"Based on these data, we estimated the total electricity required to enrich 1 kg lithium from seawater to 9000 ppm in five stages to be 76.34 kWh. Simultaneously, 0.87 kg H_2 and 31.12 kg Cl_2 were collected from the cathode and the anode, respectively. Taking the US electricity price of US$ 0.065 per kWh into consideration, the total electricity cost for this process is approximately US$ 5.0. In addition, based on the 2020 prices of hydrogen and Cl_2 (i.e., US$ 2.5–8.0 per kg and US$ 0.15 per kg, respectively), the side-product value is approximately US$ 6.9–11.7, which can well compensate for the total energy cost. It should also be noted that the current Cl_2 utilisation capacity in the chlor-alkali industry is ~ 80 Mtons/year. Even in the case where all the world lithium capacity is produced from our extraction process, the amount of Cl_2 produced will be 3 Mtons, and so will have very little effect on the total market", from https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...
Pretty amazing innovation, certainly a more sustainable solution than overthrowing the Bolivian government and murdering Native protestors.
To think that an entire mineral mining industry could be replaced by processing seawater is revolutionary.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:t....
https://sci-hub.do/10.1179/143307508/270875
Edit: it's a bit of a strange paper with a lot of talk about unrelated things (imo) but there seems to be this unexpected effect which might make it worthwhile to investigate it independently from what one thinks of this paper. The setup seems to be simple and cheap enough that there should not be huge obstacles to get easy and fast results.
If I was looking for something to research, I wouldn't pick this one. It's not strange enough to compensate for how hard it is to understand it. (But then, I wonder how I the photoelectric emission fits on that dimension...)
That seems reasonable and yet unfortunate. It seems like the kind of experiment that a scientist would try to undertake out of sheer curiosity.
I expect it will first be studied by YouTubers like "the plasma channel".
From a practical point of view, It looks like an interesting demo, but I don't think it has too many applications. I only can imagine that it may be useful as a sterilization process, whatever virus or bacteria that is in the solution will be extremely unhappy with so much H2 and O2 around. The flame and the small risk of an explosion is a problem.
From a theoretical point of view, it's easy to model isolated small molecules. Big molecules or combination of molecules is exponentially more difficult, like in ~exp(5*N) where N is the number of atoms and 5 is an oversimplification. There are some approximations that reduce it to a polynomial time like ~(5N)^12 or ~(5N)^9 less if you use more approximations. And with more approximations you can calculate it in linear time that is very useful for biochemistry that are interested in big molecules. Anyway, most of these methods assume that atoms don't move, or don't move too much, or use a lot of simplifications.
Simulation water at the molecular level is a nightmare. You need to simulate many molecules, each one moving around, that form bounds between them that are not stable enough to simulate like a fixed length, but stable enough to be ignored. And now you need to add a strong electromagnetic field to the mix, and the nightmare is upgraded to the Freddy Krueger level.
"Effects of different parameters on the efficiency of electrode-less water splitting", sounds like an acceptable topic for a bachelor thesis for example ;)
It's just that most papers pretend that the result has some practical or theoretical application, and I think it's difficult to get one.
I'd want to know how the Hydrolysis effect varies as a function of EM frequency and salt composition. Hypothetically, different EM frequencies could produce resonance effects in water. Basically, I'm curious how the flame might grow bigger at different EM frequencies.
If anyone has any access to EM equipment like this, I'd definitely pay $1000 to catalyze. Seriously! I haven't been this curious about a physics phenomena since I learned about sonoluminescent bubble implosions "Mysterious Glowing Bubbles". Seriously. https://www.newswise.com/articles/mysterious-glowing-bubbles
RIP Dr. Apfel, he was a big influence on me.
I know Alan McGaughey at CMU does water modeling at a molecular level, pretty cool stuff: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HmNtygkAAAAJ&hl=en
This should work without the RF stage using electrodes coated with glass, and using AC to drive it at high frequency.
(Rex Research is mostly crackpottery. But not all of it. The tricky bit is sorting the horse from the horseshit, eh?)
I wonder if we are wasting valuable brine as part of our established desalinization processes?
EDIT: For more context, nuclear power could be a great tool in reducing carbon emissions. I read somewhere that mining Uranium 235 from seawater at scale would cost roughy 2x to 3x what it costs to get the fuel from the ground at today's prices. I was trying to say that if we're going through all of the trouble to extract Lithium from seawater, it'd be cool if extracting Uranium at the same time made both processes more economical.
"Seawater contains about 3.3 parts per billion of uranium by weight, approximately (3.3 µg/kg) or, 3.3 micrograms per liter of seawater.[6] The extraction of uranium from seawater has been considered as a means of obtaining the element.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Nat...
(Mining uranium is as environmentally unfriendly as other mining operations, just do a web search for "uranium mining".)
Actually the only "molecules" smaller than Lithium are Hydrogen and Helium. Helium is not a problem because it's too easy to pull apart and Hydrogen (H+ and H2) are not problem because H2 is another of the products.
