Adding another solution to the issue of mining lithium for batteries at scale is awesome, I hope they find a way to deal with the brine that this produces (Edit: it does not really produce brine in the classical sense according to the paper [0]).
Maybe this process could be a way to deal with brine from seawater desalination [1] by at least removing lithium ions from the waste water. Since the ion concentration in the waste water is higher than in seawater, it should theoretically make the lithium separation process easier, shouldn't it?
Another thing: combining this with cheap solar power and seawater lithium mining might be a part of a possible solution for a post-oil industry in the Gulf States? They did the tests on Red Sea seawater which has a higher salinity than most other seawater but apparantly the eastern Mediterranean matches or even surpasses that [2].
[0] "It is also noted that the total concentration of other salts after the first stage is less than 500 ppm, which implies that after lithium harvest, the remaining water can be treated as freshwater. Hence, the process also has a potential to integrate with seawater desalination to further enhance its economic viability", from page 5, (PDF) https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...
It depends. There is chemistry here too, not just physical membranes. Higher concentrations of everything else might interfere with only getting at the lithium.
You can obtain a few things from desalination brines. Magnesium is the most plentiful, besides salt, of course. There's also some sulfur, bromine and boron that might be worth recovering. It's mostly theoretical, of course.
The concern over brine is something I'm willing to contemplate but on the face of it, it seems to me that brine would only be a problem in the immediate zone where it is returned.
And then again the fresh water produced along with the brine will end up back in mostly the same surrounding after it gets used, so it's not like we're producing saltier and saltier water over time?
So aside from the increased salinity at the specific location where the brine is returned to the sea, is there another issue? Am I missing something that makes all this a large scale problem?
Not necessarily a “large scale” problem but the increased salinity means you create a enormous dead zone near your output system unless you spend a ton of energy to mitigate it.
We had Bechtel design us a desalination/RO system for a biofuel startup I worked with and to prevent the dead zone, you need a massive system of buried pipes in the ocean. Iirc, it was the most expensive part of the entire design since you need to output it over something like a square kilometer and you need to mix in fresh seawater at several points to dilute the effluent before you release it. So in addition to the CapEx of a construction project in a horribly hostile environment, you have permanent energy consumption even past the filters.
And of course, since it’s coastal, there are tons of regulations and government bodies interested in making sure you don’t cut corners.
Wow, most people never consider the dead-zone around desalination plants. Us landlubbers just think of it as manna from heaven, “free freshwater.”
The way we discuss technical solutions is woefully inadequate. Everything is still presented as a miracle-cure for our problems. We should have a more mature understanding of how these things are constructed and maintained.
The ocean is pretty big. That's why fish poop and pee in it. Not much of a problem. And if you weren't already aware, did you know plants also excrete waste through their roots? I only found out recently. But yes, all waste needs to be spread out and able to diffuse into the large atmosphere or it causes dead zones.
Plant wastes are a part of an eco system. They are cunsomed and transformed into other wastes. Actually, only human beings see wastes as a definitive lost. For every sustainable cycles, a waste is going to be transformed into you will consume again.
A sewer pipe discharging a river of poop from an entire city into a forest—a toxic waste dump.
The entire surface of the sea is evaporating fresh water and the resulting brine is slinging constantly. It’s not creating a dead zone because it’s distributed. A river of brine in the oceans would be like a toxic cloud of ammonia that kills anything it touches…until it mixes sufficiently.
There must be some creative solutions to the brine problem. At the end of the day we’re really not processing much seawater compared to the size of the ocean.
Right but the size of the ocean is the wrong metric - it’s really only the coastal region adjacent to the desal plant that you have to work with, and the chemistry and power realities mean that you just have a ton of very salty water to pump through pipes.
I wonder if one could not simply pump it into some old oil reservoirs. The nations that need to do seawater refining should have some nearly empty oilfields lying around.
Salt water intrusion into the aquifer is pretty bad for agriculture. Not sure if that would be a problem with refilling oil reservoirs but I'm not an expert.
Interesting answer and thanks for providing it. Do you think the geography of the coast changes how expensive this gets? I'd think a coast that goes deep quickly or has strong currents wouldn't need as much spread out disposal infrastructure as one in a shallow area.
Yeah it 100% does - mixing rate is a big design driver. We actually had decided that is was better for our primary effluent pipe to be several KM longer to reach the “coast” vs the smaller bay that we were immediately adjacent to.
But even then, if the ends of your system are in 50’ deep ocean, the water column is such that the top ~10% sees really good mixing and exchange due to wind and wave action but the rest really doesn’t. It’s rare that there are strong currents near enough coastlines to take advantage of.
The brine problem is played up because environmentalists don’t like building new industry to solve environmental problems. A big part of their psyche is that man must suffer for his sins against nature. IMO.
No, environmentalists simply say that it’s worth to preserve the environment that humanity evolved in. One reason is for our grandchildren to be able to experience it and another is we don’t really know what happens if we destroy too much of it - we do have localized examples though and they’re really not good.
Environmentalists are mostly political today, they focus their efforts on benign & wealthy countries instead of the most polluting. (Which are often poor or run by dictatorships)
I, too, focus on problems at home that I have any hope of changing rather than yelling at countries on the other side of the planet that have zero incentive to listen to me.
Oh, if they are producing fresh water as well then isn't this good as desalination is already needed in some area's. So the studies upon the brine they output would be useful to measure any impact. Which would be localised - how localised and impacting is really the question here and for that we can look at existing drinking water from sea water production.
Would there even be any brine? If they take out the lithium but don't take any water out (remix everything other than lithium) then the net effect on salinity would be almost nothing. It would make economic sense to colocated, to also do freshwater extraction at the same facility, but the removal of the lithium would then be beside the point.
I wonder if the process can work for other more valuable substances. Uranium from seawater has been done for a while now. This process might make it cheaper than mining. The world could change if every country with access to the sea can start extracting such things.
In Michigan there is a special class of mining known as injection wells where they force water into wells and extract either salt or potassium fertilizer. Makes me wonder if they could extract lithium as a byproduct of this process?
Its hard to say as the process is not described well. It seems to be, but i know that this kind of article is obscure on purpose to let readers imagine all kind of applications.
