At the Great Salt Lake, Lilac will capture lithium using ceramic beads

Mining lithium for electrical automobiles and power storage comes at an environmental price. In distant salt flats in Chile, the place briny groundwater is pumped into enormous evaporation ponds, extracting a single ton of lithium can use greater than half one million gallons of water. A special course of requires blasting by means of rocks in an open pit mine, utilizing giant quantities of each water and power and destroying landscapes.

A startup referred to as Lilac Solutions is taking a unique method: It pumps brine over reusable ceramic beads which are designed to seize lithium. Then the brine might be despatched again underground or again right into a saline lake. “The groundwater stays unchanged,” says CEO Raef Sully. The beads are washed to extract the lithium, and the method begins over once more.

The essential “ion alternate” know-how isn’t new—in case you have a water softener in your home, it’s doing one thing just like take away parts like calcium out of your water. Beads designed to seize lithium additionally already existed, although they didn’t final lengthy; Lilac’s innovation was to make a lithium-attracting bead that’s so sturdy it turned economically viable. (The “beads” are tiny, every roughly the dimensions of a grain of sand.)

In 2023, the corporate completed a pilot in a distant a part of Argentina. Although lithium concentrations within the groundwater there are comparatively low—200 components per million versus 2,000 components per million in a few of the finest reserves in Chile—the beads had been capable of seize greater than 80% of the lithium, proving that the method may work commercially. (In conventional evaporation ponds, greater than half of the lithium is misplaced as waste.) Lake Assets, the Australian firm that partnered on the pilot, is now in search of funding to construct a full-scale plant.

Later this summer season, Lilac plans to start one other pilot at Utah’s Nice Salt Lake. Recurring drought and overuse of the lake’s water implies that the lake has shrunk dramatically and faces potential ecological collapse. Different mineral extraction firms have been pumping the lake’s water into evaporation ponds, however a newly-passed Utah law is pushing them to avoid wasting extra water as a substitute. Compass, one firm that works on the lake, determined to cancel its lithium plans in response to regulatory stress. Lilac’s pilot plans to display that its course of is nonconsumptive: “The quantity of water that will probably be going again within the lake is similar as what we pull out,” Sully says.

The Nice Salt Lake doesn’t have excessive ranges of lithium, at 65 components per million. However Lilac says {that a} facility may nonetheless be commercially profitable there. As a result of the corporate’s tech captures solely lithium, the ensuing product can be pure and doesn’t want as a lot processing. After the pilot, it hopes to start producing between 3,500 to five,000 tons of battery-grade lithium a yr on the web site; the lake may theoretically assist as a lot as 20,000 tons of manufacturing a yr.

The corporate can be actively pursuing different potential websites within the U.S., together with in Texas. “As a result of our know-how is cost-effective and works on a few of these brines which are fairly low in focus, I feel we’ve obtained the chance of doing one thing completely different right here and constructing a home provide,” Sully says. Different websites are deliberate in South America and Europe. Every plant might be constructed rapidly, with modular models inside delivery containers that may be deployed in a few weeks.