Most desalination plants only concentrate the ocean salts a little.
The more you concentrate them, the more energy you need to put in to get any more water out. I think the only time this would make economic sense is if there are laws in place saying brine may not be returned to the ocean (for environmental reasons). In that case, it would make sense to concentrate it further with reverse osmosis, and then use multi-stage flash to further concentrate the brine.
After a few more steps, you could probably sell most of the resulting salts.
What is the process by which drinking water is extracted from seawater, and does that give you any savings at all with regards to a goal of extracting minerals?
The most common approach is reverse osmosis. This yields a waste brine that is up to 2x as concentrated as seawater. That's not negligible: it would reduce the cost of Li extraction that is proportional to mass flow by a factor of 2.
You either boil it or force it through a semi-permiable membrane.
In both methods you get two products: one one side pure water, on the other water with a higher concentration of non-water things as waste, most often just dumped back into the ocean.
That waste stream is just a bit closer to the end product than taking from the sea directly.
If it's unlawful to discharge brine to the ocean (that is, concentrated seawater), it'd still probably be more economical to just dilute it before discharge (they probably already do this).
Dilute it with seawater, I mean. Even it's not safe to discharge concentrated brine with, say, 10x the normal salt concentration, maybe seawater with 1.1x the usual concentration (or whatever it is) would be okay.
In some me places it is hard to discharge even 1.1x brine. In the future it might be necessary to concentrate it all the way to solid salt crystals and then truck them away.
Are EVs and battery powered tech actually sustainable?
Lithium is a finite resource which needs to be extracted from the earth via mining (or maybe this new evaporation technique).
Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery. It feels like swapping one unsustainable resource for another. We already are struggling to meet demand for EVs despite making up a small portion of the worlds vehicle production.
>Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery.
There's a lot of misleading information out there on the Internet. Actually, searching led me to one of my old comments, which is still true ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15883035 ). The old link about ocean extraction died, so here's another one:
The bottom line is that both the raw quantity and the prospective capital expenditures on lithium are way, way smaller than what we were looking at in terms of oil extraction. We're not running out of lithium, and we're not destroying the environment to get it.
I suspect oil industry PR could be behind all of this run-out-of-lithium hokum, which inevitably comprises articles based on "[presently] economically viable" resources and does not consider the actual availability of lithium in Earth's crusts and waters, which is much higher if you include low-grade ores that are not presently viable. It's obvious who benefits from this widespread misconception.
The simple fact is that if the price of lithium were to jump by a factor of 10, it still wouldn't affect the price of a Tesla that much.
Now, when we talk about grid-storage batteries, we might want really huge amounts of storage, and then sodium-sulfur / zinc-bromide / etc becomes relevant. But currently, grid-storage batteries are LiFePO4 simply because they're really cheap. That seems like a pretty good problem to have.
It sounds like there's enough lithium in all identified lithium resources to produce the batteries for 10.6 billion[1] Nissan Leafs. Enough for every human to have 1 low range car if the population plateaus around there, but that would still require perfect recycling and would leave no lithium to put batteries in anything else. Unless we start mining lithium from asteroids or something.
Notice that the same page says that the Earth's crust contains 20 parts per million of lithium. That's more abundant than tin or lead, to name two rarer elements that are currently mined in much larger quantities:
See the tables "World Mine Production and Reserves" in these reports and following paragraphs.
From the 2010 report to the current report, world lithium resources went up from 25.5 million tons to 89 million tons even as extraction rates rose from 18,000 tons per year to 100,000 tons per year. That alone brings us up to 37 billion Nissan Leafs.
How can resources go up even as we're using lithium faster? It's because reserves and resources are determined by a combination of economics and technology. The Earth's crust contains 20 ppm of lithium now and 12 years ago (or a million years ago, for that matter). The geology doesn't change but the effort put into identifying potential sources of lithium and means of extracting and purifying lithium does change. Geologically speaking, the Earth has a lot of lithium. For as long as the USGS has been keeping records -- only a few decades, admittedly -- world lithium reserves have been increasing faster than they have been depleted, because the industrial demand that causes reserve depletion also spurs additional research to identify potential lithium sources and extraction processes. This Economist article is about such new processes.
