Lithium is currently sourced mainly from hard rock mines, such as those in Australia, or underground brine reservoirs below the surface of dried lake beds, mostly in Chile and Argentina. Hard rock mining – where the mineral is extracted from open pit mines and then roasted using fossil fuels – leaves scars in the landscape, requires a large amount of water and releases 15 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of lithium.
The other conventional option, extracting lithium from underground reservoirs, relies on even more water to extract the lithium – and it takes place in typically very water-scarce parts of the world, leading to indigenous communities questioning their sustainability.
Extracting lithium from geothermal waters – found in Cornwall, Germany and the US – has a tiny environmental footprint in comparison, including very low carbon emissions.
“All the clean technologies that we need to combat climate change – whether that’s wind turbines, solar panels or batteries, they’re all really, really mineral intensive. We need to make sure we extract these materials as responsibly as possible otherwise it mitigates the reason for building these technologies in the first place.”
Here is the link: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201124-how-geothermal-lithium-could-revolutionise-green-energy
CrossroadGREEN aims to become an on-line resource for information exchange and a market place specialising in bioenergy and waste-to-energy technologies. Among our growing list of references we have an article titled “The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction” , see this link.
