Lithium, crucial for powering electric vehicles and renewable energy storage, faces a dual dilemma: while essential for combating climate change, its extraction poses severe environmental risks. Current methods are water-intensive and use toxic chemicals, threatening local ecosystems and communities in places like South America’s lithium-rich regions. Enter AlkaLi, a startup promising a game-changing solution with a greener approach to lithium extraction using innovative technologies. Their method claims to reduce water and carbon footprints significantly and cut costs by half, potentially revolutionizing the industry while addressing environmental concerns. Can AlkaLi’s breakthrough pave the way for a sustainable future, or will lithium continue to be a hazard in the race toward cleaner energy solutions?
Lithium is critical to rescue the globe from climate change, but will it harm the environment?
Ironically, lithium extraction is equally associated with severe negative environmental consequences as it is with clean and green energy endeavors. The communities where lithium is extracted are already facing serious health and environmental consequences, but the lithium industry is only getting started. To avoid destruction for these people, something about the lithium extraction method must be altered dramatically and quickly.
Gradiant, a unicorn startup business that cleanses industrial wastewater, believes it has a solution to the fast-rising problem. It is launching a new spin-off company called alkaLi, which intends to harvest lithium from naturally occurring brine and prepare it for use in lithium-ion batteries using revolutionary methods. Forbes defined the company’s revolutionary approach as “using resins and membranes to more easily extract the lithium from brine, then relying on its own technology to concentrate the mineral, which is eventually precipitated into a solid for use in batteries.”
Gradiant and alkaLi’s team thinks that their innovative lithium extraction and processing technology has the potential to turn the lithium industry on its head and catapult the young company into the stratosphere. “The demand side of lithium is crazy,” Gradiant co-founder and chief operating officer Prakash Govindan told Forbes. “We believe we can create a billion-dollar company just from the lithium business, but it is in the early stages of revenue.”
It is true that lithium demand is skyrocketing and shows no signs of slowing. According to Popular Mechanics’ 2023 report, “an electrified economy in 2030 will likely need anywhere from 250,000 to 450,000 tonnes of lithium.” As an example, “In 2021, the world produced only 105—not 105,000—tonnes.”
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) confirms this astronomical rate of increase. According to its 2022 lithium forecast, lithium demand for battery production alone is predicted to increase by tenfold between 2020 and 2030. These batteries will be critical to the global clean energy transition, powering electric vehicles as well as storing variable renewable energy generated by solar and wind power.
However, the tremendous increase in lithium consumption raises a few concerns. The first point to consider is the environmental impact of lithium mining and extraction. Lithium extraction is often very water-intensive; according to a 2018 WIRED magazine study, extracting one ton of lithium requires around 500,000 gallons of water. In a sad irony, lithium is frequently discovered and extracted in very water-stressed locations, such as South America’s so-called ‘lithium triangle,’ which overlaps with the world’s driest desert, the Atacama. Furthermore, extraction through brine ponds has the potential to contaminate existing, limited water reservoirs.
Furthermore, the chemicals used in lithium extraction are highly hazardous. “The release of such chemicals through leeching [sic], spills, or air emissions can harm communities, ecosystems, and food production,” according to a recent report from Friends of the Earth, an international environmental fighting organization. “Moreover, lithium extraction inevitably harms the soil and also causes air contamination.”
Finally, the lithium industry’s current state raises significant geopolitical concerns. While most lithium is extracted in Australia and South America, practically all lithium processing occurs in China, resulting in a potentially dangerous concentration of a critical supply chain.
AlkaLi claims that its lithium extraction and processing method is less water and carbon-intensive than traditional processes, as well as 50% less expensive. This implies that scientists may not only have discovered a solution to lessen the environmental damage that the lithium boom threatens to inflict around the world, but they may also have enabled the United States to someday become competitive with China, a goal that the country badly craves.
Last year, GreatGameIndia reported that Daranda Hinkey, a leader from the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe and head of the People of Red Mountain group, is rejecting and protesting Biden’s lithium mine.
One Response
I don’t know about Lithium but yeah crude oil is definitely killing the planet. We all know what oil does in an engine – keeps it smoothly running but more than that it lowers the friction this controls the heating and then other things are put in place.
Like wise crude oil keeps the earth cool which gets heated due to Sun’s radiation, as humans have been extracting crude oil this natural ability of earth has declined rapidly thus we have global warming, secondly rampant mining in the poles due to which million metric tone of helium have escape into atmosphere causing further warming of the upper atmosphere of the earth and now extraction of Lithum for batteries..as we all know when we charge the phone heat is generated which is no significance but imagine a room with i billion phones charging at the same time and the heat generated out of it…likewise once lithum capacity to charge dies.. it is toxic and wonder why we are using such minerals or metals to generate or preserve energy.
Its sad that we have technology being filtered and then being given to first make our planet earth unlivable and then for the future generation it will be marketed “space the final frontier” go and steal resources from other planets…that’s what we are being made..but not trying to preserve the planet with alternative energy like water…which can be transformed in all forms liquid, solid and gas, water holds memory, water is good conductor of energy and also it can be used as combustion…but how will the rich make more money out of it..so why fund such research and those who date… we erased from history without a trace and few who were adamant were bought or their work stolen..