The actual footprint of lithium mining is absolutely tiny compared to pretty much any other metal in demand. Iron, copper, and aluminum mining have left giant gaping scars in the earth that are thousands of times larger than anything anyone has even proposed doing for lithium. And that's before we start to talk about surface coal mining, tar sands, and all the land that's been scraped flat for oil and gas exploration and production. Get some perspective on this by getting out of your house and looking around. Those photos in the article that are intended to shock me would amount to a single medium-scale table salt evaporation facility.
That looks like a fallacy reasoning. In the same way if we would compare any harm that is happening on our planet to let say: Solar system, galaxy or universe, combined with age of a star, so it would be negligible and therefore justifiable?
Collateral damage is justifiable unless you are not that damage isn't it?
Better reasoning could begin with the question: would I leave my comfortable home, go there, and live there in community where water is contaminated by lithium mining sludge. Would I drink that water every day? Is there anyone who is suffering so I could enjoy comfortable life?
I'm not suggesting that you should move to a salt flat in Bolivia where nobody lives, no, nor am I suggesting that you move to an acidic retaining pond at an old copper mine in Shasta County, California. What I am suggesting is that there are already way, way more people suffering from global consumption of gold, copper, lead, nickel, iron, cadmium, and other metals than are or will potentially suffer from lithium mining.
I'm saying that more people suffering from other type of mining does not justify more lithium mining just because it is polluting less in comparison to another long establish industries.
Instead it should concentrate people thinking power to solve those other issues in mining industry of metals as gold, copper, lead, nickel, iron, cadmium...
Also going outside and seeing that it is beautiful kind of sounds as ostrich way of dealing with problems buy turning on the blind eye concentrating to things in local vicinity, convincing yourself that all is good and we should move on.
$5 per kg for the electricity expenses is far from magical, but it should be low enough to make the extraction profitable.
I do not know the current price of lithium, because most previous information sources, like the metal exchanges, no longer make their data public.
Nevertheless, a few years ago lithium was around $66 per kg.
So $5 would be just about 7.5% of the price per kg, but there are a lot of other costs, like replacing from time to time the expensive LLTO ceramic membrane and the very expensive Pt-Ru coated cathode and also many other operational costs and the amortization of the investment.
For reversible batteries, the conversion of lithium phosphate to another lithium salt might be enough, but for applications that need metallic lithium, like primary batteries or Li-Al alloys, the lithium phosphate must be converted into lithium chloride or other suitable salt and the metallic lithium must be extracted by electrolysis, with additional, higher, costs for electric energy.
However, the method described is sound and there are also useful byproducts to ensure or increase the profit.
The method is not new, but the major achievement is finding a suitable material for the selective membrane, which passes lithium but blocks the much more abundant sodium & potassium.
Unlike many such announcements, this appears to have good chances to eventually be used for lithium extraction.
The Pt-Ru is just a catalyst, no? Maybe it gets contaminated but it would hopefully be recycled. Might even go up in value over time rather than be consumed.
I really hope this is not something like the false joy i had when it was said we were able to remove ligogen from hardwood completely and that the carbon structure was almost as strong as steel. Three years later, i'm still waiting for it :/
To extract 1 kg from 0.2 ppm seawater, you need to process 5e6 kg of water.
$5 of electricity at $0.09/kWh is 200 MJ, which is enough to pump that much water 40 m high, or push it through a membrane with 4 bar pressure drop.
So you can't do very much to seawater at that price point. Like many "scientists develop cheap ___" headlines, it may just cover part of the process and not the whole operation.
No, lithium is a mood stabilizer. It is mainly used to treat manic episodes in bipolar disorders and is not a particularly effective treatment for major depression.
I doubt drinking water contains anything close to therapeutic doses of lithium.
It’d be cool if they could combine this with extraction of Uranium 235 for a more sustainable source of nuclear fuel.
EDIT: For more context, nuclear power could be a great tool in reducing carbon emissions. I read somewhere that mining Uranium 235 from seawater at scale would cost roughy 2x to 3x what it costs to get the fuel from the ground at today's prices. I was trying to say that if we're going through all of the trouble to extract Lithium from seawater, it'd be cool if extracting Uranium at the same time made both processes more economical.
"Seawater contains about 3.3 parts per billion of uranium by weight, approximately (3.3 µg/kg) or, 3.3 micrograms per liter of seawater.[6] The extraction of uranium from seawater has been considered as a means of obtaining the element.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Nat...
(Mining uranium is as environmentally unfriendly as other mining operations, just do a web search for "uranium mining".)
The trick here is to use a ceramic filter that have holes that are so small that only Lithium can pass through.
Actually the only "molecules" smaller than Lithium are Hydrogen and Helium. Helium is not a problem because it's too easy to pull apart and Hydrogen (H+ and H2) are not problem because H2 is another of the products.
(Actually^2 H+ is not isolated, it's combined with water in H3O+, but I guess the holes need some room for the water around the Li+ ions. The technical details are probably more complicated, but "small holes only allow H, He and Li to pass" is a good approximation.)
But Uranium atoms are huge. They are bigger than most atoms, and I'm not sure if the common form in seawater is a combination of Uranium and Oxygen. A hole that big will allow most mineral to pass, so you will just get brine. Using it in the other direction with holes just smaller than Uranium is also not very useful, because you will get Uranium mixed with a lot of crap, many of the contamination are not isolated atoms (that are mostly smaller) but molecules that combine a few atoms are are bigger.
Of course, there's precious metals and rare-earth elements in there too, but are they economically-viable to process?
Yes, I know all about the externalities of uranium mining as a portion of my extended family who lived in a particular house around the Four Corners/Durango area all died within a matter of years from horrible cancers due to contaminated drinking water.
Interesting point. Lets do the numbers. Supposedly desalination is 86.55 million m3/day (https://iwa-network.org/desalination-past-present-future/). 1m^3 is 10^3 kg. So 8610^9 kg desalinated water, I dont know the conversion rate, but lets say rougly 110^11kg water from sea pumped. Divided by 5e6 we have 2*10^4 kg/ day. 20 tons of lithum per day. Sounds a lot. That's roughly 8000 tons of lithium per year. Worldproduction is 80000 tons per year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-...
