re: Diving deeper on Standard Lithium?

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Somebody loaning out their shares to shorts

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Lithium’s scarcity has raised concerns that future shortages could cause battery prices to skyrocket and stymie the growth of electric vehicles and other lithium-dependent technologies such as Tesla Powerwalls, stationary batteries often used to store rooftop solar power.

Seawater could come to the rescue. The world’s oceans contain an estimated 180 billion tons of lithium. But it’s dilute, present at roughly 0.2 parts per million. Researchers have devised numerous filters and membranes to try to selectively extract lithium from seawater. But those efforts rely on evaporating away much of the water to concentrate the lithium, which requires extensive land use and time. To date such efforts have not proved economical.

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The change in voltage, Cui explains, causes lithium and sodium ions to move into the electrode, stop, and then start to move back out when the current reverses. However, because the electrode material has a slightly higher affinity for lithium than sodium, lithium ions are the first to move into the electrodes and the last to leave. So, repeating this cycle concentrates lithium in the electrode. After 10 such cycles, taking just minutes, Cui and colleagues ended up with a one-to-one ratio of lithium to sodium, they report this month in Joule.

“That doubles the selectivity, at least,” compared with previous attempts to use battery electrodes to harvest lithium, says Chong Liu, a materials scientist at the University of Chicago who previously was a postdoctoral scientist in Cui’s laboratory.

The advance is still not likely cheap enough to compete with mining lithium on land, Liu says. However, she says her group is attempting to increase selectivity using other types of lithium-ion battery electrodes.

Choi adds that the approach might also prove useful for recovering lithium from discarded batteries, giving the metal a second lease on life—and potentially supercharging the ascendancy of electric vehicles.

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