Little precious lithium?
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Inside: EDITORIAL
Little precious lithium? ENERGY SECTOR ANALYSIS
There’s a lithium battery in your future ENERGY SECTOR ANALYSIS
Fuel efficiency drives the auto industry to reduce vehicle weight ENERGY QUARTERLY ORGANIZERS CHAIR Y. Shirley Meng, University of California, San Diego, USA Andrea Ambrosini, Sandia National Laboratories, USA Kristen Brown, Commonwealth Edison Company, USA David Cahen, Weizmann Institute, Israel Russell R. Chianelli, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA George Crabtree, Argonne National Laboratory, USA Brian J. Ingram, Argonne National Laboratory, USA Elizabeth A. Kócs, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Sabrina Sartori, University of Oslo, Norway Subhash L. Shinde, University of Notre Dame, USA Anke Weidenkaff, Fraunhofer IWKS and Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany M. Stanley Whittingham, Binghamton University, The State University of New York, USA Steve M. Yalisove, University of Michigan, USA
“There’s a lithium battery in your future” title image: Close up of a battery in a Nissan Leaf at the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show. Credit: H. Kashioka.
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Little precious lithium?
Lithium is on everybody´s lips these days, due in part to the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to our own EQ Board member M. Stanley Whittingham and co-recipients John B. Goodenough and Akira Yoshino for their research in breakthrough battery technology. Lithium is the lightest metal and, like other alkaline elements, it is highly reactive. Thus, it occurs only in its oxidized form. Because of its many interesting properties—high electropositivity, low weight, relative stability—lithium is widely used in the production of polymers, as antidepressants, as a fusion fuel candidate, as flux in ceramics and glasses, and as a “rocking chair” intercalating ion in Li-ion batteries. Li-metal batteries, which would be even more effective, unfortunately are not reliable and safe enough to be applied broadly. The transition from combustion-based to electric mobility in transportation raises the question of increasing demand and limitations of new material supply chains. Lithium might become a very critical element, although it is abundantly found even in oceans because of its water solubility. Geological lithium resources are not easy to quantify—the published data vary according to political whims—but are certainly abundant: at least 15 million metric tons of reserves are proven. Lithium extraction from brines and hard-rock mines, currently around 40,000–50,000 metric tons, will increase dramatically along with the price of battery-grade lithium salts. Better technologies will be required at the extraction sites to safely provide larger amounts of this future high demand material and, therefore, more and more precious raw material. Until now, recycling lithium has not been an economical option. However, as the demand for raw material for millions of new Li-ion batteries increases—for the stor
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