So while not insignificant it doesnt seem a game-changer. (I might have miscalculated a factor of 10 somewhere, probably..)
that would be a non-issue in existing desalination plants
sounds promising but papers tend to overpromise, so we'll see if it's viable - cheap and abundant lithium batteries would be a major breakthrough for renewables
The manufacturing process indirectly produces CO2 in the same way the staff driving to a nuclear power plant produces CO2. Aka it’s all indirect and could be replaced with EV and clean energy.
Nuclear is a non starter from a cost perspective at this point. You get vastly more bang for the buck subsidizing battery backed up wind / solar which can actually load follow without becoming even more expensive.
First, Nuclear is more than 10c/kWh unsubsidized at 90% capacity factor, which only gets worse as you try and scale up. France got into the 70% range and they had countries to export to. Nuclear is not even vaguely competitive even without energy storage involved. Just the fuel rod lifecycle alone costs almost as much per kWh as solar. 24/7/365 security is only the tip of the iceberg when you look into why Nuclear is so stupidly expensive. Maintenance for example takes up roughly 1 month per year of operation and you can’t send the guards home.
Anyway, it’s the same in that their all indirectly producing CO2. In a full accounting all of those things that make nuclear expensive actually produce CO2 because construction equipment, mining to produce the parts to build a reactor, etc etc all produce CO2 in the current economy.
In fact if you do the full breakdown for all activities related to Nuclear Reactor Construction, Operation, and Decommissioning their a very significant CO2 source in large part because all economic activity is and their really expensive. Regardless of how easy to draw arbitrary lines that ignore say CO2 emissions from workers daily commutes etc.
The only way to move past that is to have serious energy storage that’s used for all equipment and thus very widespread adoption of cheap battery technology. At which point Nuclear costs become an even larger issue because cheap batteries tank the cost of battery backed up wind/solar. In the end far northern countries can make some use of Nuclear, but it’s a dead end technology without a significant role in actually solving climate change.
Some pretty wild unsourced claims masquerading as facts.
As with pretty much any energy source, (including wind, solar, gas..) nuclear tends to get cheaper the more you build. You can look up FOAK vs NOAK and note the curves. Not sure what you're referring to re difficulty of increasing %share?
How are you measuring "fuel rod lifecycle"? And how does that possibly comparable to "$/kWh solar"?
Here's [0] a good source for some facts. You should note that accounting for the whole lifecycle of mining/processing/operating/defueling/decommissioning, nuclear is ~1/4 of the emissions of solar. And this is only considering electricity; we still have 2-3x the kwh to source for our heating requirements. You're suggesting we get that all sorted with solar & wind too?
First your source is heavily biased, dig into the numbers they use and they skip for example workers commuting emissions as nobody lives within walking distance of a reactor. Making their comparison absolutely meaningless.
More importantly nuclear very specifically gets more expensive as you ramp up the percentage of grid energy your supplying. For a simple fact check look at the capacity factor of French nuclear reactors, for example:
Lower capacity factors directly translate into higher costs as you still need to pay for the building and security guards etc, you just don’t generate as much energy from identical infrastructure.
PS: If you don’t want to do the leg work just compare national averages around 2000-2005 and then realize France needed to import and export a lot of electricity because they simply couldn’t afford to operate in isolation at 70+% nuclear generation.
While still significant, the impact of lithium cost on battery cost is commonly far overestimated:
"A 50% increase in lithium prices would for instance increase the battery pack price of a nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) 811 battery by less than 4%." [1]
Nevertheless, together with improvements in (low-cobalt) battery chemistry, this sounds like an important piece of the puzzle.
I'm assuming there's other advantages in terms of supply chain. We can put saltwater lithium extractors anywhere and have them be mostly automated. I don't know much about conventional lithium extraction but mining anything tends to be dirty business for both workers and the environment.
There's no real need though with this: anything where the product is not on-demand electrical power can and should be able to be run off of intermittent solar or wind power.
Amortized over a year, letting the plant shut down because it's cloudy a few days should be fine.
They discuss this on pages 3 to 5 of the paper if you want to read up on this. Here is an excerpt:
"Based on these data, we estimated the total electricity required to enrich 1 kg lithium from seawater to 9000 ppm in five stages to be 76.34 kWh. Simultaneously, 0.87 kg H_2 and 31.12 kg Cl_2 were collected from the cathode and the anode, respectively. Taking the US electricity price of US$ 0.065 per kWh into consideration, the total electricity cost for this process is approximately US$ 5.0. In addition, based on the 2020 prices of hydrogen and Cl_2 (i.e., US$ 2.5–8.0 per kg and US$ 0.15 per kg, respectively), the side-product value is approximately US$ 6.9–11.7, which can well compensate for the total energy cost. It should also be noted that the current Cl_2 utilisation capacity in the chlor-alkali industry is ~ 80 Mtons/year. Even in the case where all the world lithium capacity is produced from our extraction process, the amount of Cl_2 produced will be 3 Mtons, and so will have very little effect on the total market", from https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...
Do you remember this guy, Kanzius, who showed that you can burn saltwater when pumping it with radio waves? Yet, the citation trail seems dead because scientists assumed that he was a crank claiming he got more power out than he put in. No, he just demonstrated a really neat approach to electrodeless hydrolysis.
Edit: it's a bit of a strange paper with a lot of talk about unrelated things (imo) but there seems to be this unexpected effect which might make it worthwhile to investigate it independently from what one thinks of this paper. The setup seems to be simple and cheap enough that there should not be huge obstacles to get easy and fast results.
Thanks for the edit. I view this all through the lens of the politics of science. Some radio technician figures out a really unexpected natural effect, it gets major news coverage by a scientifically illiterate press (claiming free energy), and the scientific mainstream pounce: "how foolish they were to think that energy could be extracted from water!" And yet (and this is the thing that makes me jump up and down), we still have a really unexpected property of nature! Study that shit, people! I might be wrong, but it seems that the reason the topic isn't studied—even to measure the inefficiency—is due to some unhealthy politics in modern science.
I expect it will first be studied by YouTubers like "the plasma channel".
From a practical point of view, It looks like an interesting demo, but I don't think it has too many applications. I only can imagine that it may be useful as a sterilization process, whatever virus or bacteria that is in the solution will be extremely unhappy with so much H2 and O2 around. The flame and the small risk of an explosion is a problem.
