Sustainable Lithium Harvesting – Revolutionizing EV Supply Chains

Driven by global decarbonization efforts, the growth of electric vehicles (EVs) is projected to continue at a rapid pace, accounting for more than half of worldwide vehicle sales in ten years. 

This widespread electrification of the transportation sector, which accounts for about 20% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions due to its heavy reliance on fossil fuels, will help significantly reduce overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

However, this rapid transition to EVs brings a major problem — a severe strain on the supply chain of critical elements used in EV batteries. 

Among EV batteries, lithium-ion batteries are the most widely used due to their low cost and unparalleled energy density, and they are expected to remain the dominant battery chemistry. This means lithium (Li), in particular, will continue to be an essential component.

The soft, silvery-white alkali metal, which is the lightest of all solid elements and reacts vigorously with water, is used in substantial quantities in a single EV battery pack.

So, naturally, the demand for lithium is anticipated to grow exponentially over the next decade, so much so that it will far exceed what can be obtained via mining of lithium ores or extraction from lithium-rich brines by 2030.

The Supply Chain Issue with the Critical Battery Element

The demand for lithium-ion batteries is forecasted to surpass one terawatt hour (TWh) this year, a dramatic surge from 74 gigawatt hours (GWh) a decade ago, according to Benchmark’s Lithium-ion Battery Database.

This soaring demand for lithium-ion batteries, which is central to the growth of the auto industry and energy transition, has countries seeking to develop their very own domestic supply chains.

While China dominates the industry, the competition is intensifying, with the US aiming to gain control in EV and battery tech. Both countries are imposing trade restrictions to protect their industries and emerge at the top.

In January this year, China suggested restricting lithium extraction and refining technologies to gain more control over the global lithium supply chain. China, which also houses the world’s top lithium battery manufacturers, with CATL accounting for the largest market share at 35%, followed by BYD, has become the second-largest holder worldwide, with 16.5% of the global total as its lithium reserves triple.

Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina are the other most prominent lithium reserve holders, with new lithium producers like Saudi Arabia joining in by investing heavily in lithium projects. 

The US is also among the top countries with significant lithium reserves. However, despite that, its production is relatively small—less than 2% of the world’s total. And almost all of this lithium comes from Albemarle’s Silver Peak facility. Hence, the “Unleashing American Energy” order seeks to simplify permits for mining and strengthen domestic capabilities.

A few months ago, a senior US official accused Chinese lithium producers of eliminating competing projects by flooding the global market with the critical metal and causing a “predatory” price drop.

Lithium prices have declined more than 80% in the past year, largely due to China’s overproduction. According to Jose Fernandez, the then Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment:

“They engage in predatory pricing… (they) lower the price until competition disappears. That is what is happening.”

China, he further noted, was producing much more lithium “than the world needs today, by far.” This has resulted in low prices, which Fernandez said “constrains our ability to diversify our supply chains on a broad, global scale.”

As competition intensifies and price volatility threatens global supply chains, there is an urgent push for alternative extraction methods to ensure a stable and sustainable lithium supply.

Addressing the Lithium Demand-Supply Gap

Effectively addressing the lithium supply gap requires moving from conventional means to unconventional aqueous sources. This includes extracting lithium from geothermal brines, industrial wastewaters, oil and gas-produced water, and groundwaters.

Traditionally, this type of extraction involves pre-concentration via solar evaporation, followed by a series of chemical-based purification and precipitation steps. 

As a result, lithium extraction is restricted to regions with dry and vast land. Also, this involves lengthy processing times and has adverse environmental impacts, and despite all that, it still has low lithium recovery rates.

This is why direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies have become the focus, which can overcome the time and land-intensive limitations. These technologies can also obtain high-purity lithium without requiring chemical-based post-treatment steps.

Here, ion-exchange resins and adsorbents, in particular, are highly investigated for lithium extraction, but these techniques still need partial pre-concentration of lithium due to their limited lithium selectivity and require large volumes of freshwater or chemicals to regenerate. 

Electrochemical lithium intercalation, in contrast, showcases impressive lithium selectivity, but these approaches suffer from severely limited electrode life spans and require periodic regeneration.

Highly selective membranes, however, have the potential to overcome these limitations by providing continuous and sustainable lithium recovery. This method facilitates the preferential transport of lithium over competing ions.

In regards to this technique, investigation into membrane materials that provide high lithium selectivity against both commonly competing divalent and monovalent ions continues to be crucial.

Most recently, researchers from the Elimelech lab at Rice University achieved a big breakthrough in this as they repurposed solid-state electrolytes (SSEs) as membrane materials for aqueous lithium extraction. 

