Researchers develop a new process to get lithium out of rocks
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This was a cool article.
I love when chemistry is used the way it's supposed to be used - to make life BETTER. Seems a lot of it is used to make it worse. This is one of those happy outcomes that serves good for a lot of everything, including the environment.
I love when chemistry is used the way it's supposed to be used - to make life BETTER. Seems a lot of it is used to make it worse. This is one of those happy outcomes that serves good for a lot of everything, including the environment.
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I'll admit that the number of times HF is mentioned in this article makes me think this whole process wouldn't be out of place on Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" blog.
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So basically, lithium ore goes in on one conveyor, and out comes three conveyors: lithium, aluminium oxide, and sand. You then send the Al oxide to the Al plant, the sand to the concrete factory, the lithium to the battery factory. Then you combine the three streams again to build pads and containers to store batteries.
New factorio meta.
New factorio meta.
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The major advantage of lithium is its low weight. I think you should differentiate between applications which take advantage of that low weight (vehicles, handheld devices) and devices which do not (grid-scale batteries, home storage batteries).
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The major physical/chemical benefit, you mean. The economic benefits of already having produced a staggering number of Li batteries in terms of optimization and squeeing costs out go considerably beyond that.
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The major advantage of lithium batteries are that they're cheap as chips.
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Those not weight dependent applications may be moving to Sodium soon.
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Yeah well, I read somewhere that
If we use other materials for other purposes, then we reduce the cost of lithium for applications which require its unique properties. Some of the other elements being researched for battery applications are abundant and cheap: sodium, iron, manganese, etc.
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All of those already have versions on the market already, and there are a number of additional ones, including all-organic flow batteries, so it's not just research. They definitely work, and it's really, really good to have options. But right now, it's a struggle for these companies.
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Calling stationary storage "not weight dependent" is easy to say for those who don't have to move the batteries to and fro their stationary locations. For those of us who do have to deal with that, lower weights are still greatly appreciated. One of the reasons I'm trying to move all our stuff off of lead-acid and onto LiFePO.
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Lithium isn't all that important a contributor to battery cost. There was a brief spike in lithium prices a few years ago that threatened to make lithium cost be significant if the price continued to rise. Instead, more supply came online and the price fell back down.
By contrast, cobalt prices are significant, which is pushing LFP to an increasingly dominant position in the market.
Having additional options is great. They haven't been able to keep up with the falling price of lithium ion: they look like they'll offer a big reduction in price, then by the time the first factory gets built, lithium has fallen in price on its own. Someday, lithium ion batteries will finally bottom out and be basically just the cost of the minerals. Then the other processes might become more interesting.
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You just described the game "Satisfactory". One of the late game parts is advanced batteries and I could literally use your comment as the blue print for that factory.
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Factorio is the ur production chain game; Satisfactory was a few years later.
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I've worked with ammonium fluoride (technically, the salt NH4F.HF). While it isn't as bad as HF(g), it's still nasty and requires precautions. In particular, it's really good at etching glass (both silicate and quartz). That is going to make designing the plant to do all this interesting, and the local fire department is going to have conniptions, although it's not like such challenges haven't been met before. And at least it's not ClF3 or FOOF...
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And HF is very commonly used in semiconductor processing (e.g. wet etching some otherwise stable materials). We have vast experience at handling it, not that it is remotely safe to be exposed to without proper engineering controls and PPE.
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Well weight and of cause not blocked by the fire hazard, and grid based batteries can be very well contained and placed away from other things just like many grid level facilities already are, and sodium is even in many processes the waste so doing that actually transforms waste into something useful.
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Off topic, but only slightly, is Lowe's most recent entry:
The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America
Happy that this research into lithium extraction made it to fruition and very, very worried for the future of R&D (and especially into those 'woke' elements like lithium).
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A semiconductor clean room might just be a tad different to a 700 degree industrial scale ore smelter.
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And all this time I thought it would be easier to just pump up the brines under the Salton sea or the big aquifer that stretches fro Arkansas to Florida, which we were already doing for geothermal and bromine production respectively. Run the brine through ion exchange resin and put it back.
Clearly Effing around with fluorine chemistry is a better bet. We’ll find out.
Clearly Effing around with fluorine chemistry is a better bet. We’ll find out.
