Posted on 10/20/2019 11:32:45 AM PDT by Erik Latranyi
For every soldier on the battlefield, electric car battery or guts of a smartphone or solar panel, there is lithium to help power them.
Now, a Williamsport-based company has been able to extract the mineral right beneath the region’s feet.
Through a patented process, Eureka Resources, headquartered at 454 Pine St., has developed a technique at its Bradford County plant to extract the rare earth mineral — in high demand and short supply in the United States — from wastewater flowback used in the hydraulic fracturing process in the Marcellus Shale.
“We’re excited our company that purifies water, salt and pure calcium chloride is on track to be one of the world’s first commercial rapid lithium recovery system operators,” said Daniel A. Ertel, company president.
The environmentalists heads will explode!
Game changer if true.
We’ve got to save the fracking technology. Who knows? We might discover a cure to global warming. Maybe even a cure for cancer.
... rare earth mineral
Not particularly rare, more common than lead for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth’s_crust
For sure....China has us by the ...... right now.
if they can do it with fracking wastewater — then they should be able to do it with desalination waste water
Fascinating
Lithium is not a rare earth. Fail.
I didn’t know that they had that much lithium in their flow back water.
Kind of like Aluminum in the early 18th century. Electricity turned it from a precious metal to common trash.
Winning!
“rare earth mineral”
sigh. typical ignorance and laziness by so-called “journalists” ... rare earth minerals contain rare earth elements ... lithium is relatively rare, but is an alkali metal, NOT a rare earth element, which belong to the fifteen lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium ...
Not a “rare earth”, the rare earths or lanthanides are from a particular region of the periodic table. Lithium, an alkali metal, is from the same group as sodium and potassium.
Question to anyone...
Was all the lithium in the universe created during the Big Bang?
Or - is some lithium still being produced inside stars at various stages of star birth-life-death?
Thanks!
Journalism students should be required to take basic science courses - then they might not be fooled by pseudo science and hoaxes.
All but two of the lithium isotopes are radioactive with very short half-lives. They transform almost as soon as they are created.
Probably.
There is no certainty where the universe is concerned but it is probable that in the chaos of star stuff some lithium is forming
A corollary question is when the earth is sucked into the black hole, will lithium be destroyed despite the law of Conservation of Mass
“White Petroleum”
It depends on the specific composition of the brine at the specific location. They probably have struck a brine "pool" with a high lithium content.
Other brines have different abundances. Brine from an area in Arkansas happens to be very high in sodium bromide. Dow Chemical commercially produces bromine from that particular brine.
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