Just FYI I'm not having a go, having a genuine conversation
Now to answer your question with regards to the seawater idea. It seems like a no-brainer! The issue really comes down to the concentration of Li in seawater, it's quite low! Now you would think, sure ok well let's just process loads and loads of it. The cost of doing that would be significant, you'd have to process about 2000 times more than typical salar brines, there's quite a bit of energy involved in that. You would shortly run into another problem: osmotic shock. This basically breaks the resin used for the ion exchange, so you'd need to be refreshing your resin also which costs more money again. So, it's basically just not economical -- yet! There are clever people working on nifty membranes to filter the Li out for very minimal cost, and hopefully within the next decade they will have it working, the process can then be used to scrub anything we wanted out of the ocean (oil, micro-plastics etc...)
To be clear; I actually don't have all the details of what Lilac do, their exact process is not public (like what resin they're using etc).
LKE Price at posting:
8.8¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Not Held
