Surprisingly simple, sustainable lithium extraction

Mining lithium is a slow, water-hungry endeavor. It involves evaporating salty brines in vast ponds for 12–18 months to concentrate lithium salts for separation. Emerging direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies can be faster and have low environmental impact, but they require expensive engineered materials.And the world doesn’t produce enough of the battery raw material to keep up with demand, which is expected to triple by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. Methods for extracting the metal efficiently and from unconventional sources are critical to sustainably increase supply.On Wednesday, at an American Chemical Society Spring 2026 meeting talk cohosted by the Division of Environmental Chemistry and Division of Geochemistry, Zhiyong Jason Ren presented two of his team’s lithium-extraction technologies that could help increase lithium supply. “This research sounds very simple, honestly, but nobody has done it before,” said Ren, a civil and environmental engineer at Princeton University. “It’s inspired by real problems I see in the lithium industry.”Three years ago, Ren and his team found an efficient extraction route that leverages the high solubility of lithium chloride compared with other salts in the brine (Nat. Water 2023, DOI: 10.1038/s44221-023-00131-3). The researchers made porous cotton strings with hydrophobic surfaces and hydrophilic cores. Brine flows up the strings via capillary action and the water slowly evaporates. As it evaporates, salts with lower solubility crystallize up the string before the LiCl precipitates for collection at 6% concentration.The string method should be 20 times as fast as traditional evaporation, use minimal land, and could