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Will they? A friend of mine started a sodium battery company some years back. They put a lot of work into it, had good funding, got pretty far in real-world testing. In the mean time, electric cars and grid storage took off and his conclusion was that they couldn’t compete any more.
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Yes, options are always good. Still, hard rock spodumene mining is not that great for the environment.
There are vast quantities of Li brines in deep aquifers, which, as the article mentions, can be produced at about the same cost, and far less energy and land (mining) intensive.
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On that note is "Mining Lithium From Seawater," where Li is about 0.1 ppm. This article notes energetics are significantly improved with more concentrated brines: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435120302786
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This recent video about LFP hazards is worth paying attention to. TLDW; Lithium-Ion can fail and burn your house down. LFP can fail and blow your house up. Make sure you're accounting for the differences in hazards.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LbBryib8yY
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Scaremongering. Despite what the person in the video says, the person who built that building was negligent. You don't put batteries, of any kind, in an air-tight enclosure. All batteries can off-gas stuff that you don't want accumulating.
Also, LFP is not a separate thing from lithium-ion. Lithium-ion is a catch-all term for all sorts of different battery chemistries that utilize lithium ions (hence the name). LFP is a specific type of lithium-ion battery.
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I can feel for you. At my first job out of college, our central office [telephone] switch prototype had a lead-acid backup battery. 24 cells with a few spares, 5,000 Ah apiece. Each something like 18" square and 4' tall. I don't know what they weighed, but they could not have weighed less than 250kg/cell, and were probably closer to 1,000 kg. I doubt a standard forklift could have lifted them safely. They had to be checked and watered monthly.
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Sodium ion is also a good deal safer. I'd prefer such a battery over lithium NMC or lithium iron phosphate for an application like a UPS, or other long-term installations in living areas, etc.
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A lot of very nasty compounds are commonly used in semiconductor manufacturing, including hydrogen fluoride and hydrofluoric acid, tungsten hexafluoride, phosphine, phosgene, arsine, and chlorine trifluoride. Ironically, I used to work in a basement under a GaAs chip fab, but our printed circuit board facility had to be located elsewhere because we apparently couldn't use sulfuric acid and other needed compounds due to water table concerns.
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I've been following that channel for a while and it's not "scaremongering" at all.
IMO the channel is quite fairly balanced between the reality that we need all different types of batteries, that we're going to use them in various applications where hazards will come into play (e.g. giant stacks of them physically co-located for grid storage, and fairly good-size single batteries in applications like vehicles where they will occasionally be unexpectedly mangled in rapid fashion), and that we need to put plenty of thought into how we're going to deal with those hazards so as to prevent future tragedies.
In case you hadn't noticed, the human race has a long history of saying "it'll be fine" with new technologies until one or another string of incidents proves that it is not, in fact, fine, without substantial consideration as to the risks involved. Most safety regulations are written in blood.
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Classic article, and yes, now there are many companies manufacturing direct lithium ectraction (DLE) plants using some variation of that process in the article.
On another note, deep aquifer Li brines become cost-effective around 250ppm, depending on depth and infrastructure.
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This isn't something that people who aren't ignorant or negligent aren't thinking about. The LFP batteries I'm using have fire protection built into their enclosures. The room they are in has fire protection. Importantly, the rooms are not air-tight because that would be foolish. Therefore, I'm not worried about off-gassing from a malfunctioning battery resulting in an explosion.
Importantly, these risks are not new to lithium-ion chemistries, which is the point I'm making. Lead-acids have been in use for ages and they have their own hazards. People using them need to know what the hazards are and their mitigations or else bad things can happen.
Your video points to a pretty specific hazard from an amateur not knowing what they don't know and doing something foolish like building an air-tight room for their batteries, which again is not something one should do for pretty much any battery chemistry. I would still characterize the way it is presented as fear-mongering, though if it keeps a few amateurs from putting their batteries in air-tight rooms then I'm not mad about it.
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To be honest, as soon as I saw there was Flourine chemistry involved, I was secretly hoping ClF3 or FOOF would be involved.
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As the mineral corundum (Al2O3), it's 9 on the mohs scale, and is found on sandpaper everywhere. The 3M company (aka the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation), for those of us old enough to remember, was founded on corundum prospecting and mining.
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