Recovery of Lithium from Geothermal Brine with Lithium-Aluminum Layered Double Hydroxide Chloride Sorbents

Mariappan Parans Paranthaman, Ling Li, Jiaqi Luo, Thomas Hoke, Huseyin Ucar, Bruce A. Moyer, Stephen Harrison

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

184 Scopus citations

Abstract

We report a three-stage bench-scale column extraction process to selectively extract lithium chloride from geothermal brine. The goal of this research is to develop materials and processing technologies to improve the economics of lithium extraction and production from naturally occurring geothermal and other brines for energy storage applications. A novel sorbent, lithium aluminum layered double hydroxide chloride (LDH), is synthesized and characterized with X-ray powder diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES), and thermogravimetric analysis. Each cycle of the column extraction process consists of three steps: (1) loading the sorbent with lithium chloride from brine; (2) intermediate washing to remove unwanted ions; (3) final washing for unloading the lithium chloride ions. Our experimental analysis of eluate vs feed concentrations of Li and competing ions demonstrates that our optimized sorbents can achieve a recovery efficiency of ∼91% and possess excellent Li apparent selectivity of 47.8 compared to Na ions and 212 compared to K ions, respectively in the brine. The present work demonstrates that LDH is an effective sorbent for selective extraction of lithium from brines, thus offering the possibility of effective application of lithium salts in lithium-ion batteries leading to a fundamental shift in the lithium supply chain.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)13481-13486
Number of pages6
JournalEnvironmental Science and Technology
Volume51
Issue number22
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 21 2017

Funding

This work was supported by the Critical Materials Institute, an Energy Innovation Hub funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Advanced Manufacturing Office. The research on the synthesis of sorbents (JL, TH) was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) under the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program. Part of the synthesis work (MPP) was supported by the U.S. Departmen-tof Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division. Thanks are due to Fred Sloop and Daejin Kim (ORNL) for ICP analysis. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05−00OR22725 with the U.S. Depart- ment of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).

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