 4 years ago

Tesla did file a patent for some new way of extracting lithium from clay and bought an american lithium producer.

(Seperately, one of their execs started a battery recycling firm with a similar mission of providing battery chemicals)

bob2222• 4 years ago

Kazakhstan is worlds largest exporter of potassium

taneq• 4 years ago

Is this a real fact or just something from Borat?

pfdietz• 4 years ago

Potassium resources are a concern if you're talking about fertilizer, where it has to be extremely cheap. For technical use in batteries cost would not be a concern. Potassium is about 4000x more abundant in seawater than is lithium, btw.

keithnz• 4 years ago

In New Zealand there is this company https://geo40.com/ it is trying to develop this technology. Interesting stuff, though ultimately it feels like we need an alternative battery tech not based on lithium. But next 10-20 years seems like it is going to be big for batteries.

fareesh• 4 years ago

Is there enough lithium on the planet to move everyone entirely over to electric cars, and still keep up with the demand for phones, tablets, drones, etc?

neals• 4 years ago

Interesting question. If you look it up, you'll find that estimates grow each year, probably because we're increasing our search for it?

This article* talks about enough for 3 billion EV's, depleting supply in 2100-something.

* https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/09/15/how-long-will-the-lit...

bryanlarsen3• 4 years ago

Mostly because we're looking at new ways of extracting it. Most well known is the Tesla parent for extracting from mud. Most well known because Tesla, but there are lots of other companies looking at different extraction methods.

Lithium price has gone up a lot because demand is growing faster than the mines and plants that extract it. That 80 million tonne figure was based on low prices -- at high prices a lot more reservess become viable and we have a lot more.

KennyBlanken2• 4 years ago

If Lithium scarcity becomes a significant problem, there will be plenty of economic incentives for recycling. There are already multiple competing companies offering ~95% recycling of lithium ion battery materials.

Also, batteries more suited to grid-scale operation like iron-flow are already in commercial use and will likely replace a fair bit of the large-scale lithium ion battery market.

bryanlarsen3• 4 years ago

There are 230 billion tonnes of Lithium in sea water, and it constitutes .002 percent pf the Earth's crust. It is very common, and widely available in economically viable concentrations.

The concerns are building new mines and extraction plants fast enough to meet during demand, and the environmental damage from doing so. There are no concerns about running out.

prox• 4 years ago

I wonder if there is such a thing as a Lithium asteroid that would be easier to extract using Starship level of technology.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

Exactly, there are some companies working on less energy intensive solutions for extracting it.

These guys look like they have some promising technology: https://energyx.com/ They are currently testing membranes that can selectively let through lithium. Their solution vastly reduces cost, water usage, and energy usage.

panick21_7• 4 years ago

The problem with lithium is not availability. Not in the least. There is enough 10x over.

The problem with lithium is that it is spread out, that means you can't really find good ores with high concentration.

Additionally, lithium behaves less like copper, nickel and so on, and more like a specialty chemical.

Mining lithium is basically more running a chemical plan and only very few companies can do it so far.

This leads to a situation where lithium mines are very hard to make profitable and you need a huge amount of knowledge to run one. The on-boarding of new mines and expansion of capacity is the problem, not the total availability.

emkoemko2• 4 years ago

are they not switch from lithium to sodium ? i heard some announcements from a big battery maker can't remember their name

Gibbon1• 4 years ago

This is from memory

Lithium ion batteries use a zeolite cathode which have atomic sized pores that safely 'stores' the metallic lithium[1]. Issue with sodium is unlike lithium sodium increases in size when reduced. That tends to damage the cathode.

For ion batteries the cathode is the big technological challenge. Has to be cheap, manufacturable, stable, conductive, and hold as high a percentage of lithium as possible.

[1] There are lithium batteries with bulk lithium cathodes. But they are hazardous.

panick21_7• 4 years ago

This is still far off.

If you want to look at realistic lithium extraction in the US, look at Thacker Pass. That is much closer to being an actual reality.

Nobody has yet made Geothermal Brines a reality and nobody has even really managed commercial DLE.

The reality is all lithium in the world today comes from conventional brine project that use natural evaporation or it comes from Spodumene rock. We will scale those things first in order to increase lithium production.

Lithium industry is difficult, its very hard for these operations to be profitable. And the California is specially difficult.

But this is very much a very, very real problem. Lithium will be a huge cost even in LFP batteries as you can't take it out. We already know that not enough new lithium mines are coming online for coming demand. And high oil price made it even worse.

We do actually seriously need to move to other types of battery chemistries as well. The most promising by far is Sodium batteries and CATL (big dog of batteries) is commercializing it. It has far, far less supply issues and it will be dense enough to make standard cars practical.

There are lots of other ideas but the reality is, its absurdly hard to get even a tiny innovation in the cathode into actual cars and takes 5+ years. Doing it with a totally new chemistry is even more difficult.

jjcm• 4 years ago

You seem well informed here. Do you have any sources you’d recommend to stay on top of battery tech news?

panick21_7• 4 years ago

I would say by far the best on just lithium is: https://www.globallithium.net/podcast

The host has decades of experience in lithium and has interviews with many of those lithium companies. He is certainty opinionated but he is informed.

