Germany Chancellor plans lithium deal with Serbia after Rio ruling
Olaf Scholz plans to visit Serbia this week to secure supplies of lithium that are critical for the nation’s energy transition and auto industry.
Is it possible to get lithium without actually mining it? Martin LaMonica in his “Green Tech” blog explains how.
LaMonica reports that Simbol Materials has started a plant in California that is able to extract metals from the discharge brine of geothermal plants:
Rather than drill wells or mine for minerals, Simbol Materials’ process separates lithium carbonate, zinc, and manganese from the brine brought up from a geothermal well. A geothermal plant generates electricity by using underground heat to make steam, which is pushed through a turbine that turns an electricity generator.
Lithium, used in batteries for electric vehicles, is normally made from brine that is pumped into large ponds that take several months to evaporate.
There are only a handful of companies producing lithium in the United States (the biggest reserves are in China, South America and Australia) but Simbol says the new process has the potential to make the US a much larger producer.
2 Comments
Ken in San Jose
This could finally make geothermal cost effective and attractive.
Fehertom64
Nevertheless we must make a world-wide survey in several geological environments (e.g. oil-fields and so on) for other accessible elements in hot underground waters. It is not only interesting but maybe the form of a kind of future mining of elements nowadays extracted from hard rock.