From a theoretical point of view, it's easy to model isolated small molecules. Big molecules or combination of molecules is exponentially more difficult, like in ~exp(5*N) where N is the number of atoms and 5 is an oversimplification. There are some approximations that reduce it to a polynomial time like ~(5N)^12 or ~(5N)^9 less if you use more approximations. And with more approximations you can calculate it in linear time that is very useful for biochemistry that are interested in big molecules. Anyway, most of these methods assume that atoms don't move, or don't move too much, or use a lot of simplifications.
Simulation water at the molecular level is a nightmare. You need to simulate many molecules, each one moving around, that form bounds between them that are not stable enough to simulate like a fixed length, but stable enough to be ignored. And now you need to add a strong electromagnetic field to the mix, and the nightmare is upgraded to the Freddy Krueger level.
But isn't that challenge of simulation exactly why empirical study would be valuable?
I'd want to know how the Hydrolysis effect varies as a function of EM frequency and salt composition. Hypothetically, different EM frequencies could produce resonance effects in water. Basically, I'm curious how the flame might grow bigger at different EM frequencies.
If anyone has any access to EM equipment like this, I'd definitely pay $1000 to catalyze. Seriously! I haven't been this curious about a physics phenomena since I learned about sonoluminescent bubble implosions "Mysterious Glowing Bubbles". Seriously.
https://www.newswise.com/articles/mysterious-glowing-bubbles
There seem to be a lot of low hanging fruits to characterize the phenomenon, so I would not try to simulate the process yet. Dependence of the amount of produced gases on the concentration and type of salt, the temperature, radio frequency, input power seem very easy to check if the necessary equipment is available. Pick a few parameters and hand the task over to a bachelor/master student or maybe research assistant and see what results come out.
"Effects of different parameters on the efficiency of electrode-less water splitting", sounds like an acceptable topic for a bachelor thesis for example ;)
I agree, there are many interesting variables (temperature, concentration, frequency, shape of the container, localization of the beam, ...), and impurities/catalyzers open another huge amount of tweaking opportunities.
It's just that most papers pretend that the result has some practical or theoretical application, and I think it's difficult to get one.
Personally, I read it as "mostly unmodelled, difficult to calculate experiment behaves in a way no scientist ever predicted, but not very far from what simpler ones do".
If I was looking for something to research, I wouldn't pick this one. It's not strange enough to compensate for how hard it is to understand it. (But then, I wonder how I the photoelectric emission fits on that dimension...)
If I understand, you are saying you wouldn't try to empirically research this because 1. burning salt water isn't strange enough and 2. it would be difficult to calculate and model.
That seems reasonable and yet unfortunate. It seems like the kind of experiment that a scientist would try to undertake out of sheer curiosity.
The RF probably just turns the glass into a capacitor plate. The AC nature of RF helps to deal with the fact that glass is a poor conductor, so a DC field couldn't create much gas before the surface saturated with charge.
This should work without the RF stage using electrodes coated with glass, and using AC to drive it at high frequency.
IIAN, 5,000 tons of water is 5,000 cubic meters' worth, right?
Wouldn't this process also quickly reduce the local concentration of Lithium in the water surrounding the processing station? Making sustained operations difficult?
In 1891 Chicago built a water intake four miles offshore in Lake Michigan, with pipes under the lakebed. I bet we could do a lot better than that, over 100 years later.
Likewise between the tide and currents you might have sufficient mixing if new seawater.
It's still not clear that the mixing will be faster than the flow through the Lithium extractor, if that extractor needs 5000 m^3 / Kg of output, and wants to get to, oh, 1000 Kg / day.
But you people visit Reddit as well. Is this your alter ego on HN? Why not behave the same way you do in other communities, why put on a mask for the HN folks?
The differences between a professional situation/drinking with friends/talking with grandmother are way too big compared to the differences between HN and Reddit. The latter two are actually extremely similar in how content gets posted and discussed.
In other words, there appears to be no reason why HN and Reddit folks should behave differently when on the opposite platform. These behavior differences are artificial and ad hoc (i.e. 'we want to keep HN free from obtuse memes.. because we said so!')
You don't accept that different online communities can have sufficiently different cultures that "memes" are more acceptable in one than the other, even if said communities have somewhat of an overlap in audiences?
I'll give you an unrelated example - I watch lots of developer conference presentations and read articles on developer blogs. My pet peeve is when writers include reaction GIFs in between some code example or one-sentence epiphany. I'm here to learn, not to waste bandwidth on some dumb five frame 80MB file. GIFs are for casual "throw-away" conversations, not learning resources.
I like that HN is a learning resource. I like that I can read perspectives from people in many different fields and across the various economic classes. I also like reddit - I like the memes, the in-group culture (when it's funny), the bots, the one-liners, what have you. But I don't want humor and generalizations to dominate HN comments; I want educational content to float to the top so that authors are rewarded for sharing their perspective. I can find funny takes on HN headlines on reddit already.
The point is that HN and Reddit are not extremely similar. This is more like a work place (more rules, more interesting), reddit is more like 8th grade recess (less rules, more fun)
Did I get this right: the primary process is basically an LTO battery where salt-water sits behind the LTO's membrane, and when the battery is "charged", the Lithium ions are "sucked" into the battery-side's electrolyte by osmosis?
Not a chemist so I'm just trying to see if I grokked it. If I did, then this is remarkably simple!
They built technology to separate lithium from brine that has high concentrations of it. Their short term plan is to test this in Bolivia where lithium is currently being mined by evaporating water in basins (using the sun). This takes huge amounts of water and a lot of time. This would potentially be a lot more efficient. The same company is also working on solid state batteries.
Doing the same with sea water would just require pumping a lot of water, I imagine. If you are desalinating that, you'd end up with a brine with relatively high concentrations of salt, lithium, etc. Same for hydrogen production. So, not the worst idea to do something productive with that brine (as opposed to dumping it back in the sea).
"This means that the value of hydrogen and chlorine produced by the cell would end up offsetting the cost of power, and residual seawater could also be used in desalination plants to provide freshwater."
