If we’re all destined to drive electric vehicles, we’re going to need a lot of lithium for the batteries. And where would you rather get that lithium — China or Arkansas?
In Medford, a startup called Lithios says it’s creating a clean and relatively cheap way to access vast amounts of lithium that’s presently sloshing around in briny water beneath the southern United States.
“If you ask me if this had been possible 20 years ago, I’d have said probably not,” said Mohammad Alkhadra, chemical engineer and Lithios cofounder. But today, with better manufacturing techniques and soaring demand for lithium, Alkhadra thinks the time is right. So do the investors who’ve put $10 million into the project. These include Clean Energy Ventures and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.
There’s lots of lithium in the United States, including a major find in Maine. But that lithium is trapped inside rock, and the process of extracting it is extremely messy and would consume vast amounts of energy.
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Lithium can also be extracted from vast underground pools of salty water — the remnants of oceans that disappeared from the surface millions of years ago. Much of the world’s lithium brine is found in Chile and Argentina. But the United States has a lot of this brine as well, mainly in a huge underground geological structure called the Smackover Formation which reaches across the southern United States from Texas to Florida.
The Smackover Formation is named for an Arkansas town located right over it. In the 1920s Smackover became a petroleum boom town, and since then the area has produced over 600 million barrels. Now its brine wells may produce a different kind of energy boom.
Last week the United States Geological Survey and the Arkansas government said that the amount of lithium in the Smackover brine could range from five million to 19 million tons. According to the Geological Survey, that’s up to nine times the amount of lithium that will be needed to power the world’s electric cars in 2030.
In places like Chile, the lithium is extracted by pumping out the brine and pouring it into huge open-air ponds, where the water evaporates. What’s left is lithium and lots of other minerals. It takes a lot of effort and money to get the lithium out. Besides, evaporation works fine in arid regions of the world, but not in Arkansas, which gets lots of rain.
Alkhadra, a US native who grew up in Saudi Arabia and earned his doctorate in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he’s got a better way. Lithios has developed a lithium-absorbing material that can be made into electrodes using the same technologies created to make electrodes for lithium-ion batteries.
Dozens of Lithios electrodes are layered together to form an electrode stack. When a current flows through the stack and brine is pumped in, the electrodes capture only the lithium and let all the other minerals pass. Flushing fresh water through the stack rinses out all the lithium, which can now be reduced to a powder for use in building batteries.
Alkhadra said that the Lithios method uses 75 to 80 percent less water than other brine processing methods and doesn’t sully the environment with other metals and chemicals found in the brine. And it’s vastly cleaner and less energy-hungry than refining lithium from ore.
Lithios is currently developing its first full-scale stack at its Medford lab. The stack is expected to produce a ton of pure lithium per year from Arkansas brine. If it works, said Alkhadra, the company could install thousands of stacks in Smackover country and start pumping out thousands of tons of lithium.
Michael McKibben, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California at Riverside, is working on extracting lithium from brine found underneath California’s Salton Sea. McKibben said it’ll be a few years before it’s known whether companies like Lithios can make their technology work in the real world. “They have to prove that it works at scale and they have to prove that it works under demanding conditions that are different than the lab,” said McKibben.
But the payoff would be immense. “The combination of Arkansas brines and Salton Sea brines would make the US totally self-sufficient in lithium,” said McKibben. “And then we wouldn’t have to import lithium from China and Australia and South America anymore.”
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.
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Publish date : 2024-11-02 21:00:00
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