REN: Lithium- US challenge to get DLE working

by Ian Page

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/799178.pdf

There are lots of deep rock brines in the world, in particular under the Salton Sea in California. These contain between them an enormous amount of lithium.

DLE direct lithium extraction is an approach to put an extraction plant at the cool output of a geothermal plant before the brine is returned to the ground. The lithium process gets the drilling and pumping essentially for free which improves the costs. (As well as some low temperature hot water that might be useful in the processing.)

The main problems are separation of the lithium from all the other junk and ensuring that the brine that comes up the bore hole doesn't lose lithium concentration because the way brine being returned has no lithium in it.

The above paper suggests that it should be commercially feasible, and a challenge has been set up to demonstrate feasibility in two years. It should be faster to implement the results of this than to create a new lithium mine so useful output may not be too many years after that.

The approaches are pretty well understood, as are the problems.

Should the challenge be successful, there are a number of geothermal stations in the Salton Sea area so a useful amount of lithium could be produced.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pulsing industrial chemical reactions

By Ian Page From Nature 605 19 May 22 470. Chemical reactions are often a mixture of potential parallel reactions, and potential serial reactions. Chemists play with temperature, flow rate, pressure, proportions etc. to persuade just the one reaction they want to happen.
Read more

REN: Reperceiving the Grid Part 1

Image
2021.06.30 – Ian Page The grid is normally described as a cloud that delivers electricity as needed to a wide array of sinks/applications/users at an averaged price in control and buys services such as generation and storage from a variety of external suppliers. It has a very difficult job balancing the variable supply and variable demand with congestion on lines and keeping alternative lines to handle outages. Supply and demand are being balanced by market systems such as day ahead bidding for 15-minute periods as well as using inertia and battery systems to balance the system within the 15-minute periods. It's worth comparing this with the internet. The internet also has the need to maintain an instantaneous balance between packets coming onto the system and going out, packets cannot pile up.  Congestion appears as delays to streaming rather than brownouts or overvoltage. The internet also has sources that can deliver huge quantities of packets unpredictably and sinks that can de...
Read more

Serious Plan to Convert Australia's Largest Fertilizer Plant to Green Hydrogen to Save Money

By Ian Page – 2021.12.31 https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/30/high-gas-prices-lead-to-conversion-of-ammonia-plant-to-green-hydrogen/ I’ve written before that the high price of gas means that it's now cheaper to make hydrogen by electrolysis than from natural gas in Europe. This is the first actual plan I've seen and by a big industrial group. I hope it goes forward. Also:  Hyundai has given up on hydrogen powered cars citing technical issues, and lack of marketability after spending a fortune over many years. With Toyotas ambivalence and deal with a Chinese EV car firm to make rebrand-able EVs, hydrogen powered cars are effectively dead. This is good news because energetically it's a lousy idea, and batteries have gotten good enough to eat into the potential market. However, there is still potential for long distance lorries, although we are already seeing in Germany container lorries doing repeated medium distance trips from port to warehouse, trying pantographs on parts o...
Read more