There are four stages of identifying and use of a resource.
Theoretical quantity - That would be the 20ppm as you said. Based on knowledge and estimates.
Identified reserves - How much of this stuff do we actually know about and is in a suffciently enough pooled location. This would be less than the 20ppm - how much less is a different question.
Technically available - How much of the known resource could we actually extract? It is ok if we know about it but if it is 10KM below a lake, could we get to it?
The most important stage after those three - Economic availability. Can we actually afford it and have people pay for it?
The argument from absurdity I use on this one is that there is effectively near infinite clean energy in the form of hydrogen in the sun. No one owns it - now go get it! The technical and economic scale ruins the argument a fair bit.
I'm not even arguing against lithium here, it seems to be more output restricted than resource limited. The two elements in batteries I worry about is Cobalt and Nickle - they could become the weakness. That said it does look like some folks are working on some neat alternatives in that space.
All identified reserves… meaning lithium found and quantified and deemed extractible.
Problem is that until recently lithium was not a hugely in demand element. As a result not a lot was invested in finding the stuff. Now that it is important large investments will be made and a lot more is likely to be found. It’s a light element and is very abundant in the solar system.
So this means that after not really trying very hard we have already found enough to give every human an EV. That is encouraging. If we try a bit harder and find say 50% more we are good for a really long time.
Oil is an example of something we have tried really really hard to find. We’ve found a ton more than we thought we would.
Lithium is not expended and recyclable. As long as EVs are a growth market, we'll need to mine more of it of course but at some point, the vast majority will come from recycled batteries.
The reason recycling lithium is so attractive is that 1) it is valuable because it is expensive to extract from the typically very low concentrations that exist in natural deposits. and 2) expended lithium batteries have orders of magnitude higher concentrations of it than exist in nature.
You'd be a fool to dump it in a landfill. For reference, lead, which is far less valuable is also typically recycled from the batteries in scrapped cars. Depleted lead batteries are valuable enough that they are not dumped in landfills. The current price is about 74$/kg, up lately by about 7x from 10$. A 73kwh Tesla battery would contain about 63 kilos of lithium. That's about 5000$ or more than a lot of second hand cars. Even at 10$, we're still talking well over 700$. A depleted lead battery would be closer to 5$. Those are recycled as well.
Regardless, there's a lot of lithium out there in nature. More than enough. There is no shortage just scaling challenges. Technical improvements like described in the article make it cheaper and less energy intensive to extract lithium. As you note, there's huge demand for EVs and that will keep prices for lithium high for some time to come. Companies working on extraction and recycling technology, have a lot of growth opportunities. They are super hot from an investor perspective and there are multiple very well funded companies working in this space already.
Long term, that makes lithium super sustainable. Short term, it just means we'll expend a lot of energy (increasingly of the renewable type) and water to get it. But compare that to extracting oil and turning it into petrol. That too is expensive and 100% of it is expended. Recycling burned gasoline/diesel is not a thing. That's not sustainable at all.
> Lithium is a finite resource which needs to be extracted
Yes, but once concentrated it is extremely recyclable. It doesn't flow, or corrode, or leave the battery. So when the cell's life is over the lithium is still there, "extractable" with vastly higher efficiencies than seen by raw production.
> Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery.
There is for everything we'd want to put a battery in today. It's not an uncommon element at all, it's just a hard one to concentrate because (owing to the fact that it's very soluble) geology has done a poor job of concentrating it for us. There is more lithium in the earth's crust than there is lead or tungsten or tin, yet those metals are minable from "veins" where with lithium we have to get it out of the oceans (or out of salt deposits that are ancient dried oceans).
Think about the timescale that lithium has been a valuable resource. When the first oil wells were being drilled in Pennsylvania for lamp oil no one could fathom how oil exploration, extraction and processing techniques would evolve to mechanize an entire planet.