(Actually^2 H+ is not isolated, it's combined with water in H3O+, but I guess the holes need some room for the water around the Li+ ions. The technical details are probably more complicated, but "small holes only allow H, He and Li to pass" is a good approximation.)
But Uranium atoms are huge. They are bigger than most atoms, and I'm not sure if the common form in seawater is a combination of Uranium and Oxygen. A hole that big will allow most mineral to pass, so you will just get brine. Using it in the other direction with holes just smaller than Uranium is also not very useful, because you will get Uranium mixed with a lot of crap, many of the contamination are not isolated atoms (that are mostly smaller) but molecules that combine a few atoms are are bigger.
And heavy. Some gravitational fractionation should do it.
Yes, I know all about the externalities of uranium mining as a portion of my extended family who lived in a particular house around the Four Corners/Durango area all died within a matter of years from horrible cancers due to contaminated drinking water.
https://www.ewg.org/research/170-million-us-drink-radioactiv...
Returns to mending nets and counting seagulls.
I doubt drinking water contains anything close to therapeutic doses of lithium.
I remember in 2005 my earth science teacher told me "shale in north dakota will never be viable with all this saudi oil lying around"
Wouldn't this process also quickly reduce the local concentration of Lithium in the water surrounding the processing station? Making sustained operations difficult?
Likewise between the tide and currents you might have sufficient mixing if new seawater.
Anyway, like you said - "maybe".
sounds promising but papers tend to overpromise, so we'll see if it's viable - cheap and abundant lithium batteries would be a major breakthrough for renewables
"A 50% increase in lithium prices would for instance increase the battery pack price of a nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) 811 battery by less than 4%." [1]
Nevertheless, together with improvements in (low-cobalt) battery chemistry, this sounds like an important piece of the puzzle.
[1] https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...
Batteries still have a lifespan, their manufacture emits CO2, and they need to be disposable or to be recycled.
Nuclear is still the best energy in terms of carbon.
Nuclear is a non starter from a cost perspective at this point. You get vastly more bang for the buck subsidizing battery backed up wind / solar which can actually load follow without becoming even more expensive.
The same way? Mining, processing, shipping, etc... There is a difference between "the same way" and an actual carbon accounting.
Money doesn't matter, only carbon matters. Nuclear is a long term investment, it doesn't mean it's more expensive.
Anyway, it’s the same in that their all indirectly producing CO2. In a full accounting all of those things that make nuclear expensive actually produce CO2 because construction equipment, mining to produce the parts to build a reactor, etc etc all produce CO2 in the current economy.
In fact if you do the full breakdown for all activities related to Nuclear Reactor Construction, Operation, and Decommissioning their a very significant CO2 source in large part because all economic activity is and their really expensive. Regardless of how easy to draw arbitrary lines that ignore say CO2 emissions from workers daily commutes etc.
The only way to move past that is to have serious energy storage that’s used for all equipment and thus very widespread adoption of cheap battery technology. At which point Nuclear costs become an even larger issue because cheap batteries tank the cost of battery backed up wind/solar. In the end far northern countries can make some use of Nuclear, but it’s a dead end technology without a significant role in actually solving climate change.
As with pretty much any energy source, (including wind, solar, gas..) nuclear tends to get cheaper the more you build. You can look up FOAK vs NOAK and note the curves. Not sure what you're referring to re difficulty of increasing %share?
How are you measuring "fuel rod lifecycle"? And how does that possibly comparable to "$/kWh solar"?
Here's [0] a good source for some facts. You should note that accounting for the whole lifecycle of mining/processing/operating/defueling/decommissioning, nuclear is ~1/4 of the emissions of solar. And this is only considering electricity; we still have 2-3x the kwh to source for our heating requirements. You're suggesting we get that all sorted with solar & wind too?
0 - https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the...
More importantly nuclear very specifically gets more expensive as you ramp up the percentage of grid energy your supplying. For a simple fact check look at the capacity factor of French nuclear reactors, for example:
France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chooz_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Capacity factor 70.6% and around 700 full-time workers
USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Nuclear_Generating_St...
Capacity Factor: 87.70% (lifetime)
Lower capacity factors directly translate into higher costs as you still need to pay for the building and security guards etc, you just don’t generate as much energy from identical infrastructure.
PS: If you don’t want to do the leg work just compare national averages around 2000-2005 and then realize France needed to import and export a lot of electricity because they simply couldn’t afford to operate in isolation at 70+% nuclear generation.
Amortized over a year, letting the plant shut down because it's cloudy a few days should be fine.
$5 of electricity at $0.09/kWh is 200 MJ, which is enough to pump that much water 40 m high, or push it through a membrane with 4 bar pressure drop.
So you can't do very much to seawater at that price point. Like many "scientists develop cheap ___" headlines, it may just cover part of the process and not the whole operation.