Yes if you run electrodes in water you get Oxygen and Hydrogen at the respective electrodes. Add salt as you get in seawater and you get Hydrogen and Chlorine.
Is the demand for Chlorine that high?
[EDIT ADD] YES, it is and thank you for the replies, the epoxy one I had no idea (never even thought about it even).
The global demand for chlorine is 25-30 times as high as the amount of chlorine they would expect to produce when replacing all current lithium production with their process.
Two of these citations undermine your original claim that "the reduction in carbon footprint from EVs is nullified by the expanded carbon emissions from lithium mining."
Overall, electric vehicles typically have much lower life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than a typical car in Europe, even when assuming relatively high battery manufacturing emissions.
The first link does not appear to directly compare internal combustion vehicles against battery electric vehicles.
And some other data points indicate its not that clear cut and that is my point. From the second link you mentioned:
"On the other hand will the total CO2 footprint from battery production increase in unprecedented pace and to
an enormous scale. If the value from GREET 2018 is used (73kg CO2e/kWh) the industry will go from 12
million tonnes CO2 equivalents to 106 million tonnes which is equal to almost two thirds of GHG emissions
from aviation in Europe . Even if this contributes to a decrease of direct fossil fuel emissions, through the 30
replacement of ICEVs to EVs, it will be a large source of CO2 emissions "
> An entry-level Honda Civic, which we believe is a more appropriate comparison, would improve the ICE fuel efficiency by 20%.
Someone shopping for a Tesla model 3 isn’t also in the market for a base-model civic. The primary market they’ve been eating is bmw and Audi. And the author has to know that because it’s published monthly and he’s at least pretending to have done some research.
When you link to a blog making obvious bad-faith assumptions, the rest of the message is rather irrelevant and people are going to let you know.
I would like that EVs would prove to be solution to carbon footprint reduction.
Its just that with information I looked at so far, for ex. the fact batteries do not seem to last more than 130,000 Km and the expansion of lithium mining it looks like the jury
is still out of EVs really are helping reducing overall carbon footprint. If you look at some of the studies you will seen depending on the data there a reduction only of 10% maybe 15% and according to other sources its basically flat.
I would love to be proven wrong, as clearly we are facing a climate change emergency.Plus hydrogen as a solution does not seem to be around the corner. Producing hydrogen also has its challenges.
Does somebody know the environmental impact of this? Would the lithium concentration in seawater become meaningfully lower, and if so have we verified that organisms aren’t dependent on it?
We don't have a good idea of how this new method will scale, or how demand will scale once this cheaper method gets going. It's hard to speculate accurately I think.
No. Damage from extracting 'large volumes' is insignificant. (waste is another issue)
You are completely off scale.
The oceans contain 1.34e+21 L.
Humanity uses 1.38e+17J annually.
If we take ~10J to move 1Kg 1m up. That means if we spend all our energy on moving sea water, we can move 0.00001% of the ocean up by 1 meter per year.
Any novel ecosystem is close to shore, from those ecosystems most are already damaged by other means.
Only one way to find out!
Jokes aside, this would be awesome for Portugal, there's a lot of protests when lithium mines open in here.
Have an option to start extracting lithium from the ocean (which Portugal has LOTS of) would be really cool, but I doubt anyone would put a finger on it without have proper studies on the environmental impact.
A really cool example of lithium from seawater is underway on the Salton Sea using geothermal plants. The water in the Salton Sea is incredible high in lithium and there’s enough there to supply the demand for US EVs.
Salton Sea is one of the most disgusting and hazardous places in the USA. I’m glad something good can come of it. Hopefully profits will be used for remediation and cleanup.
Another way to kill the oceans. So pissed china pumps tons of crap there, and their massive ships with all that fossil fuels putting their emissions into the oceans, killing the reefs. Now we steal the oceans lithium. Wtf you people, all loving to kill the oceans. Stop it now.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadMaybe this process could be a way to deal with brine from seawater desalination [1] by at least removing lithium ions from the waste water. Since the ion concentration in the waste water is higher than in seawater, it should theoretically make the lithium separation process easier, shouldn't it?
Another thing: combining this with cheap solar power and seawater lithium mining might be a part of a possible solution for a post-oil industry in the Gulf States? They did the tests on Red Sea seawater which has a higher salinity than most other seawater but apparantly the eastern Mediterranean matches or even surpasses that [2].
[0] "It is also noted that the total concentration of other salts after the first stage is less than 500 ppm, which implies that after lithium harvest, the remaining water can be treated as freshwater. Hence, the process also has a potential to integrate with seawater desalination to further enhance its economic viability", from page 5, (PDF) https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...
[1] I am not linking to a particular article but this is what I am talking about: https://www.google.de/search?q=toxic+brine+seawater+drinking...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity#/media/File:WOA09_sea...
And then again the fresh water produced along with the brine will end up back in mostly the same surrounding after it gets used, so it's not like we're producing saltier and saltier water over time?
So aside from the increased salinity at the specific location where the brine is returned to the sea, is there another issue? Am I missing something that makes all this a large scale problem?
We had Bechtel design us a desalination/RO system for a biofuel startup I worked with and to prevent the dead zone, you need a massive system of buried pipes in the ocean. Iirc, it was the most expensive part of the entire design since you need to output it over something like a square kilometer and you need to mix in fresh seawater at several points to dilute the effluent before you release it. So in addition to the CapEx of a construction project in a horribly hostile environment, you have permanent energy consumption even past the filters.
And of course, since it’s coastal, there are tons of regulations and government bodies interested in making sure you don’t cut corners.
The way we discuss technical solutions is woefully inadequate. Everything is still presented as a miracle-cure for our problems. We should have a more mature understanding of how these things are constructed and maintained.
One piece of poop in the forest—nature.
A sewer pipe discharging a river of poop from an entire city into a forest—a toxic waste dump.
The entire surface of the sea is evaporating fresh water and the resulting brine is slinging constantly. It’s not creating a dead zone because it’s distributed. A river of brine in the oceans would be like a toxic cloud of ammonia that kills anything it touches…until it mixes sufficiently.
We kind of figured it out 150+ years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
But even then, if the ends of your system are in 50’ deep ocean, the water column is such that the top ~10% sees really good mixing and exchange due to wind and wave action but the rest really doesn’t. It’s rare that there are strong currents near enough coastlines to take advantage of.