Lithium in lithium batteries are recyclable, and because of microstrutures formed during the use of the batteries actually make better material for new batteries. There's a company already recycling lithium batteries, though they have to fight against the perception that recycled lithium is not as good as newly mined lithium.
There are also emerging technologies for extracting lithium from brine as a byproduct of geothermal power plants. American Public Media had produced a podcast series ("This is How We Survive") that included several episodes about this technology, and some of the patent drama that had gone with trying to control the tech.
As far as I know only certain Nickel metal hydride batteries use rare earth metals. Unless you just meant "rare" as in uncommon. Nickel isn't particularly rare and can be recycled from batteries.
Nickel is quite rare in the sense that the volume available for us on earth isn't as robust as something like iron or lithium, which are extremely abundant.
Also Nickel is highly concentrated in set regions which also causes problems.
Nickel & Cobalt are the most expensive metals in NCA/NMC batteries which are very common today.
Nickel is 4x as abundant in the Earth's crust as lithium.
Peridotite, a mantle-derived ultramafic rock that's widely available around the world, can be 0.1-0.3% nickel. This rock has been considered for CO2 sequestration, as it has large amounts of olivine, which is one of the most easily weathered silicates for mineral carbonation. One concern of mineral carbonation is all the nickel that could be released.
Nickel is viable for mining in set regions as I've said before.
Although Li-ion batteries are named over lithium, they require quite a small amount of it compared to other materials. the bulk of the battery is the Cathode.
Cost and materials wise, Cathode are a larger portion.
Of course, Anodes are of extreme importance as well but Graphite\Silicon are more manageable than Nickel for example.
Anodes are more of an enabler for other things. for instance, anode almost solely dictates the charging rate of the battery. very important parameter for sure.
The problem isn't oil itself but rather the byproducts, namely CO2 that is the cause of global warming and there just isn't enough of an impact from switching from modern ICE to EVs, rather the biggest source of CO2 emissions are the countries people in the West are outsourcing to make cheap goods.
It appears the CO2 emission standards can be achieved overnight simply by boycotting of all goods produce in countries where there is zero qualms about CO2 emissions, namely coal based power plants, which Western allied nations are more than happy to sell and point the finger at the said country they are exploiting.
But imagine telling virtue signaling West coast individual who believes he/she has superior moral values while happily consuming products produced in Authoritarian states under the threat of violence and exploitation of children that they need to trade their comfort for a greater collective.
If a society can't even come to agreements over wearing masks, there's zero chance such society can cut back on our reliance on the Petrodollar because doing so would put them on the same level of discomfort as other developing nations.
Leave it to third world countries to fix it while happily consuming and fueling the product of CO2 emissions and reminding them what a shthole country they live in.
This is my observation as a German looking into the West's mindset, its riddled with hypocrisy and self-contradictory ethic system aimed at distracting its citizens from the truth that their comforts are at the cost to this planet and rest of humanity.
We enjoy what we have because others could not have it and there is zero chance individualistic societies can reverse its mindless competition for vanity consumption.
As a German citizen, you should be aware that your country just veto’s sanctions on Russia so that they could keep the flow of natural gas coming. Your ex-Chancellor decommissioned your nuclear power plants so that you would buy more Russian gas, and he now is on the board of Gazprom and heads the company behind Nordstream 2. Also, petroleum cars are one of your biggest industries. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
> It appears the CO2 emission standards can be achieved overnight simply by boycotting of all goods produce in countries where there is zero qualms about CO2 emissions, namely coal based power plants, which Western allied nations are more than happy to sell and point the finger at the said country they are exploiting.
You just spent paragraphs virtue signaling while turning up your nose at people less harmful than your own. Clearly you care enough to keep coming back you glutton for punishment :P
> This is my observation as a German looking into the West's mindset, its riddled with hypocrisy and self-contradictory ethic system aimed at distracting its citizens from the truth that their comforts are at the cost to this planet and rest of humanity.
