Electric cars: in Germany, waste water from coal mines full of lithium?
Rather than unnecessarily treating wastewater from coal mines, a German academic is proposing to filter it to recover the lithium, and secure a national supply subsidiary...
06/12/2022
The many mines disused coal from the Rhur and the Saar in Germany cost industrialists a fortune. They must indeed treat wastewater from these coal mines to filter them of the many contaminants from the depths, before releasing them into the rivers. Over one year, RAG, one of the German coal giants, spent nearly 300 million euros to treat this wastewater.
Rather than filtering this wastewater, a German academic proposes to recover... the lithium, needed to manufacture electric car batteries. On paper, it is a question of passing the water through a cell with two electrodes, which make it possible to capture the lithium and chlorine ions. After several filtrations with fresh water, and once the water has evaporated at the end of the process, the lithium chloride remains in solid form.
The RAG is already financing a pilot project at one of the mines, with astonishing figures: if the estimated lithium concentration is rather low in these waters, their volume means that it would be possible to recover some 1900 tons of lithium per year .
In Europe, metallic lithium reserves are estimated at 24 million tonnes. Several extraction projects could thus see the light of day by 2025, and ensure a little independence for the Old Continent from Asia.