SSEs are a heavily investigated topic in the battery community but not as a membrane material for aqueous ion separations. The development of SSEs has been the area of focus in the battery field due to the safety concerns posed by the flammability of commonly used liquid electrolytes.

Solid-state electrolytes (SSEs) actually offer promising alternatives to traditional liquid electrolytes in batteries, offering enhanced safety and potential for higher energy density. SSEs are solid materials that allow the transport of ions like lithium ions between electrodes in a battery. 

Besides offering improved safety due to being non-flammable, SSEs are also more durable but face challenges like lower ionic conductivity and interfacial instability. 

When it comes to the potential application of SSEs as membrane materials for the selective extraction of lithium ions from seawater, a few studies have demonstrated their possible use, but the fundamental evaluation and understanding of transport in SSEs have not been explored.

So, the latest study assesses the usage of a Li-ion-conducting SSE as a membrane for aqueous lithium extraction by investigating the fundamentals of ion and water transport in the SSE and evaluating its ion-ion selectivity against commonly competing cations in lithium brines. 

The study results indicate “virtually perfect lithium selectivity.” It also uncovered an important relationship—although impenetrable, the presence of competing cations (a positively charged ion) still adversely affects the flux of lithium ions.

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Paving the Way for Sustainable EV Battery Supply Chains

Published in Science Advances¹, the study details the development of the efficient lithium extraction method—a highly selective solid-state electrolyte membrane that revolutionizes lithium harvesting with near-perfect selectivity, therefore enhancing sustainability in EV battery supply chains.​

The research team found that the highly ordered and confined structure of SSEs, originally designed for the rapid conduction of lithium ions in solid-state batteries, is capable of achieving unprecedented separation of both ions and water in aqueous mixtures.

This marks a potential breakthrough in sustainable resource recovery that can help reduce reliance on traditional techniques. According to corresponding author Menachem Elimelech, Nancy and Clint Carlson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering:

“The challenge is not just about increasing lithium production but about doing so in a way that is both sustainable and economically viable.”

The new technique developed by the research team depends on a fundamental difference between traditional nanoporous membranes and SSEs. 

The difference is conventional membranes’ reliance on hydrated nanoscale pores to transport ions, while SSEs move Li ions using an anhydrous hopping mechanism within a highly ordered crystalline lattice.

“This means that lithium ions can migrate through the membrane while other competing ions, and even water, are effectively blocked. The extreme selectivity offered by our SSE-based approach makes it a highly efficient method for lithium harvesting as energy is only expended towards moving the desired lithium ions across the membrane.”

– First author Sohum Patel, currently a postdoc researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

To test this phenomenon, the team used an electrodialysis setup, where electricity is used to drive Li-ions across the membrane. 

The experiment result showed that even when the concentration of competing ions was high, the SSE continued to exhibit almost perfect lithium selectivity with no discernable competing ions. This is something traditional membrane technologies have been unable to achieve.

Now, to answer the question of just why the SSEs demonstrate such exceptional Li-ion selectivity, the team used a mix of computational and experimental techniques to investigate, which pointed to the tightly packed, rigid crystalline lattice of the SSE. This structure prevents not only water molecules from penetrating the membrane but also larger ones like sodium and magnesium ions.

“The lattice acts as a molecular sieve, allowing only lithium ions to pass through. This combination of highly precise size and charge exclusion is what makes the SSE membrane so unique.”

– Elimelec

While competing ions didn’t pass through the SSE, the researchers noted that their presence did reduce lithium flux, though it was still comparable to those observed in significantly less selective membrane materials. Researchers believe this challenge, which is caused by the blocking of the available surface sites for ion exchange, can be addressed through further material engineering.

Moreover, further work is required to show the effectiveness of the SSE when applied to increasingly complex and saline source waters. 

Overall, the study highlights “the highly promising application of SSEs to lithium recovery.” 

According to the researchers, this newly developed method can help secure a stable lithium supply for a wide range of industries, including the automotive, electronics, and renewable energy sectors. 

Not only can SSE-based membranes help address the lithium shortages that are on the horizon, but they can also do so sustainably and without negatively affecting the environment like traditional mining. According to Patel:

“By integrating SSEs into electrodialysis systems, we could enable direct lithium extraction from a range of aqueous sources, reducing the need for large evaporation ponds and chemical-intensive purification steps. This could significantly lower the environmental footprint of lithium production while making the process more efficient.”

The method that could also reduce costs associated with lithium production can be expected to see possible industrial adoption within 5-8 years.​ The researchers are expecting SSE materials to be “at the forefront of DLE technologies” moving forward.

