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Excerpt from www.independent.co.uk
Global production of lithium – an essential mineral for manufacturing the lithium-ion batteries that are found in everything from smartphones to electric cars – has tripled over the last 10 years, however current extraction techniques are slow and energy intensive.
These methods also require the lithium to be highly concentrated in the rock ore, meaning only a few countries have deposits worth mining.
A team of researchers from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have now come up with a way to extract lithium in a manner that they claim can overcome all of these issues.
The new method is so effective that it can extract lithium from sources that have been previously impossible on a commercial scale, such as seawater and groundwater.
“Right now there is a gap between the demand for lithium and the production,” said Chong Liu, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago PME.
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