Minerva Lithium uses absorbent material to change the way we extract lithium – By Rebecca Bellan (Techcrunch) / Oct 19, 2022
The electric everything revolution is here, and with it an unprecedented demand for critical battery materials. The most precious of all? Lithium, the crucial ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries that will power everything from your Tesla to your iPhone.
The problem is, extracting lithium is expensive, time-consuming, labor intensive and takes a serious toll on the environment. It either involves digging lithium-rich rocks out of mines, crushing them, roasting them, washing them with acid and roasting them again, leaving large open pits behind, or, through evaporative brine processing, taking mineral-rich water found deep underground, known as brine, and pumping it into large ponds that evaporate 24 to 36 months under the sun. All of the other metals that get deposited at the base of the ponds — sodium, potassium, magnesium — get removed through exposure to harmful chemicals in order to access just the lithium.
A wave of so-called direct lithium extraction startups are raising their hands with solutions to all of these problems. Among them is Minerva Lithium, a University of North Carolina at Greensboro spinoff that has produced Nano Mosaic, a coordinated polymer framework that looks a bit like black gravel and extracts critical materials from brine in just three days. Just one gram of this absorbent material has a surface area equal to that of a soccer pitch, according to Sheeba Dawood, CEO and co-founder of Minerva, which should give you an idea of just how little you’d need to extract a large amount of minerals