In addition to this, the study anticipates broader applications for SSEs in ion-selective separations beyond lithium.

As Elimelech noted, the mechanisms of ion selectivity in solid-state electrolytes (SSEs) can inspire the development of similar membranes for extracting other critical elements from water sources, opening the door to “a new class of membrane materials for resource recovery.”

Innovative Company

Albemarle Corporation (ALB -4.84%)

Now, if we look at a prominent investable company in this field, Albemarle Corporation stands out for being a global leader in lithium production, which is investing in sustainable extraction technologies.

The company operates mines in Australia, Chile, and the US. Its lithium resources, which Albemarle says are “among the largest and highest quality in the world,” comprise hard rock deposits and hypersaline brine.

Albemarle, however, is facing challenges, which pushed it last summer to pause a $1.3 bln EV lithium processing plant in South Carolina, US. Around the same time, it halted the expansion of a manufacturing plant in Australia, where it produces battery-grade lithium hydroxide for EVs, due to weak lithium prices. The news came only about a year after Albemarle shared its plan to double production, with a large chunk of its over $1 billion loss in Q3 2024 attributed to the failed expansion of this project.

The price decline in the lithium market continues due to strong production in Chile, tariffs by the Trump administration, and a slowdown in the demand for post-Lunar New Year holidays in China. As a result, Albemarle had to cancel not just its expansion projects but also reduce staff. 

Now, Albemarle Corporation primarily operates through three main divisions — Energy Storage, Specialties, and Ketjen. 

The Energy Storage division manufactures lithium chloride, lithium hydroxide, and lithium carbonate. The Specialties segment optimizes highly specialized lithium and bromine solutions and serves the mobility, energy, connectivity, and health industries. Ketjen’s focus is on performance catalyst solutions (PCS), clean fuels technologies (CFT), and fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) catalysts and additives that serve aerospace, automotive, conventional energy, grid storage, and other markets.

With a market cap of $8.78 billion, Albemarle share prices are currently trading at $74.82, down 12.28% YTD. The company has an EPS (TTM) of -11.19 and a P/E (TTM) of -6.74, while the dividend yield paid is 2.15%. On February 27th, the company declared a quarterly common stock dividend of $0.405 per share, payable on April 1st.

When it comes to its financials, for Q4 2024, Albemarle reported net sales of $1.2 bln while net income was $75 mln or $0.29 per diluted share, and adjusted diluted loss per share was ($1.09).

The net sales saw a decline of 48% from the prior-year quarter of $2.4 billion, which the company attributed to lower pricing and volumes in Energy Storage. The net sales for different divisions were as follows — $617 million in Energy Storage, $333 million in Specialties, and $282 million in Ketjen.

During Q4, Albemarle also reported achieving record production at the Meishan and La Negra lithium conversion plants. However, it is planning to put its site in Chengdu, China, for maintenance by the middle of this year.

For the full year, the company reported net sales of $5.4 billion and a net loss of $1.2 billion, while cash from operations was $702 million. As of December 31st, 2024, Albemarle had about $2.8 billion in liquidity, including $1.2 billion of cash and equivalents. Its total debt, meanwhile, was $3.5 billion.

“We are taking decisive actions to reduce costs, optimize our conversion network, and increase efficiencies to preserve our long-term competitive position. As we look ahead, we expect dynamic market conditions to persist but remain confident in our ability to deliver value to stakeholders by increasing our financial flexibility, strengthening our core capabilities, and positioning Albemarle for future growth.”

– CEO Kent Masters

For 2025, the company is expecting its capital expenditure to be in the range of $700 million to $800 million, 50% less than 2024’s $1.7 billion. This spending, Albemarle noted, reflects a prioritization of sustaining existing assets and resources.

Conclusion 

In today’s hyper-mobile world, electric vehicles have emerged as a solution to the problem of sustainability. EVs offer a way to reduce carbon emissions and lower our dependence on fossil fuels. At the core of this revolution sits the battery technology, which is helping EVs reshape the future of transportation.

A key component of these batteries is lithium, which is instrumental in powering not just EVs but also many modern devices and energy storage. Given the importance of lithium in clean energy transition, the world is racing to secure a stable lithium supply.

Conventional lithium extraction methods, while effective, are limited by environmental concerns, resource-intensive mining, and long processing times. Here, breakthroughs like the use of solid-state electrolyte (SSE) membranes present a transformative solution, as enabling sustainable and efficient lithium harvesting can not only alleviate looming supply chain issues but also redefine the future of battery production.

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