Researchers at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have developed an environmentally friendly process to extract lithium from the salty thermal water reservoirs that are located in the Upper Rhine Trench. Similar to other initiatives that are taking place in the UK , the German scientists want to recover the white metal using minimally invasive processes. The mechanism they have come up with consists of filtering out lithium ions from the thermal water and then further concentrating them until lithium can be precipitated as a salt. “As far as we know, there can be up to 200 milligrams per litre,” said in a media statement Jens Grimmer, a geoscientist at KIT who co-developed the method with his colleague Florencia Saravia. “If we consistently use this potential, we could cover a considerable part of the demand in Germany.” According to Grimmer, compared to traditional methods of lithium production from the South […]