It may be hard for you to imagine that a simple rope could completely change the rules of the global lithium game, using this wonderful way to extract the critical mineral lithium, can reduce land use by 90%, increase production speed by 20 times, and save a lot of water and chemicals, thereby greatly reducing production costs and environmental costs, how does this perfect rope lithium technology do it?
The study, led by Zhiyong Ren, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University, and led by Xi Chen and Meiqi Yang, was published in the September 7 issue of Nature Water and featured as the cover article.
Lithium is a highly active flammable metal that does not exist in nature, mainly in pegmatite minerals and brine, and is currently mainly produced by ore refining and brine extraction. Due to the rise of electric vehicles, lithium is widely used in electronic products, new energy vehicles, aerospace and other fields, and the amount has increased year by year, and it is considered to be a key mineral in the field of new energy.
Whether it is ore refining or brine extraction, the production of lithium needs to pay a huge environmental price, brine extraction requires the construction of a large number of evaporation ponds, the use of a large area of land and a long time, the vast majority of lithium concentration of brine has no production value, the production of one ton of lithium needs to evaporate 2200 tons of water, shocking. The amount of lithium in the ocean is as high as 230 billion tons, but the relative concentration is only 0.14-0.25 ppm, and the difficulty and cost of extraction are surprisingly high.
Researchers at Princeton University have developed a porous fiber that can be twisted into a rope with a hydrophilic interior and a waterproof surface, when the rope is immersed in salt water, the water flows upwards through capillary action, and after the water evaporates, the salt ions are left on the rope, eventually forming sodium chloride and lithium chloride crystals that can be easily collected. The most amazing thing is that due to the low solubility of sodium salts, they form at the lower end of the rope, while the lithium salts with higher solubility form at the upper part, so they can be easily separated without the use of more chemicals.
According to the researchers, the rope can reduce land use by 90 percent, and lithium can now be harvested in less than a month in less than a month after months or even years of evaporation, which is more than 20 times faster, and the technology can also be used for low-concentration lithium resources such as abandoned oil wells and geothermal brine, and the researchers are also studying whether the technology can be used to extract lithium from seawater. In addition, the material of this porous fiber rope is also very cheap, which can greatly reduce the production cost of lithium.
It is conceivable that if this technology is eventually developed to the point where lithium can be produced on a large scale, and can even be extracted from seawater, it may completely change the global lithium production pattern and rules of the game, reduce the cost of environmental protection, and have an incredibly huge impact on the field of new energy.
In the first half of this year, a company in Qingdao, mainland China, built the world's first desalination concentrated brine lithium extraction project, which adsorbs lithium ions through ion exchange and will be officially put into operation before the end of the year. However, this project is to take advantage of the opportunity of desalination to comprehensively use concentrated brine to reduce costs, and the production is very limited, which may not have a greater impact on the entire industry.
Thesis: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00131-3