I think people are reading this, perhaps incorrectly, as you considering Germany and yourself to be on the outside of this phenomenon, rather than a part of it.
I have not stated my opinion on lithium production only the difference to oil.
And yes it's the co2 but the co2 is always the issue when we talk about climate change.
If we get ecopolitical: I think lithium itself is right now much better to extract from earth then oil as it will help to transition away from fossil fuels and I'm not blind to the fact that my existence creates struggles for other humans.
Good response I will concede that lithium seems our best bet given the current situation but I think ICE cars still have lot of room for CO2 reduction. While we are on topic of cars, I would slap additional environmental tax for old classic cars or straight piped V8, V10, V12. One does not need so many cylinders to get from point A to B.
Like when you have level 1 unlocked and lvlq creates a lot of money and you are at the point to continue to buy more and more expensive upgrades for lvl 1 or to save up to start to invest in lvl2.
If the market can just do what it does with ice cars and in parallel work on ev I would totally agree. We could do much more with ice.
But we know that there is a huge necessary investment curve for ev. When is the right time to stop investing money time and brain time for ice and start putting it in EV?
I believe they are not independent.
Funny enough I think old companies are getting more frightened then ever afer Tesla, apple, Sony, Amazon are investing into ev development.
Independent of this, ice to ev transition takes already relatively long in Germany and similar countries. This will take even more time in countries with less GDP.
For ICE we are chasing the final 0.1% improvements. There are a few of them left, but each round eliminates more from the future things to find. Even if they all work out, total we are looking at most a couple percent improvement.
The same applies (maybe worse) to electric motors, but the efficiency of electric motors is substantially better.
there is a fair amount of work yet to be done with Batteries, but even there we know theoretical limits and are closing in on them. (Ask a chemist what they are). if you want to make a contribution to cars battery technology is currently where there is the most room for a big improvement.
Note, I have no idea what the costs for any of the above is. It maybe that ICE investments are still more cost effective. I doubt it, but I don't know. Not matter what improvements will be expensive.
80% is the theoretical limit and we are struggling to get past 30% but I forsee dramatic economic incentives to increase this a lot higher. Doing so might raise costs of production however
80% is the theoretical limit for what? AFAIK the theoretical limit for an Otto cycle engine is somewhere around 46%, and we're getting pretty close already.
> The actual evaporating is done mainly by heat delivered as sunlight. But much of this is wasted. [...] it warms water below a pond’s surface—which, not being in contact with the air, is thus unavailable for evaporation
Wouldn't warming subsurface water warm the pond as a whole, which would both warm the surface layers through convection, as well as make it easier for that subsurface water to evaporate when it does make its way to the surface? Since warmer water evaporates more easily in general, it's not clear to me why adding thermal energy to the body of water you want to evaporate is wasted.
I think what they're talking about is the following.
If they could focus all of the energy on a very thin layer at the water's surface then most of it would go into evaporating the water rather than be transferred into the bulk.
Sure, heating the bulk makes it easier to evaporate, but it doesn't help as much as concentrating it all on the surface
Non-evaporating water will also radiate heat back out into the environment, meaning that less of the heat warming the bulk of the water goes into the actual evaporation process.
I would think that at the point of precipitation, heating the lithium and not the water would be a relatively large loss of efficiency.
Minerals and plumbing can be bad news. There are systems for efficiently extracting water from brine via evaporation, but that requires a dilute brine to keep from gumming up.
I do wonder though if there’s a hybrid system here where you install solar panels next to the ponds, use the input pipes to cool the solar panels, and use the power for something like final processing or drying.
I saw a talk from a company called Precient Technologies which uses microbes to remediate heavy metal from ore extraction process wastewater (e.g. the microbes are genetically engineered to “eat” and concentrate a particular target metal). What they have works really well for heavy metals right now and they floated they idea that their tech could be modified to work on lithium.
I can’t read the article but Texas has tens of thousands of brine water wells that were created while looking for oil. An improvement in lithium extraction from brine could result in a significant economic benefit for Texas.