On battery in general, and partly on lithium: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/vid...

Many others but information is kind of all over the place.

But I'm not in that industry, more a general interest in batteries.

samatman• 4 years ago

The Goodenough battery is truly the best case of nominative determinism in history.

No one is going to want to drive on sodium batteries, which are merely good, rather than good enough. We're talking about the weight of a Tesla with the range of a Leaf, as a best case scenario.

As for lithium, there are absolutely enormous amounts of it in highly available form, in the parts of the world where brine evaporated relatively recently. The Great Basin has a lot of those.

When you say lithium extraction is difficult to do profitably, this is just a way of saying the supply/demand curve yields cheap lithium in 2022.

We're in no danger of supply issues at the right price, no one who wants to buy some lithium is coming up short, and no such future is at all likely in this century.

vosper• 4 years ago

No one is going to want to drive on sodium batteries, which are merely good, rather than good enough. We're talking about the weight of a Tesla with the range of a Leaf, as a best case scenario.

Do many people care about the weight of their car? I would bet most people couldn’t tell you what their car weighs with any accuracy (me, for one).

People happily drive giant heavy trucks (like an F150) for much shorter distances than the range of a Leaf.

Or weight matters for some other reason? Shipping?

panick21_7• 4 years ago

No one is going to want to drive on sodium batteries, which are merely good, rather than good enough. We're talking about the weight of a Tesla with the range of a Leaf, as a best case scenario.

People said the same about LFP and Sodium is getting pretty close to that on a system level. You have to consider the whole pack and its price.

The reality is that there are literally millions that could run with sodium and be a practical product.

And the extra volume required is actually not that big a problem in many vehicles.

When you say lithium extraction is difficult to do profitably, this is just a way of saying the supply/demand curve yields cheap lithium in 2022.

No actually lithium is getting more and more expensive and demand is growing at insane rates while getting new mines in production is really hard. So the price will likely continue to go up.

We're in no danger of supply issues at the right price, no one who wants to buy some lithium is coming up short, and no such future is at all likely in this century.

Price go up until some people that had plans will reconsider those plans.

scythe• 4 years ago

Sodium rhodizonate [1] gets a comparable real density to lithium by using an excellent cathode (rhodizonate) that doesn't work with lithium. The thing is that the rhodizonate method hasn't escaped Yi Cui's lab as far as I can tell.

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0014-y?from=artic...

s0rce3• 4 years ago

I understand that the demand for lithium grows but as someone who currently lives in Northern Nevada its sad to see more beautiful areas and critical habitat going to be destroyed for new mines and mineral extraction.

azinman2• 4 years ago

The reality is mines have to exist somewhere. The cost of them being abroad is more CO2 spent on getting materials shipped around the world, national security vulnerabilities, worse environmental laws, removing economic pie pieces, and a loss of potential jobs.

seibelj2• 4 years ago

I look on a map of Nevada and it’s just vast, uninhabited space. Are the only sources of Nevada resources in actually lived areas, or is it something a handful of people see in any given year?

robocat2• 4 years ago

Nobody has yet made Geothermal Brines a reality and nobody has even really managed commercial DLE.

The same is said about every innovation or invention ever. If you have knowledge about why it is infeasible, then your references are welcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30802349

From https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/zero-carbon-lithi... “A pilot plant to demonstrate DLE from the project became operational in April 2021 while the first battery-quality lithium hydroxide was produced from the pilot operations in September 2021.”. They are doing it and obviously believe it is commercially viable to do so.

From https://geo40.com/geolithium/ “We have successfully recovered lithium from low, moderate and high-grade brine types covering Europe, the Americas and New Zealand at laboratory scale. We will move to pilot stage in 2022.”. I am more sceptical about the economics of this (some government funding, possibly for positive discrimination, and no obvious commercial investors). “Lithium bearing geothermal fluid is allowed contact with Geo40’s proprietary GeoSeive compound. The GeoSieve is then regenerated to release the lithium”, and reused.

panick21_7• 4 years ago

I'm not saying its infeasible. I'm saying it will take a more time then many people think and it will take more money and some of the companies wont make it.

simonebrunozzi• 4 years ago

I would like to ask you a few questions. Would you mind getting in touch with me?

Email in my profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonebrunozzi

Thanks!

freemint• 4 years ago

Something similar is done in Germany. https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/zero-carbon-lithi...

shkkmo2• 4 years ago

I find it strange that the article talks only about supplying power for lithium planets with no mention of the massive amounts of water that lithium mining operations use. This seems like a pretty significant hurdle in the SW where surface water is scarce and the aquifers are already dropping significantly.

Edit: Here's one Nevada lithium mine that is facing challenges due to water issues. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/wikieup-lithium-mine-bi...

StopDarkPattern• 4 years ago

Lithium will be extracted from salt water on a massive production scale

meatsauce• 4 years ago

I'm sure the present admin will kill it so we're forced to buy (among other things) lithium from despots and dictators.

Geothermal Plants Could Unlock Vast Supplies of Lithium in the American West

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