Featured GM Invests In Extracting Lithium From Brine

Every PowerPoint design works perfectly ... until actually built. I wish them well but a working demo would be more impressive.

Bob Wilson

 

But still no sign of a breakthrough on end-of-life for ½ a billion ½ tonne batteries every year once this EV craze sets in.

 

GM money will help get them there.

Tesla's new cell is something like 95% recyclable, and the company plans to eventually make new cells out of new ones. Recycling of the rest win happen in time. The hurdle to doing so now is the small number of old cells available. Need more out there to make cost competitive with making new.

 

Cali just wants the Salton sea superfund area profitably cleaned up

California Energy Commission awards $7.8M to two lithium recovery projects; “Lithium Valley” - Green Car Congress

Run a pipe from the ocean to the Salton Sea and voila higher water level and a sustainable source of lithium dense water and other salts to drive an underground salt dome mine

If not enough salt is extracted you will end up with a Utah salt flat / Dead Sea like environment

 

6.9 litre diesel & E40d tranny weigh even MORE than that (even before filled w/ fuel & gear oil) ... & have less torque than a model S ... BUT that's the nature of power plants, right?

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There is a working demo of the technology.
Geothermal lithium extraction pilot plant set up in Germany

The question really is cost. Using today's technology it is more expensive than other processes to extract lithium. Still there is US, German, and California government money to subsidize, maybe they will make a breakthrough to cut the cost.

The biggest contributor to cost of lion batteries today is nickel and cobalt. VW and Tesla - two of the largest users of automotive lithium batteries are switching to lithium iron phosphate. After that its manufacturing and lithium costs.

 

I got the impression it is an experiment to quantify performance. Not a production project. I look forward to reading a paper of their results.

Bob Wilson

 

it's always cheaper to harvest virgin resources when using slave labor

 

Notice the convenient correlation with California’s $7.8M Salton sea lithium reclamation offer and GMs novel project to recover lithium and replace into the ground.

Seems convenient and likely that the cheaper option will fund the more expensive system in a bid/contract scenario

Beneath and around the Salton Sea are virgin resources but yes a Chinese Cell Companies open pit mine in a foreign land is cheaper due to us (and others) subsidizing freight

 

maybe the new gub'ment leadership will insist the pyramids be torn down.

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https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/2/22559718/gm-lithium-ctr-ev-battery-investment-salton-sea

More on the subject

 

There is a new company apparently planning to mine the manganese nodules in the ocean for cobalt, etc. Greenpeace is on the warpath saying all ocean bottoms must stay pristine, no mining allowed, which may negatively impact sea life.

 

So much has been said in this thread, and most are taking a very optimistic point of view.

For instance, the program to recycle scrap from the manufacturing process... That sounds encouraging but in reality it's low hanging fruit. It's easy to recycle the scrap that is trimmed from the sheets or blocks of material. It's easy to recycle scrap that has never been contaminated by mixing it with the other chemicals in the finished product.

The stumbling block to Li-ion battery recycling is that the components are intimately meshed and can't be conveniently sorted. It's not like the lead-acid batteries that can be drained, crushed and ground up. Then the heavy parts drop to the bottom and the rubber/plastic parts can be floated away, burned, etc.

Then look at the "not enough batteries available to recycle"... Currently there is a market for partially depleted Li-ion batteries because you can take a 62kWH battery that is degraded to 25 kWH and mate it with several more to come up with a viable battery backup for your grid tied solar system. The jury's still out on what will happen to that market when we have 1/2 billion battery packs (is it really that many???) sent to junk yards (world wide ???) every year.

We have geothermal power here in Calif. If's an interesting source of power. But using it to inject brine back into the bedrock is a shaky proposition. The article said that they would be pumping lithium rich brine to the surface, apparently using it's heat to drive a turbine that powers the lithium extraction and the pumps that will inject the water back into the ground. It "hopes to produce 49.9 MW" of power. That's a lot of awfully hot brine. And, of course they use the phrase "hope" instead of "will" or "is designed to". I hope that I will see a new Prius Prime for less than $10,000. I will not ever see it.

 

Now if the mining companies just train sea critters to play ‘fetch’.’

Bob Wilson

 

maybe we could mine the mercury

 

The great thing about this thing called Google...
Q: Google: how many cars sold each year worldwide?
Answer: 74-76 million

Mike