Extracting Lithium from Brine Just Got Easier

Two new methods for pulling lithium out of low-concentration brines could help address a looming shortage of this critical battery material.

World lithium demand is expected to hit 3 million m.t. by 2030, tripling today’s demand. Batteries for electric vehicles and for green energy storage are the biggest drivers of the increase. Today, lithium comes from hard-rock mines and the evaporation of high-concentration lithium brines found mostly in South America. But hard-rock mines are energy-intensive, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive to operate, notes Seth Darling, the chief science and technology officer for the Advanced Energy Technologies Directorate at Argonne National Laboratory. Meanwhile, brine evaporation takes 9 to 18 months per batch, and evaporation ponds require a lot of space.

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▲ Today, much of the lithium destined for rechargeable batteries and electric vehicles comes from the evaporation of high-concentration lithium brines found mainly in South America. However, brine evaporation takes 9 to 18 months per batch, and evaporation ponds require a lot of space.

“These two major sources today probably can’t be scaled up enough to meet that demand using the existing approaches,” Darling says.

The looming supply crunch has spurred a lot of research into alternatives. Lithium itself is abundant; seawater holds between 180 and 230 billion tons of the metal, but at a very low concentration. There are also many subsurface brines that are lithium-rich, though not as rich as the brines found in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. Two recent studies published in the journal Science take different approaches to extracting lithium from such brines.

The first takes...