Seawater could provide nearly unlimited amounts of critical battery material

Great sounding headline! However:

1. How environmentally would this seawater extraction be?
2. How economically sound is it?

"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. ... The world’s oceans contain an estimated 180 billion tons of lithium. But it’s dilute, present at roughly 0.2 parts per million [0.180 ppm]. ... In seawater, a negative electrical voltage applied to a lithium-grabbing electrode pulls lithium ions into the electrode. But it also pulls in sodium, a chemically similar element that is about 100,000 times more abundant in seawater than lithium. If the two elements push their way into the electrode at the same rate, sodium almost completely crowds out the lithium. ... The advance is still not likely cheap enough to compete with mining lithium on land ..."

"Electrochemical Li extraction emerges as an attractive route for Li extraction, which can potentially utilize renewable energy to power the electrochemical processes. For most of the study using electrode materials, the focus was on highly concentrated Li brine with Li to Na concentration ranging from 0.001 to 1. Real seawater condition with much lower Li concentration is rarely tested. ..."



Seawater could provide nearly unlimited amounts of critical battery material | Science | AAAS



Here is the underlying research paper:

Lithium Extraction from Seawater through Pulsed Electrochemical Intercalation