Let's say we decided to go all-in on transforming the US to 100% renewable. Solar, wind and enough batteries to ensure continued power for times lacking sun/wind. For all homes, businesses, industry, transportation.
Do we have enough lithium and other materials for that? And what is the environmental/carbon cost of extracting and refining it? I assume it would be net positive, but I don't know for sure, nor to what degree.
We don't need to store every last kWh of power generated. A significant portion can be absorbed at time of generation by dispatching it to smart loads.
Lithium is also not the only storage technology we have. Pumped hydro, chemical storage, and heat storage.
We don't really need lithium for large-scale storage at all. The advantages of lithium batteries in terms of density are important for transport but irrelevant in fixed operation. Also, the round-trip efficiency of the storage isn't terribly important if you can arrange for an abundance of carbon-neutral input, which we can. So grid-scale decarbonization isn't really dependent on lithium, because it could use other kinds of batteries like iron-air or whatever.
Too cheap for short term storage, but lithium isn't cost competitive for long term storage. That's where pumped hydro and perhaps chemical storage can be more effective.
> "The heat storage facility, which was ceremonially opened today in Hamburg-Altenwerder, contains around 1,000 tonnes of volcanic rock as an energy storage medium. It is fed with electrical energy converted into hot air by means of a resistance heater and a blower that heats the rock to 750°C. When demand peaks, ETES uses a steam turbine for the re-electrification of the stored energy. The ETES pilot plant can thus store up to 130 MWh of thermal energy for a week. In addition, the storage capacity of the system remains constant throughout the charging cycles."
Thermal storage of various sorts looks pretty reasonable. I think it's constructing towers or digging holes to store gravitational potential energy that's being dismissed.
It also has some significant advantages over hydro: can be built anywhere, requires a small fraction of the space, doesn't destroy vast landscapes by putting them under water.
concrete only is 2x more dense. To get the same amount of storage as pumped hydro, that means you need to use at least half as much space. If you see a cute design for lifting concrete that isn't about the same size as a lake, it's a scam.
Maybe concrete lifting facilities would be about the same size as a lake if you built thousands of them (one per small town?) and added all that mass up?
Even ignoring the space concerns, and just looking at the cost, it's completely nonviable. For example, the Grand Coulee Dam has been functioning for 80 years, has a 170 meter height, and holds 9 billion kg of water for a (construction) cost of 2 billion dollars (adjusted for inflation). If you compare that to a crane based system a single tower crane can (in optimal circumstances) reach a wide enough area to lift 500,000kg a similar height (I'm being extremely generous with this estimate). That crane will cost you well over 1 million dollars, will only last around 20 years, and you would need about 4000 of these cranes to have the same capacity. Putting this all together means that the cranes will cost 20x more than the hydro solution even if you ignore the much higher maintenance and operational costs. This is also assuming that the cost of 9 billion kg of concrete is negligible (which it isn't), and that you aren't going to need to replace blocks as they get smashed into each other (which you will). Also, the crane solution will have lower efficiency, won't work in high wind, and is utterly stupid for about 50 other more boring reasons.
You would pretty quickly lose any economies of scale if you had to replicate the motor/generator, hoisting mechanism, etc across thousands of lower capacity facilities. The whole idea behind concrete blocks is that the storage medium is common, cheap, and easy to scale up, but that ignores significant other challenges.
There are several chemistries that are good for stationary batteries.
Lithium is interesting because it allows to produce lightweight batteries, usable in mobile phones, flying drones, and cars. For immobile land batteries, and even for larger sea ships, using batteries that weigh 2x is not a problem. Especially if they cost less per kWh stored.
I highly recommend Molly Wood's "How We Survive" from Marketplace. It covers a number of topics related to electrification, lithium extraction, and climate.
Chemical elements are defined by the composition of their atomic nuclei. Specifically, the number of protons in the nucleus. This isn't something that can be changed chemically, you need nuclear reactions (it's called transmutation). These would be extremely uneconomical for recreating natural natural lithium, and the yield would be tiny.
https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provi...
https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawat...
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/699652