“A startup in Utah has developed a more sustainable way to collect lithium. Using proprietary ceramic beads, Lilac Solutions can extract highly pure lithium while recycling nearly all the water it uses. Their technology, which they plan to license, could boost US lithium supplies without straining scarce water resources in the arid West,” reports The Doomslayer.
MIT Technology Review explains:
Lilac Solutions is pioneering a new type of lithium extraction that could double US production in two years and shake up the industry…
The company uses proprietary beads to draw lithium ions from water and says its process can extract lithium using a tenth as much water as the alumina sorbent technology that dominates the DLE industry. Lilac also highlights its all-American supply chain. Technology originally developed by Koch Industries, for example, uses some Chinese-made components. Lilac’s beads are manufactured at the company’s plant in Nevada.
Lilac says the beads are particularly well suited to extracting lithium where concentrations are low. That doesn’t mean they could be deployed just anywhere—there won’t be lithium extraction on the Hudson River anytime soon. But Lilac’s tech could offer significant advantages over what’s currently on the market. And forgoing plans to become a major producer itself could enable the company to seize a decent slice of global production by appealing to lithium miners companies looking for the best equipment.
Lilac’s new way to extract lithium is called direct lithium extraction. It would reduce the environmental harm caused by typical methods of mining lithium: hard-rock mining and brining. Australia, the world’s biggest lithium producer, relies on hard-rock mining, taking rocks that contain lithium out of the earth and then processing them. Chile, the second-biggest lithium producer, uses the brining method: It floods areas of the Atacama Desert with water. “This results in ponds rich in dissolved lithium, which are then allowed to dry off, leaving behind lithium salts that can be harvested and processed elsewhere.”
Lithium supplements may help with Alzheimer’s disease.
Lithium is needed for electric car batteries, and other things on the green agenda. Yet green activists have blocked lithium mining in other places in America like Maine. In the past, the world’s richest known lithium deposit was in the woods of western Maine, worth perhaps $1.5 billion, but Maine’s greens made it impossible to mine it, reported Time Magazine.
A new lithium mine near the border of Nevada and California may produce up to 40,000 tons of lithium annually by 2026, reducing America’s reliance on China for this critical mineral.
Right now, there is only one operational lithium plant in all of America – the Silver Peak facility in Nevada.
A huge supply of lithium has also been found in Pennsylvania. But as law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds notes, that lithium probably won’t be tapped for many years, because “the Chinese government will now rush to fund ‘activist’ groups that will tie its extraction up in environmental challenges.”
As Science Alert notes, “Expanding America’s lithium industry” is “highly controversial, as mining can destroy natural environments, leach toxic chemicals, and intrude on sacred Indigenous land.”