I would argue that those countries that are cleaner have the moral authority to lead the way to a cleaner planet.
Countries should totally put pressure on others, but individual environmentalists putting pressure on their local countries makes sense.
Unfortunately, the US itself needs to beinfluenced into being environmentally conscious
Candidate 1: No. It's junk science.
Candidate 2: Two words: Condor attack. Don't want that. Got to say no.
...
Candidate 5: Enviro-mite!
Oh, if they are producing fresh water as well then isn't this good as desalination is already needed in some area's. So the studies upon the brine they output would be useful to measure any impact. Which would be localised - how localised and impacting is really the question here and for that we can look at existing drinking water from sea water production.
The real solution will be to:
"Make salt magnetic and pull it out of the water, in real-time, with electro-magnets."
https://audio.kryon.com/en/What's%20Wrong%20Today.mp3 (start the audio at 18:20, for the gist and some more details)
"Make oxygen magnetic and then just pull it out of water to produce hydrogen"
I too like to fantasize. :-)
> "Unconfigured Simplecast Domain You are seeing this page because your website is not configured properly."
Liquid oxygen is paramagnetic and it is attracted to a magnet.
https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae493.cfm
Disclaimer: Sorry if that was what you were alluding to... the person on the GP's audio clip was too annoying for me to waste time listening to it.
And yeah, cringe podcast :-/
I wonder if the process can work for other more valuable substances. Uranium from seawater has been done for a while now. This process might make it cheaper than mining. The world could change if every country with access to the sea can start extracting such things.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/05/13/ev-ran...
At the same time by this method lithium it can become available almost for all countries on the planet (minus 45 that do not have sea).
Collateral damage is justifiable unless you are not that damage isn't it?
Better reasoning could begin with the question: would I leave my comfortable home, go there, and live there in community where water is contaminated by lithium mining sludge. Would I drink that water every day? Is there anyone who is suffering so I could enjoy comfortable life?
Instead it should concentrate people thinking power to solve those other issues in mining industry of metals as gold, copper, lead, nickel, iron, cadmium...
Also going outside and seeing that it is beautiful kind of sounds as ostrich way of dealing with problems buy turning on the blind eye concentrating to things in local vicinity, convincing yourself that all is good and we should move on.
Don’t get me wrong; I really want this to work, but until the extraction plant gets built and is producing at scale, I won’t hold my breath.
I do not know the current price of lithium, because most previous information sources, like the metal exchanges, no longer make their data public.
Nevertheless, a few years ago lithium was around $66 per kg.
So $5 would be just about 7.5% of the price per kg, but there are a lot of other costs, like replacing from time to time the expensive LLTO ceramic membrane and the very expensive Pt-Ru coated cathode and also many other operational costs and the amortization of the investment.
For reversible batteries, the conversion of lithium phosphate to another lithium salt might be enough, but for applications that need metallic lithium, like primary batteries or Li-Al alloys, the lithium phosphate must be converted into lithium chloride or other suitable salt and the metallic lithium must be extracted by electrolysis, with additional, higher, costs for electric energy.
However, the method described is sound and there are also useful byproducts to ensure or increase the profit.
The method is not new, but the major achievement is finding a suitable material for the selective membrane, which passes lithium but blocks the much more abundant sodium & potassium.
Unlike many such announcements, this appears to have good chances to eventually be used for lithium extraction.
The Pt-Ru is just a catalyst, no? Maybe it gets contaminated but it would hopefully be recycled. Might even go up in value over time rather than be consumed.
If they get chemical grade lithium without extra steps, it might well be cheaper than "mining"
Just 2% of that would be enough to create storage capable of holding a year's worth of the world's electricity consumption.
I've seen a video of how smartphone batteries are made, it's pretty advanced...
The kind of false joy you are talking about has been my constant pain for like 25years.
You just have to understand that « scientific paper hyped up in mainstream media » != « new technology entering the market ».
$5 of electricity at $0.09/kWh is 200 MJ, which is enough to pump that much water 40 m high, or push it through a membrane with 4 bar pressure drop.
So you can't do very much to seawater at that price point. Like many "scientists develop cheap ___" headlines, it may just cover part of the process and not the whole operation.
I wonder if we are wasting valuable brine as part of our established desalinization processes?
Returns to mending nets and counting seagulls.
I doubt drinking water contains anything close to therapeutic doses of lithium.
EDIT: For more context, nuclear power could be a great tool in reducing carbon emissions. I read somewhere that mining Uranium 235 from seawater at scale would cost roughy 2x to 3x what it costs to get the fuel from the ground at today's prices. I was trying to say that if we're going through all of the trouble to extract Lithium from seawater, it'd be cool if extracting Uranium at the same time made both processes more economical.
"Seawater contains about 3.3 parts per billion of uranium by weight, approximately (3.3 µg/kg) or, 3.3 micrograms per liter of seawater.[6] The extraction of uranium from seawater has been considered as a means of obtaining the element.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Nat...
(Mining uranium is as environmentally unfriendly as other mining operations, just do a web search for "uranium mining".)
Actually the only "molecules" smaller than Lithium are Hydrogen and Helium. Helium is not a problem because it's too easy to pull apart and Hydrogen (H+ and H2) are not problem because H2 is another of the products.
(Actually^2 H+ is not isolated, it's combined with water in H3O+, but I guess the holes need some room for the water around the Li+ ions. The technical details are probably more complicated, but "small holes only allow H, He and Li to pass" is a good approximation.)
But Uranium atoms are huge. They are bigger than most atoms, and I'm not sure if the common form in seawater is a combination of Uranium and Oxygen. A hole that big will allow most mineral to pass, so you will just get brine. Using it in the other direction with holes just smaller than Uranium is also not very useful, because you will get Uranium mixed with a lot of crap, many of the contamination are not isolated atoms (that are mostly smaller) but molecules that combine a few atoms are are bigger.
And heavy. Some gravitational fractionation should do it.
