There may be a lithium treasure beneath the highly polluted Salton Sea. 🤔 engineering
The hot salty water in the reservoir is known as"geothermal brine," and when it's pumped from thousands of feet below the Earth, it is converted to a gas that turns a turbine that generates massive amounts of electricity. That process is exactly what's happening at 11 geothermal energy plants in the area right now. There's an added benefit, though: This pumping process brings up lithium, the elemental metal that can be used in batteries for electric cars.
"In repurposing the extracted fluids already used for electricity production as a lithium source, we can put domestic lithium onto the market while producing electricity simultaneously, all with a minimal environmental footprint," reads an October 2021 memo from the Geothermal Technologies Office from the US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
The project is sponsored by the US Department of Energy 's Geothermal Technologies Office. This project is the first detailed investigation to map out California's so-called"Lithium Valley." On February 16, 2022, the Berkeley Lab announced thatOne of the many purposes of the investigation is determining the amount of lithium in the field.
"If you do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, you can convince yourself there's somewhere between 1 and 6 million metric tons of lithium in that field," McKibben says."That would be the largest brine source of lithium in the world, bigger than any individual South American salar deposit. So, it's a big number, and it means the potential is there for – again, back-of-the-envelope calculations – something like 50 to 100 years' worth of lithium production.
The research has enormous potential because the electric vehicle industry could ramp up thanks to the vast amount of lithium extracted from beneath the Salton Sea.Stay ahead with the latest science, technology and innovation news, for free:
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