University of Alberta geochemist Daniel Alessi will give a free online talk this Friday on extracting lithium from waste in Alberta.
Lithium is a soft, silvery white metal commonly used in batteries, ceramics, and some medical treatments that typically shows up in nature as a white salt, said Liz Lappin of the Battery Metals Association of Canada (who is unaffiliated with Alessi’s talk). The world currently gets almost all of its lithium from mines in Australia and brine evaporation ponds in South America.
But those sources won’t be able to meet the world’s demand for lithium, which is set to grow tenfold by 2030 due to the burgeoning need for batteries in electric cars and renewable energy sites, Alessi said. While battery recycling has been the best long-term solution, industry experts are now seeking new sources of lithium to meet this immediate demand.
Wealth from waste
Lappin said Alberta has at least 15 million tonnes of lithium trapped in brine deep underground. Up until recently, it hasn’t had any economic reason to try and mine it.
Oil and gas companies are already pumping brine to the surface during oil and gas extraction, Alessi said. Right now, they just dump the brine back underground as wastewater, but with the right technology, they could pull lithium out of it first.
“It could be in the millions of tonnes of lithium,” he said, worth billions of dollars.
Alessi said several companies (including his own Recion Technologies) are now developing ways to extract lithium from oil and gas brines. Membrane filtration works, but is too expensive to compete with conventional lithium production. More promising is direct lithium extraction, which is where you use a lithium-loving powder to suck lithium out of brine and then stripp the lithium off the powder using acid.
Alessi said wastewater extraction is a cheaper way to get lithium than other methods because it makes use of existing wells, roads, and pipes. It also has far less environmental impact — there’s no giant mine hole to fill or evaporation ponds threatening groundwater, and the hazardous brine gets pumped back deep underground.
“It’s potentially one of the cleanest sources of lithium out there,” he said.
Alessi said the challenge now is to scale these technologies up. His company has a prototype under development, while Standard Lithium Ltd. in the U.S. has a full-scale plant. He predicts that commercial-scale lithium extraction from wastewater will happen within five years.
While wastewater is important, Lappin said Alberta will have to drill new wells exclusively for brine if it wants to produce large volumes of lithium — a task that could mean new revenues for Alberta’s army of well-drillers. Alberta will also need refineries to create battery-quality lithium and strict environmental standards to meet industry expectations for lithium extraction.
Alessi said Alberta has decades worth of abandoned wells it could use for brine extraction once its active ones dry up. The province could help the lithium industry along by clarifying royalty rules and creating incentives for electric cars.
Alessi’s talk starts at noon Nov. 19. Visit bit.ly/3DjEeP3 to register.