Yes, I know all about the externalities of uranium mining as a portion of my extended family who lived in a particular house around the Four Corners/Durango area all died within a matter of years from horrible cancers due to contaminated drinking water.
https://www.ewg.org/research/170-million-us-drink-radioactiv...
sounds promising but papers tend to overpromise, so we'll see if it's viable - cheap and abundant lithium batteries would be a major breakthrough for renewables
Batteries still have a lifespan, their manufacture emits CO2, and they need to be disposable or to be recycled.
Nuclear is still the best energy in terms of carbon.
Nuclear is a non starter from a cost perspective at this point. You get vastly more bang for the buck subsidizing battery backed up wind / solar which can actually load follow without becoming even more expensive.
The same way? Mining, processing, shipping, etc... There is a difference between "the same way" and an actual carbon accounting.
Money doesn't matter, only carbon matters. Nuclear is a long term investment, it doesn't mean it's more expensive.
Anyway, it’s the same in that their all indirectly producing CO2. In a full accounting all of those things that make nuclear expensive actually produce CO2 because construction equipment, mining to produce the parts to build a reactor, etc etc all produce CO2 in the current economy.
In fact if you do the full breakdown for all activities related to Nuclear Reactor Construction, Operation, and Decommissioning their a very significant CO2 source in large part because all economic activity is and their really expensive. Regardless of how easy to draw arbitrary lines that ignore say CO2 emissions from workers daily commutes etc.
The only way to move past that is to have serious energy storage that’s used for all equipment and thus very widespread adoption of cheap battery technology. At which point Nuclear costs become an even larger issue because cheap batteries tank the cost of battery backed up wind/solar. In the end far northern countries can make some use of Nuclear, but it’s a dead end technology without a significant role in actually solving climate change.
As with pretty much any energy source, (including wind, solar, gas..) nuclear tends to get cheaper the more you build. You can look up FOAK vs NOAK and note the curves. Not sure what you're referring to re difficulty of increasing %share?
How are you measuring "fuel rod lifecycle"? And how does that possibly comparable to "$/kWh solar"?
Here's [0] a good source for some facts. You should note that accounting for the whole lifecycle of mining/processing/operating/defueling/decommissioning, nuclear is ~1/4 of the emissions of solar. And this is only considering electricity; we still have 2-3x the kwh to source for our heating requirements. You're suggesting we get that all sorted with solar & wind too?
0 - https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the...
More importantly nuclear very specifically gets more expensive as you ramp up the percentage of grid energy your supplying. For a simple fact check look at the capacity factor of French nuclear reactors, for example:
France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chooz_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Capacity factor 70.6% and around 700 full-time workers
USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Nuclear_Generating_St...
Capacity Factor: 87.70% (lifetime)
Lower capacity factors directly translate into higher costs as you still need to pay for the building and security guards etc, you just don’t generate as much energy from identical infrastructure.
PS: If you don’t want to do the leg work just compare national averages around 2000-2005 and then realize France needed to import and export a lot of electricity because they simply couldn’t afford to operate in isolation at 70+% nuclear generation.
"A 50% increase in lithium prices would for instance increase the battery pack price of a nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) 811 battery by less than 4%." [1]
Nevertheless, together with improvements in (low-cobalt) battery chemistry, this sounds like an important piece of the puzzle.
[1] https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...
Amortized over a year, letting the plant shut down because it's cloudy a few days should be fine.
I remember in 2005 my earth science teacher told me "shale in north dakota will never be viable with all this saudi oil lying around"
"Based on these data, we estimated the total electricity required to enrich 1 kg lithium from seawater to 9000 ppm in five stages to be 76.34 kWh. Simultaneously, 0.87 kg H_2 and 31.12 kg Cl_2 were collected from the cathode and the anode, respectively. Taking the US electricity price of US$ 0.065 per kWh into consideration, the total electricity cost for this process is approximately US$ 5.0. In addition, based on the 2020 prices of hydrogen and Cl_2 (i.e., US$ 2.5–8.0 per kg and US$ 0.15 per kg, respectively), the side-product value is approximately US$ 6.9–11.7, which can well compensate for the total energy cost. It should also be noted that the current Cl_2 utilisation capacity in the chlor-alkali industry is ~ 80 Mtons/year. Even in the case where all the world lithium capacity is produced from our extraction process, the amount of Cl_2 produced will be 3 Mtons, and so will have very little effect on the total market", from https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...
Pretty amazing innovation, certainly a more sustainable solution than overthrowing the Bolivian government and murdering Native protestors.
To think that an entire mineral mining industry could be replaced by processing seawater is revolutionary.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:t....
https://sci-hub.do/10.1179/143307508/270875
Edit: it's a bit of a strange paper with a lot of talk about unrelated things (imo) but there seems to be this unexpected effect which might make it worthwhile to investigate it independently from what one thinks of this paper. The setup seems to be simple and cheap enough that there should not be huge obstacles to get easy and fast results.
I expect it will first be studied by YouTubers like "the plasma channel".
From a practical point of view, It looks like an interesting demo, but I don't think it has too many applications. I only can imagine that it may be useful as a sterilization process, whatever virus or bacteria that is in the solution will be extremely unhappy with so much H2 and O2 around. The flame and the small risk of an explosion is a problem.
From a theoretical point of view, it's easy to model isolated small molecules. Big molecules or combination of molecules is exponentially more difficult, like in ~exp(5*N) where N is the number of atoms and 5 is an oversimplification. There are some approximations that reduce it to a polynomial time like ~(5N)^12 or ~(5N)^9 less if you use more approximations. And with more approximations you can calculate it in linear time that is very useful for biochemistry that are interested in big molecules. Anyway, most of these methods assume that atoms don't move, or don't move too much, or use a lot of simplifications.
Simulation water at the molecular level is a nightmare. You need to simulate many molecules, each one moving around, that form bounds between them that are not stable enough to simulate like a fixed length, but stable enough to be ignored. And now you need to add a strong electromagnetic field to the mix, and the nightmare is upgraded to the Freddy Krueger level.
I'd want to know how the Hydrolysis effect varies as a function of EM frequency and salt composition. Hypothetically, different EM frequencies could produce resonance effects in water. Basically, I'm curious how the flame might grow bigger at different EM frequencies.
