Seawater Could Provide Nearly Unlimited Amounts of Critical Battery Material
upstart writes:
Seawater could provide nearly unlimited amounts of critical battery material:
Booming electric vehicle sales have spurred a growing demand for lithium. But the light metal, which is essential for making power-packed rechargeable batteries, isn't abundant. Now, researchers report a major step toward tapping a virtually limitless lithium supply: pulling it straight out of seawater.
This represents substantial progress" for the field, says Jang Wook Choi, a chemical engineer at Seoul National University who was not involved with the work.
[...] Lithium is prized for rechargeables because it stores more energy by weight than other battery materials. Manufacturers use more than 160,000 tons of the material every year, a number expected to grow nearly 10-fold over the next decade. But lithium supplies are limited and concentrated in a handful of countries, where the metal is either mined or extracted from briny water.
[...] The advance is still not likely cheap enough to compete with mining lithium on land, [materials scientist Chong] Liu says. However, she says her group is attempting to increase selectivity using other types of lithium-ion battery electrodes.
Choi adds that the approach might also prove useful for recovering lithium from discarded batteries, giving the metal a second lease on life-and potentially supercharging the ascendancy of electric vehicles.
Journal Reference:
Chong Liu, Yanbin Li, Dingchang Lin, et. al. Lithium Extraction from Seawater through Pulsed Electrochemical Intercalation, Joule (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.05.017)
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