Getting lithium out of brine: ponds versus direct extraction
Move the slider through five stages and compare two ways of taking the same metal out of the same salt water.
Stage Evaporation ponds
- 0
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
Tap a part of the diagram to open that stage.
The whole comparison
Brine → either a year of evaporation across square kilometres, or hours through a sorbent in a closed vessel. Both end with lithium concentrate; only one gives the water back.
What's inside
- 1 Waiting for the sun to do the work — Roughly nineteen litres out of twenty leave as vapour in the driest places on earth.
- 2 The brine goes straight into a unit — The brine never leaves a pipe, so nothing is lost to the air and nothing is exposed to dust.
- 3 A material that grabs only lithium — This is where the selectivity lives. Everything else in the process depends on this one material.
- 4 The lithium is washed off, the water goes back — Around 95% of the water goes underground again, which is the difference the local aquifer actually feels.
- 5 Months and square kilometres against hours and one building — The trade-off is energy and chemicals for the wash step, in exchange for water, land and time.
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