If anyone has any access to EM equipment like this, I'd definitely pay $1000 to catalyze. Seriously! I haven't been this curious about a physics phenomena since I learned about sonoluminescent bubble implosions "Mysterious Glowing Bubbles". Seriously. https://www.newswise.com/articles/mysterious-glowing-bubbles
RIP Dr. Apfel, he was a big influence on me.
I know Alan McGaughey at CMU does water modeling at a molecular level, pretty cool stuff: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HmNtygkAAAAJ&hl=en
"Effects of different parameters on the efficiency of electrode-less water splitting", sounds like an acceptable topic for a bachelor thesis for example ;)
It's just that most papers pretend that the result has some practical or theoretical application, and I think it's difficult to get one.
If I was looking for something to research, I wouldn't pick this one. It's not strange enough to compensate for how hard it is to understand it. (But then, I wonder how I the photoelectric emission fits on that dimension...)
That seems reasonable and yet unfortunate. It seems like the kind of experiment that a scientist would try to undertake out of sheer curiosity.
This should work without the RF stage using electrodes coated with glass, and using AC to drive it at high frequency.
(Rex Research is mostly crackpottery. But not all of it. The tricky bit is sorting the horse from the horseshit, eh?)
(Assuming lithium battery cost is USD 100/kWh and 100 g of Lithium metal (not LCE) per kWh)
Wouldn't this process also quickly reduce the local concentration of Lithium in the water surrounding the processing station? Making sustained operations difficult?
Likewise between the tide and currents you might have sufficient mixing if new seawater.
Anyway, like you said - "maybe".
That’s a generalization, not everyone visits reddit.
Come now, let's not be obtuse. People naturally behave differently in different social contexts, a thing that is totally normal and expected.
For instance, consider how you'd behave in a professional situation, vs when drinking with your friends, vs when catching up with your grandmother.
Having different standards in different online communities seems no different.
In other words, there appears to be no reason why HN and Reddit folks should behave differently when on the opposite platform. These behavior differences are artificial and ad hoc (i.e. 'we want to keep HN free from obtuse memes.. because we said so!')
The site rules would be a pretty obvious reason why people should and do act differently here vs Reddit.
I like that HN is a learning resource. I like that I can read perspectives from people in many different fields and across the various economic classes. I also like reddit - I like the memes, the in-group culture (when it's funny), the bots, the one-liners, what have you. But I don't want humor and generalizations to dominate HN comments; I want educational content to float to the top so that authors are rewarded for sharing their perspective. I can find funny takes on HN headlines on reddit already.
Not a chemist so I'm just trying to see if I grokked it. If I did, then this is remarkably simple!
They built technology to separate lithium from brine that has high concentrations of it. Their short term plan is to test this in Bolivia where lithium is currently being mined by evaporating water in basins (using the sun). This takes huge amounts of water and a lot of time. This would potentially be a lot more efficient. The same company is also working on solid state batteries.
Doing the same with sea water would just require pumping a lot of water, I imagine. If you are desalinating that, you'd end up with a brine with relatively high concentrations of salt, lithium, etc. Same for hydrogen production. So, not the worst idea to do something productive with that brine (as opposed to dumping it back in the sea).
Yes if you run electrodes in water you get Oxygen and Hydrogen at the respective electrodes. Add salt as you get in seawater and you get Hydrogen and Chlorine.
Is the demand for Chlorine that high?
[EDIT ADD] YES, it is and thank you for the replies, the epoxy one I had no idea (never even thought about it even).
"Effects of battery manufacturing on electric vehicle life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions" https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...
"Analysis of the climate impact of lithium-ion batteries and how to measure it" https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publicat...
"Climate explained: the environmental footprint of electric versus fossil cars" https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-the-environmen...
https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-the-environmen...
says
So on the basis of recent studies, fossil-fueled cars generally emit more than electric cars in all phases of a life cycle.
and https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publicat...
says
Overall, electric vehicles typically have much lower life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than a typical car in Europe, even when assuming relatively high battery manufacturing emissions.
The first link does not appear to directly compare internal combustion vehicles against battery electric vehicles.
"On the other hand will the total CO2 footprint from battery production increase in unprecedented pace and to an enormous scale. If the value from GREET 2018 is used (73kg CO2e/kWh) the industry will go from 12 million tonnes CO2 equivalents to 106 million tonnes which is equal to almost two thirds of GHG emissions from aviation in Europe . Even if this contributes to a decrease of direct fossil fuel emissions, through the 30 replacement of ICEVs to EVs, it will be a large source of CO2 emissions "
> An entry-level Honda Civic, which we believe is a more appropriate comparison, would improve the ICE fuel efficiency by 20%.
Someone shopping for a Tesla model 3 isn’t also in the market for a base-model civic. The primary market they’ve been eating is bmw and Audi. And the author has to know that because it’s published monthly and he’s at least pretending to have done some research.
When you link to a blog making obvious bad-faith assumptions, the rest of the message is rather irrelevant and people are going to let you know.
Its just that with information I looked at so far, for ex. the fact batteries do not seem to last more than 130,000 Km and the expansion of lithium mining it looks like the jury is still out of EVs really are helping reducing overall carbon footprint. If you look at some of the studies you will seen depending on the data there a reduction only of 10% maybe 15% and according to other sources its basically flat. I would love to be proven wrong, as clearly we are facing a climate change emergency.Plus hydrogen as a solution does not seem to be around the corner. Producing hydrogen also has its challenges.
Just kidding, of course.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/throwing-car-batteries-into-t...
"The world's oceans contain an estimated 180 billion tons of lithium"
"Lithium mines produced an estimated global total of 82,000 metric tons of lithium in 2020"
You are completely off scale. The oceans contain 1.34e+21 L. Humanity uses 1.38e+17J annually. If we take ~10J to move 1Kg 1m up. That means if we spend all our energy on moving sea water, we can move 0.00001% of the ocean up by 1 meter per year.
Any novel ecosystem is close to shore, from those ecosystems most are already damaged by other means.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-21/french-nu...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/01/jellyfish-clog...
[3]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hinkley-poin...
Have an option to start extracting lithium from the ocean (which Portugal has LOTS of) would be really cool, but I doubt anyone would put a finger on it without have proper studies on the environmental impact.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/28/990867075/californias-white-g...
I believe there’s a few startups rushing to get there first.