Exxon will mine lithium for electric vehicle batteries in Arkansas

With EV incentives tied to domestic battery content, US lithium mines are needed.


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[Fenixgoon]

"but working with the corrosive brine has proven extremely challenging to industrial equipment."

I'd be interested to know more about the details on this aspect - just from a layman perspective, this sounds like a materials problems - if the brine is corrosive to one material, maybe use a different material to make the equipment? Although, perhaps certain equipment is hard to make from other materials? I presume that if they could just use other materials, they would, so there must be some reason they can't.

But, just as an example, seems like maybe pipes, tanks, boilers, vats, etc could be made from something like a ceramic or plastic that would be impervious to the brine?

I certainly don't have any expertise in this area, so an article on the challenges they face and why it's hard to solve would be very interesting and educational.

Talking in very broad generalities here:

Ceramics as a class are generally too brittle. One small crack and your reactor vessel goes boom (literally). They're also difficult to make in very large assemblies.

Polymers can be made in large sections and are tough, but often too weak and susceptible to multiple forms of degradation at modest reaction temperatures and pressures.

Stainless steels (and I'm generalizing here, because there are many, many types...) are a bit of a middle ground. Not as chemically inert as certain polymers or ceramics, but we can make them in very large sections (thanks to welding), they're fairly temperature stable (in the grand spectrum of things), they're strong enough to handle both static and dynamic pressures, and tough enough that a crack won't make them go boom if they are designed properly (leak before burst criterion) and routinely inspected.

Also, it could be that lithium brine is more corrosive than sodium brine. That part I'm entirely unsure of.

<--Metallurgist