There will be geologists scrambling around every caldera in the nation. Currently, deep wells are being drilled in northeastern Texas and southern Arkansas for lithium-laden brines. I hear there is plenty in the salt lakes of California.
Excellent. I love searching for and finding things.
There is a fantastic amount of Lithium in the United States. I personally gave evaluated huge Caves withe Lepidolite lining the walls, ceiling, and floors. It is found in Volcanic extrusion. The crystals are an absolutely beautiful purple. These mines were abandoned in the late sixties because the main use for Lithium was for mood control drugs, and the mines became uneconomic. These mines were in New Mexico, near Taos. Current prices will force them to be reopened. I wish I had bought them a few decades ago when they worthless.
The oceans have 230+ million tonnes in them and no less than three groups have competing tech to harvest lithium from them. This one from Saudi Arabia basically makes the lithium for free as the process is added to the existing chloro alkaline process already used to make H2 , HCL acid ,CL2 gas and or NaOH chemicals. The cost of the electrons to get the lithium across the membrane is less than what the CL2 and H2 sell for by nearly 3X. <<<<<this is the way.
More lithium is washed into the oceans every year faster than humans could ever mine it at any conceivable usage rates so it’s effectively unlimited in supply.
This same tech has also been tuned for uranium and it works at low double digit kWh per gram of UO2 recovered from 3ppb seawater here again that single gram of uranium is equal to 23,000 megawatt hours of energy in a fast spectrum reactor...The implications should be immediately obvious. Uranium harvested from seawater plus fast spectrum reactors is billions of years worth of ebergy. We have the tech today what is lacking is political will as there is much to much profit in the existing system for corporations and congresscritters, I don’t complain the oil industry made me a wealth man and still sends thousands per month in mail box money. As a scientist nuclear is the future period.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1039/D1EE00354B
’ the total Faradaic efficiencies of all stages were close to 100% (Figure 2d). In the first stage, ~47.06% of electrical energy was used to transport lithium, while in the remainder of the stages, ~100% of electrical energy was used for lithium migration. 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 H2 and 31.12 kg Cl2were collected from the cathode and the anode, respectively. Taking the US electricity price of US$ 0.065/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 Cl2 (i.e., US$ 2.5–8.0/kg and US$ 0.15/kg, respectively),34 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 Cl2 utilisation capacity in the chlor-alkali industry is ~80 Mtons/yr. Even in the case where all the world lithium capacity is produced from our extraction process, the amount of Cl2 produced will be <3 Mtons, and so will have very little effect on the total market. It is also noted that the total concentration of other salts after the first stage is less than 500 ppm, which implies that after lithium harvest, the remaining water can be treated as freshwater. Hence, the process also has a potential to integrate with seawater desalination to further enhance its economic viability.’
(pg10-11 of report)