Around the world, there is growing fear about lithium, a key resource for making the batteries that power cars with electric power. Lithium mining consumes water and produces pollutants when it is transported to China, where it is refined and processed to produce batteries. The United States contemplates converting this scenario using geothermal power to extract lithium.
Governments, institutions and organisations around the world have been promoting the use of electric cars for years to reduce the transport of pollutants. However, one aspect that is increasingly being talked about is the challenge of lithium mining, which generates pollutants and will need to be transported to China for refining and processing.
Currently, the Asian giant accounts for 90% of the battery industry for electric cars, which has caused disorders such as the decrease in demand for electric cars in Europe. The largest lithium deposits are located in Argentina, Chile and Australia, but transporting them to Asian countries involves high prices and gigantic amounts of CO2.
The University of California Riverside conducted a study in the Salton Sea region on the United States-Mexico border. He revealed that this could involve reserves of between 1 and five million tonnes of lithium, which could be transformed into between five and 32 million tonnes of lithium carbonate, a key resource for battery production.
The Salton Sea domain was once a giant lake that attracted thousands of tourists each year. Now it has dried up and is an increasingly uninhabited salt desert. However, here there are geothermal resources that are exploited through 11 power plants that extract saltpeter from the ground to produce force and re-inject it into the soil in an uninterrupted cycle.
The companies BHE Renewables, EnergySource and Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) saw here a possible solution to extract lithium from the brine before re-injecting it into the substrate, offering a non-polluting approach to control the source chain. When purchasing batteries, they want to use gigantic amounts of water in open-pit mines.
To achieve this, they would have to invest around $1 billion in the facility, which would charge around $50 billion for each ton of lithium initially mined. This would cost more in the short term, but, on the other hand, it would generate many jobs and their prices would be reduced in the long term, thus decarbonizing the extraction process.
Geothermal lithium extraction is an absolutely new method that has yet to be tested on a commercial scale. Interested companies are making plans to create a pilot plant to see how the procedure works, but the infrastructure to refine and produce the batteries only exists in Asia, so they will still have to bring it there.
Although the corporations have said their plan is to refine lithium at the site once mining begins, they have not presented plans to make this possible, so prices are compounded in advance through transportation and dependence on the Chinese market in the short term.
The monopoly on lithium batteries will remain in Chinese hands for a few more decades. Meanwhile, they are making inroads into the U. S. market with less expensive and more efficient solar panels, which has caused foreign factories to close.
© 2024 through ECOticias